Reading:

RadTech meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description -- Jarrett M. Drake

Discussion Questions:

• Are there any examples, in your professional experience, of materials with a complicated context of creation that isn't sufficiently addressed by traditional, single- and named-author notions of provenance? How have we addressed these in the past? Can we imagine methods to address this in the future, beyond what Drake identifies?
• Provenance and respect des fonds attempt to capture origins and contexts of archival materials. What other paradigms and methods might help us do this, without succumbing to colonialist, sexist, transphobic, racist, classist, and other hegemonic sensibilities? 
• Are there examples of archival or archival-adjacent work that have worked outside of the provenance and respect des fonds paradigm(s)? What can we learn from these examples? 
• How might a shift to a new data model -- one that provides for a richer range of declared relationships, like RDF -- serve to counteract the hierarchical structure of provenance that Drake describes? What new challenges might such a model present?
• How do we unite a respect for autonomous naming decisions (including the choice to remain unnamed) with a desire to aggregate and promote our descriptive data? Can data models (e.g. RDF) help with this?

We’ll meet on Thursday, August 11 at 2:00 in Bass L01 A&B