Elizabeth-Anne Johnson

Bio: Elizabeth-Anne Johnson is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Representation (systemics) & Presentation (obstetrics). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 2 citations.

The Rainbow Read-In: A Place to Build Community

Abstract: The UMKC University Libraries held the second Rainbow Read-In (RRI) virtually in June 2022. Readers presented either their own works if they identify as LGBTQIA+ or works written by LGBTQIA+ authors. Nine participants presented and sixty people attended. Our first Rainbow Read-In included ten presenters and forty attendees in 2021. The goal of this presentation is to share how we created a safe space to showcase works from within the queer community. The objectives of this program are to discuss the origins of the RRI, the formation of the committee, lessons learned, short- and long-term goals, potential areas for improvement, and examples of the range of queer voices represented. New events usually take time to become established, but our event had a head start. UMKC University Libraries hosted the first African American Read-In (AARI) in 2009. As the co-chair of the AARI committee for six years and the creator of the RRI, this presentation will address how the AARI served as a foundation and inspiration for creating a safe and supportive environment for building community for the RRI. We created the transformative program that we wanted to attend. The initial success of this innovative event proves that, as a bunch of library nerds, if you build it, they will come.

Knowledge Organization as Knowledge Creation: Surfacing Community Participation in Archival Arrangement and Description

Abstract: Remix or bricolage is recognized as a primary mode of knowledge creation in contemporary digital culture. Archival arrangement represents a form of bricolage that archivists have been practicing for years. By organizing records according to provenance, archivists engage in knowledge creation. Archival theory holds that records are created as an output from social and bureaucratic processes. Archival description, then, could serve as a form of archival record, bearing evidence of the processes of archival arrangement. Current participatory and community-based approaches to archival description urgently require an evidential record of their processes of community consultation and professional mediation. This paper examines two Canadian community-based, participatory archival projects. Project Naming, at Library and Archives Canada, draws upon Inuit community contributions to augment the often sparse and sometimes offensive descriptions of historic photos of arctic peoples. The Sex Work Database at the University of Manitoba, works with sex work activists to create and apply a tagging folksonomy to a collection of websites, organizational records and news media. Analysis of these diverse, community-based projects reveals how current approaches to description make it difficult to distinguish between professional and community contributions to arrangement and description, and proposes ways to make such contributions more apparent.

Towards a Conceptual Framework for Digital Humanities

Abstract: For roughly a decade (1998-2007) I led new directions activities at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute across the domain of computing and its interactions with engineering, medicine, business, and the arts & sciences. Reflections on this extended multidisciplinary experience have led to the articulation of a new perspective on the nature and structure of computing as a scientific discipline (Rosenbloom, 2004, 2009, 2010, 2012; Denning and Rosenbloom, 2009). In the process has come: a new conception of what a great scientific domain is; the realization that computing forms the fourth such domain, with the physical, life and social sciences comprising the other three domains; the recognition that much of the core content and future of computing is inherently multidisciplinary; the understanding that this multidisciplinarity can be reduced to a small fixed set of across-domain relationships, defining the relational architecture; the demonstration that the relational architecture yields a novel organizational framework over computing; and the application of this framework to illuminating some of the connections between computing and other scientific disciplines. It has also suggested several tentative conclusions concerning disciplines outside of computing, such as that mathematics and the humanities can both be considered as part of the scientific enterprise, but that neither amounts to a great scientific domain on its own. Mathematics instead nestles naturally within a broad understanding of the computing domain, while the humanities fit within a comparably broad understanding of the social domain. The purpose of this article is to further explore these notions with respect to the emerging area of the digital humanities, with their focus on the interchange between computing and the humanities. In particular, we will look at the idea that the humanities can be viewed as a part of science – in fact, as part of the social domain – and at the framework that this yields for understanding the space of relationships between computing and the humanities. Such an exploration requires some understanding of computing, the humanities, and the philosophy of science. I am a professional within the first of these, but no more than an interested amateur with respect to the latter two. So there are inherent risks in this enterprise, but the hope is that the utility of its results will overbalance any naivete exposed in the process.