 So it's three o'clock. I think we're gonna get going. I don't have a lot to say right now, except thank you so much everybody for being here for the Digital Matters Spring 2023 research talk. We have really exciting projects to hear about. And so I'm gonna let them go ahead and take it away. We are being recorded today and this will be available on the Digital Matters YouTube page. We're gonna hear from all five of them about 10 minutes each and then she'll have plenty of time for Q&A at the end. So join me in welcoming our presenters for today. Hello everybody. Can everyone hear me all right? Excellent. All right, so welcome. My name is Alah McCormick and as a special collections cataloger, I create and remediate metadata for a variety of materials here in the library, particularly our rare books and archival holdings. Today I'll be discussing a project made possible by a Digital Matters Lab faculty grant wherein a student worker and I enhance the metadata for a selection of archival collections, containing material by and about five o'clock in religious minority groups. But before we get started, let's define our terms. I found that scholarly communities use these words very differently. So I wanna make sure that we're all on the same page. Firstly, what is an archive? In library and information science, an archive is an accumulation of historical records, especially unpublished materials that are created naturally over the course of a person or organization's lifetime. My personal archive, for example, might include grocery store receipts, email, holiday cards, cell phone photos, and all the other stuff I create. I am received just living my life. And this is something different than the archive, theorized by researchers and other disciplines. A hypothetical wonderland, as Michelle Pascal says, containing everything that was or could have been written or said or created. Humanities researchers in particular often focus on reconstructing information missing from the archive. Librarians and archivists know that it's really never been possible to save everything. Special collections, of course, is the part of the library that contains materials which are rare, historic, unique, or valuable in some way. They often contain archives and archival materials, but the terms are not synonymous. Finally, cataloging, as I alluded to earlier, and what is my primary responsibility here in the library, is a library science term for creating metadata or data about data for information resources. It involves describing the resource, choosing access points, conducting subject analysis, and other functions so that the resulting records are discoverable in library catalogs and other databases. This allows library patrons and others to find connections between similar or related materials. Without metadata, no one can find the amazing books, archival collections, and other resources we own. Archives, in particular, must be processed, catalogued, and otherwise interpreted by archivists and librarians before they're able to be used by the public. If you've ever had to help someone declutter their home, you have an understanding of the kind of work that's involved here. Until you have an honest accounting of everything in, say, your mother's basement, you really can only guess what the hidden treasures was in the closets, boxes, and random tiles scattered throughout the space. It's also both necessary and good to discard all of the superfluous materials, like, perhaps, stacks of money's envelopes, or plastic bags full of rubber bands, as you make sense of the materials. And the same is true for archives. Archivists and librarians are the trained professionals who make sense of the documents and facilitate the scholarly use. Without this labor, you just have a pile of unparcival stuff to be played. While metadata creation, in general, can be fraught, archival metadata, in particular, has some unique concerns. Firstly, predominantly white institutions haven't always handled the materials of minoritized groups with sensitivity. This might include using outdated racial or religious terminology to describe groups, or allowing these materials to emotion backlogs that their importance isn't well understood. Large collections in particular, such as the massive oral history collections we've had here at the Merian Library, can obscure the presence of minoritized communities. Catalogers can't possibly provide access points for every single access of the collection. The resulting metadata would be so lengthy as to be unreadable for patrons. But we have to select grouping terms, summarize, and otherwise condense our efforts. This often means that minority groups are represented in metadata and minority groups are not. A language itself can also be tricky as it's constantly changing. A once-neutral term for an ethnic group may become pejorative over time, causing harm to patrons to see these terms throughout catalog records. Even though librarians and art events know about these issues, remediation projects can't always be prioritized. Instead, we focus on eliminating processing backlogs as a security measure. Undescribed materials can help people be go missing with knowing the wiser if they're not described, and to appease donors who've given significant funding in material donations. The sheer size of the archive can also give a pause. With over 4,500 archival collections in the Marriott Library's special collections, we didn't even begin our remediation project. Thankfully, the Digital Matters Lab grant I received allowed me to hire a student worker, Emma Fox, who could not be here with me today, to prioritize this work. Prior to Emma's start, I created an initial set of 60 records that we focus on alleviating. I chose mostly collections that had impartially or fully digitalized and were available in our digital library. It really helped beginning catalogers to see the evidence that was starving and then learn how the material formats are reflected in control for vocabulary terms. Early on, I decided to exclude eight Native American archives from this original list. These are especially problematic. For example, some interviewees might discuss sacred rituals, not through the understanding that those interviews will be made public. And I believe that an expert in indigenous materials either want to assist with those. I designed a multi-part training regimen for Emma. First, she took a library-juice academy course in subject cataloging, which is often the most difficult part of metadata creation. And she was also given an archival theory and practice reading list. Finally, I sat with her to work through our private records step by step, explaining each aspect of the record and reviewing all her work in detail. Training someone new to catalog is an incredibly time-intended endeavor and there are no shortcuts. This slide contains images from some of the digitized photograph collections to give you a sense of that many communities represented in this record set. And while the project is still ongoing, we've seen some amazing results so far. As of April 12th, which is the latest date for which I pulled data, 60 records have been remediated. These represent one audio-visual, 23 photograph, and 36 manuscript collections. 80s had no pre-existing record in Alma, which is our online library catalog management system, and two had no previous record in OCLC, which is the database that powers on the international database WorldCat, which many of you might be familiar with. This means that none of those records could be discovered in the very database that no patrons rely on the most. And while all of our archival findings are available in Archives West, which is a separate regional archival database, most of our students and researchers outside of the Mountain West area really aren't aware of its existence and they began their searches elsewhere. We've also added an abundance of access points to these records. These are the controlled fields that allow patrons to search and explore in an organized and consistent fashion. In the library catalog, these are the record fields that would be hyperlinked and allow patrons to click to find related items across the catalog. For example, the original record averaged 0.65 creator terms while the edited records averaged 1.7. This is an increase of 162%. The original records also contained an average of 3.4 subject heading while the edited records contained an average of 13.8 which is an increase of 306%. These control vocabulary terms augment and enhance existing metadata and finding aids such as content notes and box and folder listings which are created by archivists. And they allow researchers to search for or select one predetermined word or string for a topic or person and know that they're seeing all development data. This is especially important when, for example, organizations can use acronyms or their full names depending on what they want to communicate. People may use their legal names or nicknames depending on social context. And the English language has so many synonyms and homonyms that can cause confusion while searching. If you're looking for a canine, do you mean a tooth or a dog? Context really matters. Control vocabulary terms eliminate this uncertainty by providing a chemical authorized way for patrons to find information. Their mediated collections also span a wide variety of identity groups including the Japanese, Chinese, Black, Middle Eastern, Latinx, Jewish, Buddhist, and behind communities. You can see from this graph that Japanese-American collections make up the majority of those edited so far. This doesn't necessarily mean that Japanese materials make up a proportional percentage of the archive. As I mentioned earlier, I had Emma focus on digitized materials first and many of our Japanese architects were digitized for inclusion in an online exhibition. So I think they may be overrepresented in the online material. But this might also show the effect of active outreach to community groups. The relationship that we have with the Japanese-American community leaders and civic organizations goes back decades and those connections have encouraged donations from other members of these groups. So as the grant period wraps up over the next month, there are a few additional things that helps you accomplish. First, I'll be enrolling in a Python for Librarians course in May, which will allow me to undertake a more targeted collection analysis and maybe make some dash changes instead of having to review each collection individually. I would still take credit at times. Emma and I also helped remediate some additional records as there are about 30 remaining on the latest spreadsheet that we cultivated. I also plan to collect some final end-of-project statistics such as more detailed information on the facial, ethnic, and religious groups included in the remediation project. Longer-term goals include quantifying the impact of remediation. For example, monitoring usage statistics to determine if archival collections that have received a good record are used more by patrons and researchers. I'll also be exploring ways to codify data vision remediation for this work into a new visual language for archival metadata, allowing these complex topics to be communicated more simply and effectively. Finally, Emma and I will be presenting updated results at the Utah Library Association Mutual Conference on May 18th. I hope that some of you will be able to see us there. Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions of this day. Thank you so much. Hey, well, welcome. Thank you all for being here. I see some clear faces. So thank you, my colleagues, and my colleagues of Artificial Planning, for being here. Really, thanks for having us here today. So my name is Lori Larson. I'm a student in College Architecture, and I'm an engineering student in my architecture. My background is in visual arts and animation, a lot of sculpture, but it's just a visual arts project. I started pursuing design and art for the last two years. It's a big change. My project is a symbolic artwork that I've been calling Brian. My project looked at my specific adaptation of the great saltwater through digital fabrication and morphological research. Try the wheel. The wheel looks like that, I think. Is it made? And the balance looks exactly like that. So let's take a look at this presentation. I'm using just two authors to create the work. The first is Jane Bennett. Her theory works to challenge the idea of matter as a passive and inert substance. She asserts that matter has an inherent vitality that influences human actions in these years and bodies and moons, as well as obviously everything non-human, but a lot of her theory is aimed towards dismantling and distinguishing something. And one of the ways that she does that is to highlight, to focus on assembly as a way to highlight the interconnectedness of causality and patience. So she says, assemblages are living, robbing confederations that are able to function despite their persistent presence of energies that we found in them. So the move here is to distribute agency into these different photo bodies and bodies and materials, not just in like a macro organism like ourselves. And the other author is the R.C. Wentworth Watson who is a mathematician and biologist. He believed that math and physics describe the underlying laws that shape life. He was working in the late 1800s and early 1900s, about a half a century in each. So he lived a good long life. But the common theory for describing the shape of life was competition, natural selection, things like that. So the idea of describing life in terms of mathematics would be radical. But that's not the reason I included in my talk today. The reason I thought he was important to include was how he talks about form. He says, in short, the form of an object is a diagram of forces. So for me, I work a lot at the intersections of art and biologating time. So thinking about organisms, the shape of them, the form of them, is not something that's superficial, but as a way that you can understand, as an avenue to understand the forces of a system acting on an organism, that is really important to me. So at a really high level, this diagram shows the general organizing principle for the project. Again, this is a symbolic artwork. And it's composed of these two pieces, a central sort of goal that explores visual fabrication through more logical assemblage. For this piece, I studied a set of organisms in depth looking at how they're adapted to the high-singling environment of the Great Salt Lake, how they deal with like UV radiation, tactics of growth, and tactics for collaboration as well. And through this research, I developed a small sculpture in the element in the depth layer. And then on the left here, this is the larger complex, which I use the shorthand of at Firm. This is a large-scale, ceramic sculpture that sits on the floor. And it deals with the product of biomineralization and shallow saving water. So really just like the larger concepts of the Great Salt Lake. A couple of key formations in the lake serve to add to my jumping off-leaf. These formations were the flulites and the Great Salt Lake bio-arms. And to be brief, a lot of concepts I've heard from these was this idea of layering, radial composition, and aggregate and precipitated calcium carbonate. So there's a material aspect, as well as just a large-scale compositional idea. So this slide details a process for designing the firm. Again, these concepts I described earlier, the layering, the radial composition, these resulted in this concept drawing, which I would actually love to pass around. I've got interactive components. Yes. So yeah, I developed this first concept drawing, which is sort of this layered mass that's pulled apart to reveal sort of the seed that the water requirement did we assume. And I liked the drawing, and I pursued that into the development of each maquettes, just plain maquettes things there. I brought a few of them, so easy to take a look. And through the maquettes, I explored the form that I described in the drawing. I explored texture, playbodies, as well as tactics for like, where the nucleus would sit, whether it sits on this big mass, or whether it's contained in a bowl with maybe like some soft sculpture. But ultimately, like when I had these things made, and I put them on the floor like I would the final, I sort of felt like they felt really isolated in whole like, in object like, they were also reading very like, oyster and furl, like nest and egg, mother and child, and also a little bit too literal to be source material with the violence and legs. So I sort of took a step back and like re-evaluated how this sculpture could sort of like, bleed out into the floor paint a little bit more and become a little bit more engaged. So I started drawing on some of the other work that I've been doing, mainly these two paintings, which the things that I was looking at there were the voids, the graphic, the minute shapes, but mostly like how they were both operating in section. So the painting here with the figures, that's a slit apple, and then the one next to it is like this fictional organism that's kind of section and to show the variation. So both of these were operating in section. And then I took another book at this McKess and thinking about like these radial layers in the same concept of section and looking at it like a section of light, but how that section was working in plan in the sculpture, which kind of gave me my next move, which was sort of like to sink this sculpture into the ground so that all these different divots would kind of extend down beyond the floor plane to suggest that there's something else happening with it. So there's a couple other influences, sections of elements in a wave diagram, things like that that helped me develop the scaffolding that you see up there. And then on that scaffolding, I sort of designed some voids and then mass around it and then iterated until I got to that final template, which is what I've been building. And it's pretty far along. You can see a picture below. But it looks kind of small, but it's big. It's shallow, but it's been applied in a concept between four and five feet in diameter, depending on how much space it's out about 3.5 inches. The sculpture is made out of a black clay body. It looks brown in the picture, it's just not fired yet. And then I'll use a black metallic fall crawl and soft sculpture on the interior surfaces. So in those voids, we'll be sort of like an intricate combination of the ball crawl and soft sculptural, which I did bring sample of the soft sculptural as well. Unfortunately, I have way more content than I have time today. So I won't walk through how I got from A to B to C, but through looking at a set of organisms, I looked at Archaea, a square Archaea called Alec quadratum. And the fact that this organism is square is really exceptional. There's really only like one or two microbes that we know of that are square. So it's between spherical or cylindrical. So that's a really unique organism for me. I also looked at a microalgae called Chinaleala. It's a primary producer for the link. It's a really significant organism. I looked at Thickleweed, which is a succulent, higher plant that is extremely salt hard. I also looked at Brainshred and Brinefly, which is a sandbacteria, a little bit. But I was looking at, again, how are these organisms dealing with the highest humidity requirements? I found a lot of similarity between organisms. For example, a couple of them, Chinaleala and Brinehred, both produce protective cysts or oponous cores, which are reproductive genus. Oponous cores are just single cellular, and cysts are not. But you can think of them like eggs, they're just protective reproductive genus that can help. The organisms survive past kinds of high stress. A lot of them also produce productive pigments like beta-carotene or anti-desiccant-carotene like all of these in our glycerol. There's our complex proteins, pretty much depends on who you produce in nails. For me, I don't have a biology background. I'm coming at this like a complete amateur. So taking the stuff I was reading, taking good notes and then synthesizing it into research posters was really crucial because for me, just taking the stuff to go figure out what potassium, sodium potassium coffee is was a lot of effort. So synthesis and then re-synthesize into concepts and then eventually into the final diagram in the system. Which I'm not gonna explain in depth. At this point, I'm gonna move into one of the pieces, which is this branchy thing. And again, this is the piece in which I'm focusing on visual fabrication methods. So developing a process and developing tools and workflows to start to design and fabricate this way. So this was designed in vinyl and ledger for workflow which needed to be invented. And from here, the aim was to pass this into a bio-composite remolding and casting. So I just split this in half, make a mold of this, a two-part mold, and then through a different material to pass this. And my desire was to use a bio-composite that would be made of lake matter and waste. So matter, again, relating to assemblage and materiality that relates to the lake. So things like Payton, beta-carotene, alginate, calcium carbonate, source HL and waste HL. But I ran into a lot of issues with this material, which I have more interact with. So the materiality is something that I really enjoyed in this process, but there was an issue of fidelity, shrinkage, and viscosity pretty much. And that you can see the differences between these. This is a 3D printed test object pretty much. And then this second thing is a plaster replica. And you can see the cream is like a one-for-one. And then this is a oyster shell alginate deposit. And you can see the fidelity, the details capturing and the shrink rate is a pretty extreme difference between the plaster. And I've created quite a challenge in trying to make this into a bio-composite because it branches, it has a lot of thin parts. You can imagine if this was a two-part mold, there'd be a lot of vacancies that would be difficult for the material to penetrate, even for plaster, which is a really generic, commonly used material. So from here, it's looking like I'll need to redesign the nucleus. And one avenue that I'm really interested in is direct printing of the material piece. The consistency of them is such that it's really moving sick to it. It's just a question of access. And right now, I have not had access to any of the furniture that I can come up with. So yeah. In fact, as I said, I have a background in visual arts and I've been working on a body of work for the last two years or so, which may not look like a lot of work for two years, but the work I do is a pre-barscale for a bit until I get into it. And I do a lot of stuff manually. So the charities get in there. It's not CNCed, I did all of that by hand. And hopefully it's obvious to see some of the things that are working with it again, intersections of biology and science and art. I work with motifs like biolabarosimetry, the Asian membrane boundaries, some hoys. So this piece fits into the body of the work that is in the building. I won't say too much on this slide, because I think I'm already over time. But my goal here is to sort of develop a very sensitive materialistic design practice. This is the economy between the two practices, like the three art and design, I think that are really well summarized by these two books. The first is a really famous quote by Victor Schlobsky, I think. It says, if art exists, that one may recover the sensation of like, it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stone. And in contrast, the way that Beatrice Olmina and Mark Weedley talk about design, they say, good design isn't aesthetic, the smooth surfaces of one design is learning friction, removing bodily and psychological sensation. So my goal is to bring these two minutes together, a great design that is sensitive to each realistic. This project will serve as the base for my thesis next year. The sculpture itself will be a partee in concept model for the architecture, so it'll be diagrammatic, and it's actually performing the architecture. The environmental research I did will serve as a basis for a lot of technical decisions of the architecture. Most importantly, processes and the program workflows that I've developed, I think, would see a really interesting manifestation in things like the stones and stones screens of upper cooling units and small scale things like furniture and maybe even interspecies literature. Thank you guys, and thank you to Digital Matters. Awesome, it's like, I want to thank you all for being here. It's really fun to hear my colleagues talking about their work that I feel really lucky to have gotten a little bit of insight over the semester as a Digital Matters fellow. So this project that I want to talk to you about today is by Master's thesis. I'm a Master's student in environmental humanities and my Digital Matters project was a continuation of a project that I've been working on for the last two years in collaboration with a nonprofit called Heart Access. We'll also first, the title of this project, which is the Digital Matters component of my project, Digital Equality with Access, Archiving Art-Based Narratives at the Intersection of Disability and the Environment in Salt Lake City, New York. So the project that I worked on this semester was an installation and archive of art that was focused on the intersection of disability and the environment based here in Salt Lake City. And as I mentioned, it's part of a larger project that is with the nonprofit Heart Access and 12 artists. Heart Access is a Utah-based nonprofit that creates opportunities for disabled artists in the area and also partners with cultural organizations such as museums and galleries to improve their accessibility practices. Together, Heart Access and I came up with the idea for a collaborative working group for artists who would create artwork at the intersection of disability and the environment. And the impetus for this project was my funding source for my time at the University of Utah from a Mellon Foundation grant that's interested in community-engaged research that focuses on an aspect of environmental justice or a group that is particularly vulnerable to climate change. So I was really interested in studying the intersection of health in the environment, coming to Salt Lake City and knowing about the impact of the Great Salt Lake on human health here. And then also as someone who has personal health and disability struggle with myself, I've been really interested in the intersection of disability and the environment. First, in the literature, both academic and more on the political policy side, it's quite widely recognized that this intersection is underrepresented. So even though there are clear connections between health and climate change as well as disability and climate change, we're not talking about this intersection enough. Disability communities are at higher risk for the impact of climate change and extreme weather events, both because of the tendency of people to have pre-existing health conditions and that making them more vulnerable. But also I really want to emphasize that this vulnerability is because of the discrimination that disabled communities face with the systems of ableism that prevent disabled folks from having access to resources and also from having access to proper disaster response programming or information. And then something that I'm really interested in exploring my work is the potential of disabled communities to respond to climate change and have a sense of agency and really important lessons to teach the environmental movement about climate resilience and how we need to take care of each other in difficult times. So because disabled communities have for a long time had to figure out ways to survive in antagonistic systems, there are lessons that we could learn from practices of community care and resistance that are common within disabled communities. And that's an argument that is emerging both from disability advocates and activists within the disability world, also scholars in field like disaster studies, sociology and environmental humanities. So with this project, I was really interested in art and a mode to explore the intersection of disability and the environment because art has a strong history within disability communities and the disability activist world. On the slide I showed in the distance in ballet which is the disability justice art group out of San Francisco but it's really the forefront of sort of collecting and making this ongoing history of art within disabled communities more visible to the public. And I also personally, as an artist, I practice filmmaking and have an academic background in climate communication. So felt really fortunate to be able to put this project together for my master's work but really drew from a lot of my different subjects and interests. So quick summary of the project that I'm working on for these last few years. I partnered with Art Access, not this fall but the fall before and he spent a couple of months planning the project. Then we were able to put out a call for artists and select five artists for the working group. These artists met bi-weekly for that spring and summer and put together a body of artwork and decided sort of themes. We had really interesting discussions and group meetings. Yeah, just trying to build that sort of community care kinship network that I'm so interested in in terms of climate resilience and then also just get really into these personal narratives about environmental health in Salt Lake City. We were able to get additional funding through a gift grant here at the university, the Sustainable Campus Initiative Fund and seven additional artists joined the group. In June and we're able to meet with the previous group monthly and then by that fall, we had assembled 24 pieces of art and a wide range of mediums, sculpture, painting, textile, art, video and all of that art went up into art installations. At first you can see some images on the bottom of the screen is at the main branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library and then we were really fortunate to be our second installation here at Digital Matters. So hopefully some are here to come and see that. I also have one of the art pieces here. This was called Woven Lake and it's a collaboration between the five original working group artists and myself and aims to show sort of the change in water levels of the Great Salt Lake. So it's a map representation and then all of the artists contributed relevant materials to that sort of bottom layer so as a filmmaker I was taking in a lot of film throughout the process of the project and you can see some of that woven through one of the artists grew up wearing a back brace for her scoliosis and included sort of like a spine sculpture that weaves throughout the lake and the idea of this art piece is really thinking about that necessity of community care and collaborative resilience within the face of climate, climate disaster, climate change and thinking about what we need to do together as a collective to respond to that. I also was able to do video interviews with the artists sort of last fall and last winter and then I was able with my Digital Matters installation Digital Matters fellowship to put together a digital installation this spring. So being a project focused on disability we're really interested in making sure that the in-person inflation focused on accessibility and we're able to be interpreted and appreciated by people with varied abilities. So for instance, we use painting heights for all the art that were appropriate for wheelchair users. The artists recorded audio of visual descriptions of their artwork so that we can link to those with the QR code and folks who aren't able to see the art fit here in the description of the art. Those included sensory tables that you see in that picture. So folks who interact with some of the materials and concepts of the pieces in a tactile manner. We ask people for face masks and also chose successful location both in the community and on campus that were physically accessible, free and frequented by diverse populations. Despite that physical installation is not accessible to a lot of people, particularly with respect to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic just going out in person to see art is not accessible to everyone and in conversations with the artists, many of them are expressing this desire to have a more permanent home for this project and the artwork that they created. So I decided to put together an application to Digital Matters and with the goal of creating a digital installation that would sort of add to the accessibility, the potential reach and audience of the project and then see this archival work of providing a permanent home to the artworks and the narratives that we're exploring in the project. With the accessible or with digital installation my goal of course was also to focus on accessibility. So I wanted to make sure that the website itself was accessible. So while it's doing this work of making physical installation more accessible I also wanted to make sure that the digital installation was accessible to both of those things. So I don't have a coding or website design background but spent a ton of time, this semester learning about website design and then accessible web design for this part of the project. I'm really grateful to everyone at Digital Matters of the Library, Rebecca, I worked with Rachel Whitman and Anna Nietzsche who are the digital installation and digital exhibits experts of the library and then Amanda Kittenbin and Leah Donaldson who work on accessibility at the Marriott Library. We're super helpful and generous with this part of the project as I try to figure out what you need to do technically to make sure that they're creating a digital resource that incorporates features that allow people with diverse needs and access to technology to proceed, understand, navigate and interact with the web as well as contribute to the web. And then sort of adding another layer to the project I was really interested in moving beyond an approach to accessibility that just focused on compliance and sort of checking off those boxes and towards an understanding of accessibility and web accessibility that was more justice-focused. For a quick introduction to these theories, the disability rights movement was really essential for making the case for disabled communities to have legal rights, really these baseline tenants of access. The Americans with Disabilities Act of the ADA came out of the Disability Rights Movement really essential in disability history but in recent years, scholars and activists have moved more towards a disability rights movement and approach, sorry, disability justice movement and approach which focuses on intersectionality and really recognizes that the disability rights movement by taking a single sphere approach and just focusing on disability really leaves out folks who have intersecting identities that are impacting their experience in the world. So disabled people of color and disabled queer and trans folks, for example, and through those different approaches to disability emerged two really different approaches to access whereas the disability rights movement has an understanding of access that's really about the individual and removing barriers to make the individual experience more accessible. The disability justice movement is more interested in an idea of access that is collective and ongoing and recognizing that all people and all bodies have diversity that deserve to be met and that the responsibility of meeting those is more about systemic change and collective action than about the sort of individual factors of accommodation. So this is sort of the framework I went into my website design when I, as I've mentioned, had to do a ton of research on accessible web design. I learned how to use a screen reader. And the personal tests of the website that I was developing and just sort of learned all the technical skills and then I was able to go in and think about what I can do with the specific design choices to really get that more justice focus to the accessibility standards that I was including. I don't have time to go through all of these so what I have done is included a QR code at the end. I'm hoping everyone has a chance to explore the website but one example I want to point to is the last bullet point visual description. This was something that we included in the interest and inflation that the artists recorded their own descriptions of the artwork. And I really wanted to make sure that that was on the website so that there's just that more personal touch and thinking about a justice framework of access also means prioritizing people who are often left out most intensely. So art being such a visual medium it was really important to myself, the artists art access to center people who are engaging with the artwork through a sense other than sight. So those personal visual descriptions from the artists allow us to access that type of ephemeral nature of art and that aspect of art that really is beyond just sort of inexplicable and hard to describe that hearing an artist talk about their own work hopefully allows you to access a little bit more of that yeah emotional side of the artwork and of access. What's next for the project? I'm hoping to sort of finish adding to the website in the next couple of weeks. We have a pretty, it's pretty complete but I saw a little bit more and I like to give it a bit and then I also want to produce a documentary out of the footage that I was able to capture throughout the project including the interviews of the artists. The contributions of the project at the University of Utah some of the things that I noticed when building the installation on the digital platform that I use which was Omega S and my conversations with the accessibility folks the library has led to advancements in the accessibility practices of the library which I'm really excited about. You might overall hope with this is that it sort of continues to ripple out and we are able to build more towards a culture of access at the university that's more comprehensive and more justice focused at art access. The program that we built through the environment or the body decolleges project is now part of their annual programming so it's one of their two four programs and I was able to sort of create a system for running that program over the last semester that they can now reproduce every year. And then also within the scholarly conversation this is a case study for projects that are working in environmental humanities and critical disabilities that we use and community-engaged methodologies in general. So hopefully this people has devices that are able to you can scan there and get to the website. So my name is Eliana Massey I am an undergraduate intern with Digital Matters and the topic or the title for my presentation today is nurturing concentric visual ecologies and the term concentric ecology as far as I'm aware was coined by one of the leading scholars of traditional ecological knowledge Dr. Nique Sanmong who is Indigenous. And this concept is basically that human life is not viable if we not view and act like we are a part of a larger ecological family that includes more than humans can. And that the way that we conceptualize our relationship to other forms of life is important for the flourishing of the entire ecosystem. And the term digital ecology refers to the relationship between technology and the environment and how these things interact. And a lot of research and digital ecology focuses on negative interactions for example, data pollution. But I want to explore in this presentation some of the possibilities for positive interactions. And I think that Indigenous studies and Indigenous conceptions of ecology really have value in things to offer to the field and history of ecology. So first I wanna talk a little bit about my process. I began this project by reaching out to the director of the Pacific Island Studies program for you from Miley Arden. And I did this because recently the Pacific Island Studies program at the U received a major melon grant to help create a center for Pacifica and Indigenous knowledges which would be one of the first kinds of centers in the United States. And also I have NACA ancestry or Native Hawaiian ancestry. And so I was just interested in ways that I could learn more and support this program through my digital matters with each other. And so I reached out and the beginning of this process is really just establishing a relationship and trying to figure out what needs and interests that program and community had. And it ended up being the case that there were various needs and interests. And so it seems like the best thing to do would be to do a little bit more research into previous applications at intersection of Indigenous studies and Indigenous humanities. I think that often in community-based projects specifically in digital humanities, they can be a little unique because communities know their needs and their interests but they might not know all the technological possibilities. And so I think that it's good to do very careful research and to present those options and possibly to them and allow them the choice. So that's what I did. And I'm gonna share in future slides some of the resources that I found at this intersection of Indigenous studies and digital humanities. But the next step in this process was generating ideas based on the research that I did and also based on needs and interests of the Spag Island Studies program. And then I worked with Spag Island Studies program to prioritize a couple ideas. And then from there on, I've been working on those projects which has mostly involved a lot of community engagement and a lot of coordination with different groups and people. And then I had another arrow because this project is very much so contributing. So I have some pictures up here of a couple different previous scholarship that I reviewed that's at the intersection of Indigenous studies and digital humanities. There's this book, A Digital Buntel. I read this book. There's also this platform referred to. It's a content management system that was designed to help Indigenous communities manage and share their digital cultural heritage. Kind of as Ali mentioned earlier today, there's specific restrictions on different knowledge within Indigenous communities and often content management systems or different archival systems that are existing don't have the capacity to carefully archive those things and share them with different communities. And so this content management system was designed specifically to be able to create that access and that control for Indigenous communities of their own cultural heritage. And then there's also this program, Voices of the Land. This platform is focused on sharing stories from different Indigenous groups in Alberta, Canada. And they've organized it based on different topics as well as communities. They have collections, thank you, digitized objects, as well as well as history interviews and different resources to learn more. Go a little on the direction please. The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton has a list of resources related to Indigenous still humanities. That was a really helpful resource. I reviewed basically everything on there that seemed relevant and that I had access to. There's also this platform made of land digital. I think this might be the most well-known Indigenous digital humanities platform, at least in my social media circles. I see people share this all the time on like Thanksgiving or whatnot. But it's a really helpful resource because it helps you to see what Indigenous groups live where you are, what languages are Indigenous to that place, learn a little bit more about the history through learning more about treaties and different stuff like that. It's very interactive, it's excellent. And then UCLA also has a program called Mapping Indigenous LA, which they've created various story maps to sort of tell the story through our GIS's story map program of different Indigenous communities in LA. And then there's another book which isn't specifically related to digital humanities, but this book was very influential in the way that I thought about these projects and is also very related to the concepts of concentric scholarship. So one thing you might have noticed is that many Indigenous digital humanities projects are GIS focused. And in some ways, you know, this has to do with the way that cartography has been a tool of conversation and sort of critiquing that. But there are plenty of different explanations for why this is. And one that I find pretty compelling comes from an Indigenous scholar. And he makes this argument that topos, as in like, topography of place is foundational to Indigenous epistemologies in a similar way to how Western epistemologies build upon logos or discourse. And I thought that was really interesting to think about this difference between word and place and think about how these origin points change kind of the trajectory of these different epistemologies and how this might change in effect research methodologies themselves as well as thinking about how we design an interactive project so that people can use it in ways that make sense to them. So I'm gonna get next to sort of the projects that I ended up prioritizing out of the different ideas which were two different projects on. So the first one was on creating an ArcGIS story map for Pacific Islander students at the U that locates Pacific Islander faculty and staff and resources. And some of the reasons why we wanted to work on this project is that, you know, this is a potentially helpful resource for a website for Future Center for Pacific Island Indigenous knowledges and also sort of relate to what Natalie was talking about about this idea of, you know, maybe going the extra mile sometimes and having resources that are intimate for communities that are often overlooked is important. And Pacific Islander students are definitely an overlooked student population here. And then the second project that I'm working on which is similar in terms of methods at least is creating an ArcGIS story map that highlights three local Indigenous and Pacifica community gardens and their efforts related to food sovereignty, land sovereignty and Indigenous and Pacifica well-being in general. And the goals for this project, I feel like I've kind of been evolving over time in some ways but some of the main goals are to strengthen these relationships between the Pacific Island studies program and these community partners and also to strengthen the relationships between the gardens and then also to raise awareness about supporting local Indigenous community organizing because, you know, these activists need help is to meet organizers who need support often their work is undermined or, you know, the resources that they have are not, you know, they're finite. And so, you know, it's important that the larger community, you know, is aware of the importance of this and realizes that, you know, these big conversations like, you know, land sovereignty and stuff like that that are, you know, to some people might say intellectual are really embodied and they are located in this place where they live. So this is what the current, like, beginning of the first project looks like in story maps. And I want to show you an example of sort of what it looks like with locating different faculty and staff and resources at the U. So here is one professor who works at the U also trying to create buttons on as well as, you know, letting people know where they are. And then I also have shared different questions that I created with different Pacific Islander faculty and staff at the U trying to create more warmth in this. Faculty profiles are kind of sterile. And so I wanted to create this, like specifically as a resource to kind of relate to these different potential mentors. And then here you can kind of see an example of, you know, what some of those answers to those questions look like. And then I've also tried to find different resources that exist at U, but might be kind of hidden in some ways and highlight them through this story map. One of those resources is there's the Pacific Islander Oral History Project at the Marriott Library. And so I went through and kind of was looking for different themes and pulling out some different quotes from different oral histories. And I think I'm going to highlight a couple of those quotes and some of those themes, especially relating to education and these different people's experiences. And also, you know, provide links to this so that, you know, people want to do research on Pacific Islanders in Utah then this research is available to them. I've also been working on creating, like highlighting some different books related to Pacific Islander scholarship and literature that are at the Marriott Library. So people can kind of get an idea of, you know, what exists out there. This is a book that's very significant in Pacific Island studies, specifically Hawaiian studies. And I think that, you know, many people have very powerful experiences, you know, when they read a book where they see themselves represented or they understand more about the context of their culture and their family. And so I think that, you know, that's a valuable research. And I'm switching gears a little bit. I want to just briefly talk about some of the Indigenous and Pacific community gardens that I've been partnering with. It's these three organizations. And we've been working on trying to figure out, you know, the best way to integrate their stories and their efforts into a story map. Right now we're thinking, you know, integrating, you know, some written as well as audio, interviews, also some video interviews, hopefully. I've also been thinking about, you know, how to try to make it feel atmospheric. Maybe thinking about adding like recorded birds on or something like that to different parts of the story map. Also thinking about different ways that people might want to express their thoughts and feelings about these topics. So, you know, giving the option to express it through sharing art or through sharing a recipe or something like that. And so this project is really just beginning in some ways, but I'm very excited to continue it. And I wanted to just highlight this really quickly. The Agua Garden, which is one of the gardens that I've been working with recently has been struggling because the city wanted to basically destroy the garden but it appears like that will hopefully not happen through a partnership with another community garden. But I think that this just highlights some of what I was getting at earlier in terms of how ephemeral these projects can be because there isn't enough support for them. But it also highlights the ways that, you know, when people recognize the importance of these things decisions can be changed. And it can, you know, end up even being a good thing and lead to more cooperation in some ways as well as more awareness about the issues that we're spending today. So I wanted to close with this quote from Robin Wall-Kamera. He's actually coming to the YouTube to attend this talk relatively soon. And she says, action on behalf of life transforms because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal. It is not a question of first giving them light and we're safe and then asking as we work to heal the earth, the earth will pass. And I felt that was just beautiful encapsulation of this idea of concentric ecology. And I'm excited to keep exploring the ways that concentric ecology relates to visual ecology and the ways that these two ideas can support each other. And then I just finally have some knowledge on which a lot of the people I'm grateful for that I felt on this project. That's it. Thank you so much to all of our presenters. That was amazing. I just really struck me, this is one of the few places you can go and hear from faculty and graduate students and undergraduate students in this like 90 minute block of time. And I just really want to hear it all together. We have about 10 minutes for questions. So what's burning in your mind to ask our presenters? Yeah. Thank you everyone for your presentation about the blog. Eric, I had a question for you. Maybe I missed it or I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit more about the digital nature of the project and about the content of your projects and if that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious what you thought about digital methods or digitalization? I mean, coming from the humanities is crap. Thank you. So in that regard, I haven't figured out a way to go beyond the very rudimentary crap making in terms of digitalization. But there are other ideas that we have going forward. I would like to see what we can do. Learning other things, then kind of figure that out. Yeah, I mean, just on top of that, I don't know how specific you're actually dating us. They try to be sensitive. They're just having it like that. Do you sort of geographies like part of the missions over time and like, you know, show like where and then you sort of speak to the missions and then say like, ah, if I get that specific, then I could really want to do that again. But if it doesn't get out of the spectrum, then that would be great. And there's definitely space and time in there. Yeah, so I'm very interested in how we can make the static for the public and the art of war as well. That's a great question. Evan? Thanks. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'll pass. My question is for you. I was struck by this idea of freedom, the sort of a loss of freedom in trying to move this dynamic better. Can you talk about the desire of the public? Like, you know, is there a possibility of that change, that loss, to be a positive thing or is the freedom of creation a positive thing? Question. Yeah, I jump in from loss, but the reason I chose LNA is that it's not going to bring it to the colors. So I'm always in the loss, but it's a human thing that comes with decision-making. Like, just a lot of it is a human thing. And that I have always been in a loss in this together. So it's actually a thing that fits around in the branches in front of me. So you can imagine if I had something shrinking and not like, maintaining that surface, like that's automatic in the design. So the other thing that I like to do is have an indicator that I embrace that it needs to be like a composite, like a design that I need, or I just need to change it. But I, the oyster composite that I asked for, maybe like, I think it was a lot of sort of, I don't know, sort of a shimmering piece. But one of the reasons that I'm able to take a decision, especially in this industry, I hope it's obviously symmetry, something I work with a lot. And I find it's a way to, or it's not a, you know, it can be like biodegradable, but if you have a lot of my work feels like it's the fingers to the news, and that's how it can be getting things and getting that out of the way. Let's take it for more context, see how it's moving, and so on and so forth. So like, the exact symmetry is to go like, as in the property, it becomes like monolithic and hopefully it can settle on with the way it moves. So like, visual monitoring is a thing that we need to take. Any more questions? Is that a hand up? No, I'm not. I don't worry. I was trying to find a way to do some symmetry, just because when I think of biology, I think in a lot of ways, it's communicative in a way, but it's perfect. And that these things are symmetrical, but when we actually go out into the world, we realize that it's not. And the biology is moving nicely. So, yeah, can you just speak to that more about which ways of symmetry, although the key focus on biology is more. Well, symmetry is like a really tight line, but like when life's sort of stumbled in, like, the efficiency of symmetry, like macro-organism is something that I need. So for me, like, symmetry is a way to reference my macro-organisms to my work and see what that looks like. It's self-adjustable to me. But I just don't need to see what I'm doing. So like, symmetry is really important to be large-scale, like I said, but yet it's not perfect. And if you look at my degree, you never see me being fair to Jared. It's not what it seems to me. And that's why I made it by myself. And you can see that. My type of perfect symmetry is, like I was saying, from where it's, a lot of my work is in on the side of the problem. The beauty and sensitivity and vibrania, but I'm doing more in the power of my life. But like, that's not what I'm just staring at. My idea is to do it by myself. I think that's a huge problem on how the essence works for me. So I'm really in the power of my life. I'm going to symmetry content again, like quicksand things, but not really. In some way, sort of, I think it's a, unsettling nature of it. The way that I'm exploring it. I have a question burning, something to do, to privilege here and ask Ali directly. I'm so taking with your work, and I think it's so important of how do we create you with access points and collections that were probably described in ways that provided access when they were collected. So the question is like, you were able to do 60 records as part of this, you know, this pilot project. So two parts, how does it scale and what do you see as being the limits of automation if automation is the answer? That's my recommendation that the labor that the system is massive and often by the money. So to accomplish having this pilot set of records is to put up statistics about training on the total amount of time to go to learn to do this work and then move that to a five-year-old grant so that I can get a lot of work or a good three-year job to develop more of the expertise in this project and be able to enhance more of the service. And without that additionally, we're going to be able to do this. And I think automation really is not possible for a lot of people. You know, we talk about things like, oh, we are, you know, this is very important. You can talk to a hundred investors and move from a couple of decades or maybe a century to a century ago, like if you didn't know that or if you didn't know that you have to have a purpose to be able to generate kind of a lot of skills to reach in this work. And that's the thing. When you have a photograph, when you have reality of the actual object, you know, I think there's a huge rematch of what a computer or any other human would do to be so flexible. And you can think of it as private people's objects. I think putting it together in conflict with all the other materials plus the art form of the whole is really raising the human's knowledge and the human being, you know, the way to make connections between the different forms never the shine here in a way that we're going to acknowledge in the point of the match. Yeah, that's a great question. I wonder if that would be the answer, but we probably have time for one more question. Anyone have one last burning question for our panel? If not, then I did want to just make one announcement that we have an annual digital humanities symposium that we've been doing for eight years now and University of Utah is going to be hosting the 2024 Digital Humanities Utah Symposium. I was just going to encourage everyone keep your eyes out for that call for proposals. Do you have something worth in progress or if you want to update us on how your projects are going then? I do have just small gifts for our students today. I'm so appreciative of the work that you've all done in the lab this semester. This really has been an incredible group. It's probably made me reflect in a very old-fashioned boiler. Actually, your names are on them, but I don't know who's who. So I'm just going to put them here for now. And one is for Ashton as well, our fall 2022 fellow who is graduating or has graduated but is walking next week. So thank you everyone for being here. Let's give our families one more round of applause. I just want to say, everyone have a call. Nice to meet you. Yeah, I got your email today, and I'll get typing on that soon. Oh, sure, sure. Nice to meet you too.