Más Tecnologia, Más Cambio?: Investigating an Educational Technology Project in Rural Peru / Emeline Therias, Jon Bird, Paul Marshall

Excellent analysis of use of educational technology in rural Peru, questioning many basic assumptions of programs based on simple hardware distribution rather than addressing social settings and context. Useful for considering digital archival projects where community partners are in areas with little hardware and network service. Also provides analysis of factors leading to success, again providing guidance for community archives projects where there may be participants with a variety of hardware and network access.

Therias, Emeline, Jon Bird, and Paul Marshall. 2015. “Más Tecnologia, Más Cambio?: Investigating an Educational Technology Project in Rural Peru.” In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’15, 447–56. Seoul, Republic of Korea: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702595.

Archival Absence: The Burden of History / Ashley Glass-Falzetti

Beautifully argued and written, suggesting (and further analyzing) practices of marking absences in history, and it is quite productive for those in processing, cataloging, digitization, and system design to consider how they might mark absences. From the article: “At saakaciweeyankwi, the annual Myaamia language camp in Indiana, a non-Miami man showed up one evening to speak with elders. He hoped to learn more about the history of the land where his wilderness preserve is located. After some conversation, we figured out that he wanted some tidbits to put on signs around the property with Miami names for landmarks and maybe something about the Miami who lived there. After those of us who run the camp discussed our response, we told him that there is no doubt that Miami people lived on that land. Unfortunately, there are no Myaamia names for those landmarks because those Miami were either forced to migrate west of the Mississippi River or they were massacred. Either way, those particular place names were lost along with the names of the people who kept them. I sincerely suggested that he put that on a sign.” Falzetti analyzes the potential of similar such markers in archives and special collections, which has interesting implications for the design of digital collection systems.

Falzetti, Ashley Glassburn. 2015. “Archival Absence: The Burden of History.” Settler Colonial Studies 5 (2): 128–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2014.957258.