Electronic Submission

Conference at George Mason University • November 30, 2018

The second Digital Archives in the Commonwealth Summit aims to highlight the growing number of significant and innovative efforts to conceive and construct digital archives within Virginia. A shared effort between the University of Virginia Law Library, George Mason University Libraries, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Summit will serve as a forum for the impressive efforts of those within the Commonwealth contributing to or interested in the digitization and interpretation of archival materials. The Summit will be an open-ended conference assembling individuals and institutions across disciplines—including but not limited to archivists, scholars, librarians, museum specialists, and technologists—who are expanding and grappling with the role of archives and archival research in the digital age. It will be an opportunity to present past, future, and ongoing digital archives projects and to explore practical, theoretical, and methodological issues regarding the convergence of archival practice, scholarly research, and pedagogy.

After the conference, presenters will receive feedback and their presentations will be published in a peer-reviewed online open access journal. This publication offers a means of capturing the important work presented at conferences.

We welcome proposals of topics, panels, and workshops and seek participants in a digital archives lightning round of 5-minute project show-and-tells.

We envision the summit engaging with the following topics:

• How do digital surrogates change our interpretation, use, or understanding of physical materials?
• New techniques of interfacing, indexing, and discovering content within collections.
• Methods of expanding access, assessing public engagement, and promoting digital archives projects.
• New models of description, interpretation, or analysis of digital archives.
• The inclusion of critical archives theory in archival practice, such as encouraging a focus on collecting and highlighting materials from understudied subjects and persons, opening collections to new audiences and methods of interpretation, or discussions of the privileged role archives play in historical memory making.
• The value of digitization in terms of the preservation of the cultural record.
• Discussions on the convergence of technologists, archivists, and scholars inside and outside the archives, particularly regarding collaborative methods of selecting, processing, interpreting, and teaching with collections and digital archives.
• Institutional issues surrounding funding, prioritization, collaboration, or the digital humanities.
• The technological underpinnings of digital archives creation including digitization methods, transcription, development of data models, standards-based metadata, hosting solutions, data management, the application of empirical data techniques, and data visualization.
• Digital archives as pedagogical instruments in classroom instruction and public engagement.

More information and submission instructions can be found at https://oieahc.wm.edu/conferences/supported/summit/cfp/

Please submit proposals by September 20, 2018.