Review of the book “Archival Silences: Missing, Lost and, Uncreated Archives” edited by Michael Moss and David Thomas. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2021.

Wielded uncritically, the term ‘archival silences’ says more about our inability (or unwillingness) to see beyond the written text, than about the presence of silences in archives. This essay discusses the concept of archival silences as a starting point for archivists to help our users engage critically and generatively with our collections.

Teaching with digital archives does not mean simply teaching students to locate material, navigate databases, or construct Boolean searches. It means showing them how to go beyond what is there to discern what is not there to critically examine what has been preserved and collected and understand the tacit narratives hidden in the archival…[Read more]

Summary of presentation for panel #228 “Compartir lo que nos une. Digitizing and Curating Colonial Records from the Caribbean and Central and South America for Public Outreach” presented during the Digital Humanities 2020 conference. Please see accompanying slides of this presentation. The presentation goes beyond digitization to discuss what…[Read more]

This presentation is part of panel #228 “Compartir lo que nos une. Digitizing and Curating Colonial Records from the Caribbean and Central and South America for Public Outreach” for the Digital Humanities 2020 conference.
The presentation goes beyond digitization to discuss what happens after digitization is completed. Considering that the…[Read more]

In postcolonial countries in the Caribbean, more than natural disasters, newspapers are threatened by oblivion, stemming from indifference in and dismissal of a traumatic past. Traditionally, scholars have read historical newspapers for the information they contain. More recently, area studies and digital tools have enabled us to read them against…[Read more]