Cultural Heritage & Social Change Summit: One Year On

We’ve just published Nothing About Us Without Us, a retrospective report about the Cultural Heritage and Social Change Summit and it’s main themes one year later.

Download the Full Report

The document summarizes some of the core findings of the Summit–themes that have also arisen in many other cultural heritage conferences and meetings over the past year:

  • Safe Space for Disruptive Dialogue
  • Funding for Transformative Gatherings
  • Equitable and Ethical Collaboration
  • Diversifying Technology Production in Cultural Heritage Spaces
  • Integrating Community Archives Into Traditional Cultural Heritage Spaces
  • Social Innovation and Rethinking Goals and Objectives in the Cultural Heritage Sector

Special thanks to everyone who participated in the Summit, our co-organizers at Southern University at New Orleans MA in Museum Studies Program, the organizing committee and co-contributors in the report, especially Haitham Eid, Bergis Jules, Natasha Varner, and Archon Editing.

Building Buy-In 4 Glam Spaces

Glam Space was not a term I had heard used before. kYm Keeton shared that this is the concept of “turning free space into art spaces”.  Doing this with flare, making it attractive, will draw the community to the space.  On college campuses it can become a great feat to accomplish glam spaces as politics present challenges.  This session was a great think tank on how to navigate administrations for glam spaces.  We also looked at progressing open space with Vera Warren-Williams by looking at the many possibilities open space presents in her book center.  This discussion gave food for thought regarding all the different open spaces around us that can be used to bring art into various aspects of community.DSC_0402

 

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Data is People

Frameworks of Guidance for Digital Projects that deal with Human Communities 

http://bit.ly/DataIsPeople

This document represents the initial outcomes of a conversation about the kinds of questions that digital project managers and planners should consider as they are beginning a project that includes data and materials that touch on human communities.

It is only a beginning, and the members of the session eagerly encourage comments, questions, additions, and edits to the document.

Please consider the draft and join our effort produce a set of questions of guidelines that will help to more explicitly address the ethical issues that are so frequently at play in our digital cultural heritage work.

#CHSCsummit Twitter Archive & Visualizations

I set up a Twitter archive for #CHSCsummit using Martin Hawksey’s free Twitter Archiving Google Sheets (aka TAGS). This archive contains tweets using the hashtag from November 11, 2016 onward, and should pull in the latest tweets every hour from now on. (We’re at 437 tweets as of 6:07am this morning.)

Screengrab of visualization of #CHSCsummit Twitter hashtag tweeter relationships

You can see the spreadsheet here: the “summary” sheet has analytic data like who’s been tweeting the most using the hashtag, the “dashboard” sheet has charts and graphs of tweeting activity, and the “archive” sheet is the straight spreadsheet of collected tweet data.

You can also see a dynamic visualization of people using the hashtag to hold conversations.

And here is a searchable, prettier interface for exploring the tweets.

Ethics

We had some excellent conversations yesterday about how new interfaces to existing data (like this archive and visualizations) may involve possibilities that people didn’t predict or consent to. Please do let me know if you have any reservations at all about our collecting and displaying tweet data this way (amandavisconti@gmail.com or @Literature_Geek).

And if you’re interested in conversations around the ethics of social media archiving, interfacing, and research, at least two members of the amazing Documenting the Now project (Community Lead Bergis Jules, and Advisory Board Member Meredith Evans) are here, and the project nurtures a fantastic ongoing, open-to-the-public conversation around these issues on a Slack you can join (Slack is a set of thematically related chat rooms).

Set something similar up for another hashtag

These are very simple to set up to track any Twitter hashtag or other search—basically typing in your search term, and okaying some Google and Twitter permissions. (Note that because of Twitter limitations a new archive will only pull tweets a week back, but will catch all tweets going forward—so it’s good to create an archive as soon as you know you’ll want one). I’m happy to help if you run into any issues.

Sunpie Barnes and Studio Be on Friday Night

20160402_194951If you’re in town Friday and looking for some things to do, I highly recommend making your way out to the Bywater and checking out Studio Be to see the amazing work of Brandan “BMike” Odums, whose work is featured on our site (they are open Wed-Sat 2pm-8pm, $10 admission). And if you go a little further into the Bywater, you can check out our friends at the Music Box–an incredible music experience and it’s their opening weekend featuring the amazing Sunpie Barnes ($20 advance tickets). I’ll be at the 8:30pm show and hope you can join us! Of course there are plenty of ways to support local music and arts, including many of our partner and delegate organizations too!

Bus Schedule

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As you know, this is a grassroots effort, so we’re not doing fancy busses, but we’ll get you there. We can’t promise an Anthony Davis sighting, but we can promise we’ll be rolling in style in a New Orleans School Bus.

If you’re staying at either of the MCN hotels, the AC Marriott is just around the corner away from the Quarter.

Here’s the driving schedule below:

Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016
Pick-up Time: 7:00 AM @ AC Marriott Hotel
221 Carondelet St.

Pick-up Time: 7:30 AM @Hampton Inn
1201 Convention Center Blvd., NOLA 70130

Drop-off Location: Leonard Washington Memorial Library
6400 Press Drive NOLA 70126 (SUNO)

Return Time: 5:30 PM
Return Location, AC Marriott Hotel & Hampton Inn
( after Hampton Inn drop-off, please wait 10 minutes)
Return to Marriott Hotel & Hampton Inn to pick-up customers

Drop-off Location: Blue Nile
532 Frenchmen Street (Final Stop)

Sunday, Nov. 5, 2016
Pick-up Time: 7:00 AM @ AC Marriott Hotel 221 Carondelet St. NOLA 70130
Pick-up Time: 7:30 @Hampton Inn 1201 Convention Center Blvd., NOLA 70130
Drop-off Location: Leonard Washington Memorial Library 6400 Press Drive NOLA 70126 (SUNO)

Return Time: 3:00 PM Return Location: AC Marriott Hotel & Hampton Inn