The Narrative Power of Archival Metadata

1. The Narrative Power of Archival Metadata Courtney Rivard, Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill www.courtneyrivard.com

2. Archive stories begin with metadata Quantitative approaches that enable data visualization can allow us to read archives in new ways that both reveal and challenge traditional power structures.

3. Pointe-au-Chein Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees

5. Metadata, refers to data about data, and is used “when design[ing], creat[ing], describe[ing], preserv[ing], and us[ing] information systems and resources” (1). Gilliland, Anne J. “Setting the Stage.” Introduction to Metadata, vol. 2, 2008, pp. 1–19.

7. Metadata Construction as Composition • Who is the intended audience of the metadata schema? • How are they assumed to navigate the schema? • Will the intended audience already know the original terms used to tag the material?

8. A rhetorical approach to crafting archival description and metadata that “enacts a queering of rhetorical historiography” by “destabilizing normative archival practices” (Rawson 5). Rawson, K. J. “The Rhetorical Power of Archival Description: Classifying Images of Gender Transgression.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2017, pp. 1–25.

9. Federal Writers’ Project – Life Histories • Put unemployed white collar works to work • Part of Work Progress Administration

13. Eye Dialect “Relies on phonetic spellings and apostrophes to make visible to the eye sounds that cannot be heard in the medium of print.” For her, it is mainly used to render “the speech of black characters ‘as an alien, estranging dialect made deliberately unintelligible by spellings contrived to disfamiliarize it” (as quoted in Stewart 79). Stewart, Catherine A. Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

17. (Tableau, Circa 2017)

19. Thank you for your time. Courtney Rivard crivard@email.unc.edu

20. Photogrammar