My research projects focus on born-digital cultural heritage and community-driven approaches to digital curation. Specifically, I study the social contexts in which different communities interpret and use digital cultural heritage artifacts. I use this understanding to inform the development of frameworks, models, and approaches for curating and preserving heritage over time. Some of my current research projects include:
- Diving into Archives! (August 2024-present): Currently, there is little overlap between archivists working with regional collections and K-12 classrooms. This gap can serve as an unintended obstacle for broadening engagement and use of the wide range of digital primary sources becoming available through regional archives. What new literacies need to be developed and incorporated for educators to ethically integrate digital heritage sources? How can archivists work with educators to develop curriculum that reflects their respective domain knowledge? What new possibilities and extensions to historical understanding are introduced by digital heritage storytelling and community engagement initiatives? This research is funded with generous support from the Eleanor M. and Frederick G. Kilgour Research Grant.
- Building Capacity and Resilience for Born-Digital Stewardship (DigiStew) Communities of Practice (August 2024-present). The aim of this three-year early-career research project is to investigate field-wide challenges and potential opportunities for sustaining born digital stewardship in U.S. libraries and archives. This research is funded with generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program.
- The Hacking into History (HIH) Project (February 2020-present): HIH is a collaborative, community-driven project to raise awareness about the history and impact of racial covenant clauses on the landscape of Durham, North Carolina. As a project co-founder, I am specifically interested in understanding how HIH can 1) empower communities through participatory public records/citizen science projects and 2) present models for ethical engagement with public records, in service towards minimizing what I term “historic data harms.” This research is funded with generous support from the Durham County Government, the North Carolina Humanities Council, with previous seed funding from the Civic Switchboard Initiative and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
PREVIOUS PROJECTS
- HIH Civic Educators Pilot Cohort (October 2021-August 2022): With generous funding from the Civic Switchboard initiative and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), members of the Hacking into History (HIH) project team partnered with local educators in Durham, North Carolina in October 2021 to launch The Civic Educators Pilot project. The purpose of the pilot was to explore how educators can use primary source materials in place-based learning to support new kinds of understanding. Do these approaches using locally-relevant documentation deepen historical connections? What impact do these “historical harms” have on participants interacting with difficult subject matter for the first time? Recruited participants from the Durham Public Schools (DPS) used the HIH platform to design curriculum, including exercises and activities for engaging students in hands-on learning about racial covenant clauses in Durham County and across the United States.
Selected media and presentations
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- Digital & Public Durham History: Works in Progress at Duke & North Carolina Central University (HIH presentation starts ~ 1:14:00)
- “Volunteers Search for Racism Written into Durham Land Deeds” Independent Weekly, November 30, 2022.
- “How Historical Housing Practices Led to the Racial Makeup of My Durham Neighborhood.” North Carolina Public Radio, September 13, 2022.
- OSSArcFlow project (2018-2021): As a member of the IMLS funded OSSArcFlow project team, I worked with researchers from UNC Chapel Hill and The Educopia Institute to study, document, and synthesize archiving workflows for twelve cultural heritage institutions. I led the project management and portions of the data analysis; unexpectedly, one major finding was a significant difference between how the digital preservation literature conceptualizes workflow development and how boots-on-the-ground practitioners actually do the work of constructing workflows. In fact, our observations focused on the sociotechnical challenges and complexities of coordinating work practices for archiving born-digital cultural heritage.
- The OSSArcFlow Guide to Documenting Born-Digital Archival Workflows (June 2020, co-authored with Colin Post). Selected as “Preservation Publication of the Year” by The Society of American Archivists. The Guide assists collecting institutions of all shapes, sizes, and types in the work of mapping out an iterative workflow for born-digital archival materials.
- Software Curation, MIT Libraries (2016-2018): As a CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow, I worked with practitioners across MIT and with researchers from the Software Preservation Group to develop models and implementation guidance for increasing the capacity of research libraries to implement software preservation services.
- Chassanoff, A. and Altman, M. (2020), Curation as “Interoperability With the Future”: Preserving Scholarly Research Software in Academic Libraries. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71: 325-337. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24244
- Grand Challenges in Information Sciences: (2018). Invited participant in Forum hosted at MIT Libraries to identify “critical research problems with broad applications where solutions are potentially achievable within the next decade.”
- Collections as Data: (2016-2018). Invited participant in National Forums I and II participant.
- Data Rescue Boston: (2017) Co-organizer, “Data Rescue” event at MIT.
Soft Architectures 