March 2025 – Kristina Mason's Blog

On Archives Having the Power to Boost Marginalized Voices

Posted on March 19, 2025March 19, 2025

This post is about TED talk by archivist Dominique Luster and her work to uplift African American voices in historical records that are held by archives. She makes the important point that history is not just a linear recounting of events, it can have bias and re-write peoples’ pasts from a particular person or group’s point of view, essentially erasing marginalised voices.

“The inclusion or exclusion of documents from history making is an expression of power.” – Dominique Luster

She is constructing an archive of works by Pittsburgh journalist Teenie Harris, who, via his articles and photography, documented everyday African American lives from the 1930s-1970s. The archive is being built and described as the community would describe it, using their standards and vocabularies. It’s a short talk, but she has some very important points to make in terms of inclusiveness and bias and it’s well worth a watch.

On Preserving Australian First Nations Digital Cultural Heritage

Posted on March 17, 2025March 17, 2025

This post is just to share an amazing talk by C. Toby Edgar and Rebecca Barnott-Clement on a project they did which helped a First Nations community digitise their heritage collections. The talk is titled Collaborative models of care: preserving Australian First Nations digital cultural heritage and was the winner of the International Council on Archives Award for Collaboration and Cooperation. The talk was part of the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Digital Preservation Masterclass series.

The project involved going to the Ramingining community in the Northern Territory to work with the Bula’Bula Arts Centre. This talk taught me so much about what it means to truly collaborate with First Nations peoples, and the immense amount of things that we can learn from engaging consistently with their communities. Giving First Nations communities sovereignty over their cultural artifacts is integral to having ethical collections and archives and this talk has some great examples of how to do that.

The talk is only 15 minutes long and I can HIGHLY recommend giving it a listen even if you don’t work in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) field.

Data or Info: Take Your Pick

Posted on March 7, 2025August 16, 2025

Today I read an article titled “On the Difference or Equality of Information, Misinformation, and Disinformation: A Critical Research Perspective” by Bernd Carsten Stahl. There are plenty of deep thinkers out there (too many to name) who contemplate what information is, or what knowledge is, or what data is, essentially going in circles around each other. However Stahl paraphrases another author in a way that I found worth calling out in particular because I have a background dealing with data and website user experience and it gave me pause.

Stahl paraphrases R. T. De George and says “De George (2003) distinguishes between data and information precisely because data contains no claim to truth whereas information does.” I’m not refuting this, but it made me think about my own bias in terms of those 2 terms. Taking that claim at face value, if data makes no claims to truth, that is precisely why I’d trust it more than information*. Let’s look at this example. Imagine I was looking for a house. If I saw a webpage that said “here is information about 123 Smith Street” I’d take that less seriously and expect different things compared to a webpage that says “here is data about 123 Smith Street”. To me, information is an interpretation of data.

Knowledge Creation and False Friendship: Thoughts on “The New Librarianship Field Guide”

Posted on March 4, 2025March 4, 2025

I encountered an interesting concept today in reading “The New Librarianship Field Guide” by R. David Lankes. In Chapter 4, “Knowledge Creation”, he discusses the nature of the conversations people have when asking for and receiving information. According to him, there are two types of language classifications when people are seeking to gain knowledge. He calls them “L0” and “L1.” By his definition, L0 is an interaction where one party knows about the subject and the other does not. For instance, I’m in a library and have no idea how to find a book, so I ask the librarian, who is very knowledgeable. He defines L1 as an interaction between two people who are familiar with and have a high level of knowledge about a subject. For instance, I say something to a friend, and he responds with an inside joke, and we then discuss where we might have heard it first.