Web-publishing Tools, Collaboration, Skills Development, and Project Management

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Sarah Kastner

I would like to propose a session on some of the open-source, web-based, web-publishing tools available that bridge cultural, scholarly, library and museum worlds, such as the open source platforms, Omeka, and Mukurtu. My own interest in this session is to situate myself as a beginner technology user who would like to play and talk with other people about their interest/experiences with these tools. As a literary researcher and student archivist working with the personal papers of Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera, I am interested in utilizing these tools to create an online resource for scholars interested where I hope to publish her archival finding aid, publicize an upcoming conference on her works, plan for collaborative digitization projects, and create a digital scholarly edition of her unpublished manuscript. Relevant discussion topics may include collaboration and project management, crowdsourcing, digital communities and cultural heritage, archives and collections, digital scholarly editions and research methods. I am hoping that this session offers a nice compliment to Heather Home and Jeremy Heil’s session on the role of Archives in DH projects.

Categories: Archives, Collaboration, Crowdsourcing, Digital Literacy, General, Libraries, Museums, Open Access, Project Management, Publishing, Research Methods, Scholarly Editions, Session Proposals |

About Sarah Kastner

I am a PhD student in the English department at Queen’s University. My dissertation focuses on three authors, Yvonne Vera, Bessie Head, and Dambudzo Marechera, who blur the boundary between autobiography and fiction through a postmodern African aesthetic. My work explores the interrelatedness of biography, narratives of self, and the construction of identity in postcolonial and post-apartheid environments. During my Masters degree in the Public Texts program at Trent University, I worked as an archivist to the personal papers of Zimbabwean author, Yvonne Vera. My thesis, entitled “Writing Against Possession: Archiving Yvonne Vera, and the Obedience Manuscript,” read Vera’s archives through her subaltern approach to writing, and argued for a reading of her final unfinished novel that does not attempt to apprehend its complete state. I am interested in personal archives theory, electronic archives, and digital editions.