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Call Alexander

Rashida Kamal

A rotary phone that allows you to find documents related to Alexander Graham Bell, its inventor, on the Library of Congress website.

https://call-alexander.glitch.me/

Description

The project is an exploration of a very specific subject (the invention of the telephone) presented through the combined interaction of a digital and physical interface. The choice of presenting the material in a manner that requires the user to access the information both digitally and physically mirrors the research process structurally required by the institutional decisions of the Library of Congress. The nature of the archives at the Library is such that access to our collective memory is necessarily mediated the intervention of subject area experts or by programmatic interfaces reflecting cataloguing practices that are as much an accident of history as they are systemic.

The resulting interaction points to the ways in which technology and its inventors remain illegible to the public, and how meaning-making from our collections are necessarily an esoteric act.

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Artists in the Archive

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Perspectives in the National Parks

Jaekook Han

Explore the happenings in the National Parks and discover the gap between the google maps

https://perspectives-in-the-national-parks.glitch.me/

Description

Perspectives in the National Parks is a project that shows the various way of seeing of four national parks which are Yellowstone, Acadia, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains national parks through the map collection, “Mapping the National Parks” from Library of Congress in the US. This project will explore the gap between the old way of cartography and modern style like google maps. In nowadays, people can variously see the maps on the web like street view, satellite view but people only see the technology in there. However, old maps which are drawn by hands of cartographer only shows one perspective, but people can feel the human touch and cartographer's endeavor. In this project, I want to show different aspects of the old maps and also, reveal the cartographer who made the maps by there physical effort.

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Artists in the Archive

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A Measure of Care

Elizabeth Ferguson

A Measure of Care is an interactive look at representation and value of people in archives.

https://www.elizabethjeaneferguson.com/ameasureofcare

Description

A Measure of Care invites you to look for remarkable people in the Library of Congress' collections who did not receive obituaries in The New York Times until the launch of their Overlooked feature in 2018. The project also offers tools for people to add more representation of these people into archives, and others who are overlooked, into the Library of Congress' homepage with a chrome extension and the ability to contribute to the dataset behind the project.

Classes

Artists in the Archive