MLIS students, Christina Taylor Gibson and K. Sarah Ostrach, and MIM student, Aakanksha Singh, were selected to receive the “Beyond These Walls” Student Travel Award. Established in 2012, this fund provides financial support to allow Master’s students from any program at the College of Information Studies to attend local and national conferences, present research, and gain experience and exposure to professionals in their respective fields.
Aakanksha Singh, MIM student studying Information Analysis specializing in Data Analytics, will travel to San Francisco this month to attend the DigitalHeritage 2018 Conference (http://www.digitalheritage2018.org). Singh will present her research paper, “Digital Curation of a World War II Japanese American Incarceration Camp Collection: Implications for Sociotechnical Archival Systems,” which she co-authored with Dr. Richard Marciano, Digital Curation Innovation Center director, Myeong Lee, William Underwood, Sandra Laib, and Zeynep Diker. Singh has been a core researcher on this project for more than a year. In addition, her research paper was published at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data.
“This paper is taking on a new approach that we call Computational Archival Science, CAS, which describes the computational treatments of archival collections through a case study of World War II Japanese-American Incarceration Camps internee data, a very significant co
llection that has not yet been shared with the public,” Singh describes her research. “The end goal is to release and share the records with WWII camp survivors and families.”
While at the DigitalHeritage 2018 Conference, Singh will also participate in panel discussions (Panel Infrastructure for Heritage Sciences), as well as workshops, “with peers and leaders in tech for culture.”
“Attending the conference will give me an opportunity to make connections with new people, especially people whose papers I have read or who work at institutions I am interested in working at in the future, and catching up with collaborators,” Singh said. “As a presenter at the conference, I am keen to get feedback, collegial support, a sense of intellectual community, and time to talk to friends and colleagues about collaborative projects and institutional developments.”
Christina Taylor Gibson, MLIS student, will attend the American Musicological Society Conference in San Antonio, TX.
“This is the major national conference in the US for musicologists,” Gibson said. “I am migrating from a career in musicology to a career in archives with the hope that I can continue to work with cultural materials in a new way.” Gibson will present her paper, “Neoclassicism, Psychoanalysis, and the Mythic Heroine in Martha Graham’s and Carlos Chávez’s Dark Meadow.”
“I am shaping the paper I’m presenting at this conference for publication in one of the major peer-reviewed journals in the field, the feedback from this presentation will be invaluable to that process,” Gibson said. She describes her passion in learning to understand how to open the archive to both scholars and ordinary people wanting to research areas of investigation surrounding Latin American musicology studies.
“In working on topics around Mexican music, I’ve seen the problems finding good sources to support diverse, multifaceted research,” she explained. “We can do better to service this growing, intellectually curious audience and I very much want to be part of that solution.”
K. Sarah Ostrach, MLIS student, will travel to Richmond, VA to attend the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Art Libraries Society of North America, ARLIS/NA, Joint Mid-Atlantic and Southeast Chapter Meeting (http://midatlantic.arlisna.org/2018/08/09/arlisna-mid-atlantic-and-southeast-chapters-to-host-joint-fall-2018-meeting/).
“Attending this meeting and presenting this poster will not only help me build my professional network, but it will also give me the opportunity to acquire new professional skills, specifically, creating and presenting a poster,” Ostrach said. “It is my intention that these professional relationships and skill building will also help my studies in terms of finding or informing practicum experience for the UMD Libraries Research and Teaching Fellowship and/or the Museum Scholarship and Material Cultural Certificate, for which I will apply when applications are made available.”
Ostrach will present her poster, “Indexing Artists in the National Palace Museum, TaiPei (NPHM Collection),” that displays her current volunteer work with the National Gallery of Art Library Department of Image Collections. Her poster will focus on her work, “creating authority and artist summary records in three writing systems, pinyin; Wade-Giles; and simplified Chinese characters, for the artists featured in the NPMT photographs, a large collection within the larger Cleveland Museum of Art Photography Library Collection.”
Ostrach’s poster, “will describe my process, the challenges faced, and future plans, all within the context of working with a Chinese collection in an institution primarily focused on American and European art,” she explained.