Digital Close Readings: How and Why We Must Attend to Born Digital Cultural Artifacts
April 10th, 2020
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Batza Room, 560
Case Library & Geyer Center for Information Technology
The digital era has brought with it an unprecedented scale of creative production and outputs and ushered in an era of analysis of culture at scale. How should our existing traditions for collecting, preserving, organizing, describing, and interpreting cultural artifacts connect to a world in which the forms and formats of creative production are increasingly born digital? Drawing on examples from the performing arts, journalism, design, folklore, and video games this talk will introduce a set of frames for both preserving and interpreting born digital objects.
Dr. Trevor Owens is a librarian, researcher, policy maker, and educator advancing digital infrastructure and programs for libraries and archives.
Owens serves as the first Head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress. He is also a Public Historian in Residence at American University, and a lecturer for the University of Maryland’s College of Information, where he is also a Research Affiliate with the Digital Curation Innovation Center.
He currently serves on the board of Anacostia Trails Heritage Area Inc, as a founding board member of Digital Cultural Heritage D.C., as a member of the CLIR Hidden Collections Digitization Program Review Panel, and as a member of the Digital Library Federation Advisory Committee.
Owens previously worked as a Senior Program Officer and as Associate Deputy Director for Libraries at the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). At the IMLS, he led the establishment of the National Digital Platform initiative, which under his leadership, invested more than $30 million in 110 projects to advance digital infrastructure for libraries across the nation. Prior to that, he worked on digital preservation strategy and as a historian of science at the Library of Congress. Before joining the Library of Congress, he led outreach and communications efforts for the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
Owens is the author of three books, the most recent of which, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2018 and has won outstanding publication awards from both the American Library Association and the Society of American Archivists. His research and writing has been featured in: Curator: The Museum Journal, Digital Humanities Quarterly, The Journal of Digital Humanities, D-Lib, Simulation & Gaming, Science Communication, New Directions in Folklore, and American Libraries.
In 2019, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University recognized him as Distinguished Alumni for History and Art History, exemplifying “the adaptability of a humanities and social sciences education” and for “taking an active role towards confronting essential questions and problems in our society.” In 2018 Library Journal recognized Owens as one of the “top changemakers who are transforming what it means to be a librarian.” In 2014 the Society for American Archivists granted him the Archival Innovator Award, presented annually to the archivist, repository, or organization that best exemplifies the “ability to think outside the professional norm.”
