Amalia S. Levi, PhD

The Cyberattack That Exposed The Fragility Of Digital Heritage Saturday 28 October 2023 is a date that will live long in the memory of staff at the British Library. As they arrived for work that day, they encountered

On ransomware and under-funded GLAMs: 'At no point was the British Library particularly negligent or unprepared. Instead, it was hindered by vulnerabilities shared by the majority of cultural institutions. ...the attack [is] a warning to the whole sector.' informationsecuritybuzz.com/the-cyberatt...

Important article that emphasizes proliferation + fragmentation of hist datasets & the need to

- rethink our responsibility+commitment as scholars to FAIR principles
- reeducate in dig skills for locating/navigating/using hist datasets
- build communities around data to naturalize reuse/engagement

Looking forward to listening to this work, Elise. Your paper "Morbid Crossings" has stayed with me...

6/6 In most of this cases, in lack of good inventories, we'll never know the true extent of what was lost.

It is sad to see how little heritage is valued. Despite frequent assertions to the opposite, there is a lack of serious and consistent funding and commitment for its protection and promotion.

Haiti - FLASH : The royal chapel of Milot, world heritage destroyed by fire - HaitiLibre.com : Haiti news 7/7 On the night from Sunday to Monday, April 13, 2020, a fire broke out in an annex building to the Royal Chapel of Milot, before spreading to this historic monument classified as World Heritage by UNESC...

5/ In 2020, the Royal Chapel in Milo, Haiti, was burnt, and its dome collapsed.

www.haitilibre.com/en/news-3052...

National Museum of Brazil fire - Wikipedia

4/ On September 2, 2018, the National Museum of Brazil's collections were up in fire.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa...

3/ On March 25, 2019, the St. Lucia Folk Research Centre's collections were destroyed.

www.caribbeanliteraryheritage.com/archival-tre...

Historic documents destroyed in fire at Archives Department - Barbados Today A fire sparked by a lightning strike just before midnight destroyed a two-storey block at the Archives Department which housed major historic documents. Chief archivist at the Barbados Archives Depart...

2/ On June 18, 2024, a major fire at the Barbados Archives Department destroyed important original documents, as Tara Inniss' article describes.

barbadostoday.bb/2024/06/18/h...

1/ Important new article by Dr. Tara Inniss that discusses the "chronic underfunding, aging infrastructure, and climatic threats" of Caribbean archives, compounded by vulnerabilities and policy gaps.

Thread w recent examples of destruction of collections by fire:

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

If Federal Museums Aren’t Allowed to Tell the Truth About the Past, it’sTime to Start Supporting… By Michelle Caswell and Bergis Jules

Community archives "have been chronically underfunded by government agencies and private foundations..., passed over in favor of wealthier institutions that...promise longer term stability and prestige, but they also propagate dominant narratives."

medium.com/community-ar...

Thank you for reading! 🤗

Image: Jamillah Knowles & We and AI / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ A neural network comes out of the top of an ivory tower, above a crowd of people's heads. Some of them are reaching up to try and take some control and pull the net down to them. Watercolor illustration.

📣 The public deserves more than basic training on how to use AI. That’s why we’re launching a new AI Civics initiative, treating AI not as a tool to be mastered, but as a domain of civic life where people have rights, responsibilities, & avenues for collective action. datasociety.net/points/build...

If Bad Bunny can cover the history of Puerto Rico, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, hemispheric consciousness, as well as contemporary life and politics in under 14 minutes, you can do your 15- or 20-minute conference presentation with time to spare.

Everyone should be following the digitization and posting of the Adam Jacobs Collection. A 10,000 live concert chronicle of rocknroll-live-in-Chicago between the mid-1980s and today. archive.org/details/aada...

Cover of Indigenous Archives: The Maya Diaspora and Mobile Cultural Production by Floridalma Boj Lopez. The cover features a photograph of two young Mayan women wearing traditional clothing sitting on steps. Below this is solid purple with the title written in white in all caps. A yellow line separates the title and subtitle. The subtitle is written smaller in white. Below is the author's name italicized and written in all caps.

The Weekly Read is "Indigenous Archives" by Floridalma Boj Lopez, which analyzes the modes through which young Mayas in Los Angeles and Guatemala make sense of and respond to transnational structures of settler colonialism. Read the entire book for free now thanks to TOME!
buff.ly/BTvGoKo

5/5 There are of course several digitization guidelines out there but most address well-resourced institutions in the "global North."

The resources here have been shared because they take into consideration local issues in small under-resourced locations.

ICA and ALIPH - Digitization Manual to Support Ukrainian Archives Completion of a comprehensive manual tailored to the specific needs of Ukrainian regional archives. Project supported by the ALIPH Foundation.

4/ The guide by the Int Council of Archives (ICA) & the Int Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH) was designed "for smaller, under-resourced institutions & take into consideration various scenarios from natural disasters to military conflicts."
www.ica.org/ica-and-alip...

3/ The Digital Library of the Caribbean @dlocaribbean.bsky.social that works with partner institutions across the Caribbean and Latin America provides several good guides for digitization, digital curation, and training.

dloc.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/technology/

2/ The Modern Endangered Archives Programme @modarchivesucla.bsky.social provides pring, audio, and video digitization guidelines for their grants that are also applicable widely.

meap.library.ucla.edu/applicants/g...

Remote Capture: Digitising Documentary Heritage in Challenging Locations This is a must-read how-to guide if you are planning to embark on a scholarly digitisation project. Tailored to the specifications of the British Library’s EAP (Endangered Archives Programme) projects...

1/ The Endangered Archives Programme out of British Library provides guidelines that contain "hints, advice and experiences from people who have completed projects everywhere around the globe from Latin America to Africa to Asia."

www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

Digitization in countries beyond Europe and North America is often a fine balance between standards and realities on the ground.

Several institutions provide digitization guidelines (and grants) that have been developed for projects in such locations.

Here I point to some:

Now available graphic. Background image is stack of books - The House Archives built by Dorothy Berry. Text is centered. We Here Press logo, weherepress.org, title of book and "Now Available" in yellow text.

now available — the house archives built & other thoughts on black archival possibilities by @dorothyjberry.bsky.social (3rd printing) www.weherepress.org

Next week Wednesday 11 February we are delighted to have @pbhellawell.bsky.social & @libertypaterson.bsky.social present their paper titled 'The Ship Bedford: Atlantic and Archival Crossings in the Long Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade'. Join us either in person at the IHR or online from 17:30

Beautiful public outreach! Academic research on archival material "transformed into a series of stunning musical arrangements on stage."

We’re thrilled to launch the BlueSky page for CONTACT
🧪We are using radiocarbon, isotopes, DNA & historical analysis to map the timeline of Norse expansion into North America. Follow along!
A 5-year ERC-funded project @rug.nl
#Norse #Archaeology #NorthAtlantic #Research

A charter written by a drunken spider

My therapist: Don’t worry, Merovingian cursive is not real, it can’t hurt you

Merovingian cursive:

Lost ancient Greek star catalog decoded by particle accelerator Synchrotron radiation has revealed a star map made by the ancient astronomer Hipparchus that was thought to be lost to time

"Newer inks on the palimpsest’s top layers contained more iron, whereas those used to transcribe Hipparchus’s catalog a few hundreds of years earlier left a calcium-rich residue that researchers zeroed in on with the x-ray imagery."

www.scientificamerican.com/article/lost...

liiive splash page image

Screenshot of the annotation interface, with toolbars (top-left, top-right, bottom-left), live user cursors and a medieval manuscript image with three annotations.

I can finally share the happy news 🚀 liiive.now — my tool for real-time collaborative annotation of #IIIF images — is going open source!

First code is available here: github.com/rsimon/liiive

Self-hosted setup coming by end of February.

#OpenSource #DigitalHumanities

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models Company hired Google's book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize "all the books in the world."

"all the books in the world"

*laughs in archivist

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/a...

The Atlas of Digital Damages Prompted by a blog post by Barbara Sierman, this space is a staging area for collecting visual examples of digital preservation challenges, failed renderings, encoding damage, corrupt data, and visual...

The Atlas of Digital Damages "is a staging area for collecting visual examples of digital preservation challenges, failed renderings, encoding damage, corrupt data, and visual evidence documenting #FAILs of any stripe."

www.flickr.com/groups/21217...