about my personal archiving project
I'm kind of a hoarder maximalist. I had been collecting bits of ephemera in shoeboxes for over a decade, starting in Chicago, taking the shoeboxes with me to Rochester and finally to Dallas. In 2022, I took a digital imaging course, which started my interest in digital asset management. For the final project, we had to put together our own collection of assets, and I decided this would be the impetus to finally start cataloguing my ephemera collection. I opted to use airtable to present the collection, as it allowed me to both catalogue the objects and their related image assets in a relational way.
After submitting the project, my professor, Deama Khader, brought to my attention the work of Laurie J. Bonnici and Brian O'Connor, Proximity and Epidata: Atrributes and Meaning Modification. The objects in my personal archive are meaningless without their context. I employed curatorial notes fields and other free text fields to provide the necessary context to understanding the value (whether real or perceived) of the objects. To borrow from Bonnici & O'Connor, including epidata in archival description transforms archives from historical records to multi-faceted narratives.
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