As the COVID-19 pandemic compelled libraries and archives worldwide to close their doors indefinitely, stranded researchers were compelled to radically reimagine what a visit to the archive might look like. Rather than scrutinizing text amid the dust of decaying paper in a Special Collections Reading Room, these researchers found themselves poring over digitized documents bathed in the light of their computer screens. The relevance of organizations like HathiTrust and the Internet Archive, which are committed to the task of document digitization, has been felt perhaps most urgently during this ..read more

This episode grapples with the many implications of one big question: what happens to literary archives when most of the work and communications around book publishing now occurs digitally? Columbia literature curator Lina Moe sits down with Lise Jaillant--an author, researcher, and lecturer at Loughborough University--to discuss this. Lise Jaillant's research lies at the intersection of Digital Humanities, Book History and Modernist Studies. Her core expertise is on literary institutions: she has written extensively about the publishers that marketed the new literature of the early twentieth ..read more

In this episode, Columbia literature curator Lina Moe sits down with historian and curator of NYU’s AI Now Institute and author of A People's History of Computing in the United States, Joy Lisi Rankin. Lina and Joy discuss urgent questions about the social history of computing; the ethical dilemmas posed by the power of tech industry giants today; and how race, class, and gender factor into online culture.  Lina and Joy also speculate on the paths not taken in computing. Instead of understanding computers as commodities for purchase, for example, computers could have been considered neces ..read more

In this episode, Columbia literature curator Lina Moe sits down with Trevor Owens, the head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress. Trevor is the first person to hold this position because it’s new— in fact, digital content management is new to most institutions. Lina and Trevor discuss the many, sometimes contradictory, challenges of dealing with digital content. How do we keep the things we want to preserve, but get rid of things that inadvertently get swept into digital archives—like personal, sensitive, or even offensive information? Lina’s conversation with Trevor is wid ..read more

Would knowing that reparations were enacted for slaveholders change the conversation around the feasibility of reparations today? Can archives be spaces of repair and reconciliation? This week we speak with Elsa Mendoza, historian at Middlebury College and former curator in the Georgetown Slavery Archives at Georgetown University about the role of archives in the debate about reparations on campus as well as how the space of the archive has been a place where historians and members of the descendent community meet. We speak with Mendoza about how students on the Georgetown campus use ..read more

Publishing houses make the study of literature possible in more ways than one. Not only do publishing houses make literary texts available as finished goods for our cultural consumption, the archival holdings of these publishing houses also contain evidence of literature in its myriad unfinished, intermittent, exploratory forms before and after publication. Publisher archives house extensive paratextual paraphernalia that shed crucial light on the works that we read, the authors that wrote them, and the industry that produces them: cover art, correspondence, contracts, and various other epheme ..read more

Maya Moretta is a recent graduate of Georgetown University. As a student, Moretta had worked with the Georgetown Slavery Archive to compile a massive database of names of enslaved people owned by Georgetown, and the Maryland Jesuits. She also became an activist working with Students for GU272 to pass a historic referendum demanding reparative justice for the descendants of enslaved people sold by the University in the 1830s. Since the referendum’s successful passage in 2019, Maya fought to have the decision enacted in practice. Maya chose to attend Georgetown University because she had heard s ..read more

Although the meaning of “archive” has always been complicated, an image persists: Vast storerooms with rows of bookshelves and boxes brimming with folders, a physical space that stores books, documents, and records of our collective physical and social world.  Today, though, archives are grappling with a momentous shift. Much of the communication and content created in recent years only exists digitally. This digital transformation poses profound questions about how the form, function, and focus of archives will change–or how this digital turn has already affected the kinds of information ..read more

Georgetown students made international news in 2018 when they voted to add an activity fee to benefit the descendants of enslaved people sold in 1838 to pay off the university’s debt. As one of the first concrete steps toward reparations, the vote can be traced back to student activism, archival scholarship, as well as a series of articles in the student newspaper written by Matthew Quallen. On this episode of Overdue, we speak with Quallen, a lawyer and former Georgetown student who helped fuel the debate on campus with his articles quoting voices from the Georgetown Slavery Archives, in ..read more

In 1838, the Maryland Jesuits who operated Georgetown University, among numerous other concerns, conducted one of the largest sales of enslaved people in American history. Nearly 300 people were sold, mostly to plantations in Louisiana. The legacy of this tragedy has been at the center of Georgetown University politics for nearly a decade. Students, faculty, alumni, and descendants of the enslaved people sold in 1838 have all engaged in research, activism, and community building in the hopes of finding some meaningful form of reparative justice in response to this history. In this episode, we ..read more