Archiving Cluster

The term archives may bring to mind large physical storage facilities containing folders of documents and maquettes of set designs. However, now that knowledge is so often transmitted digitally, online archives are needed. These pose many challenges and uncertainties related to how data operates in our culture, society, and economy, but they also offer space for resistance and the representation of difference that can open up the possibility of other worlds (Thylstrup et al. 2021; Risam 2018).

The Archiving Cluster of the Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs Partnership will make accessible online the knowledge gathered, produced, and shared by those involved in the Partnership  in keeping with project values and goals. This means working to ensure that knowledge is shared appropriately and ethically, protected when needed, and preserved for the long term. 

The Archiving Cluster serves the beneficiaries, partners, and researchers across the whole Partnership in coordination and collaboration with the SBF/MSMA co-directors and, as part of the Knowledge Sustainability clusters, with the Governance Study, Knowledge Mobilization, and Knowledge Synthesis clusters.

In the first year of the project we have worked together to understand how archiving can reflect and support the Partnership’s principles, goals, and activities, and what shape it will take in the first phase of the project.

Archiving goals for Phase 1 include:

1. Representing SBF/MSMA through a combined website for sharing information about the project publicly and an archiving space that will be a mix of published content and a “backstage” section for sharing materials amongst project members.
2. Archiving key background materials, records of key activities, and research results, sharing these publicly as appropriate.
3. Ensuring that SBF/MSMA’s data is FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable in ways that align with project values and goals, in addition to general research data management principles and the CARE principles for Indigenous data stewardship (“FAIR Principles - GO FAIR,” n.d.; Wilkinson et al. 2016; Carroll et al. 2021).
4. Conducting an analysis of the project’s needs with respect to Archiving, and identifying ways in which those could be met.
5. Enabling further enhancement of the website and advancing sustainability by seeking additional funding.

The Archiving cluster is collaborating closely to meet these aims with the Collaboratory for Writing and Research on Culture (CWRC, formerly called the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory), an online environment for cultural scholarship that uses proven digital technologies and standards to enable collaboration, to share and preserve cultural content and research, and to create a better online knowledge environment. CWRC hosts the SBF/MSMA website and archive. In the future, Archiving will be leaning on CWRC’s sister project, the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) which provides tools for connecting and sharing research content across the web as machine-readable data so that it can be found and used even more broadly alongside other cultural data. LINCS will help us link content in the SBF/MSMA Archive to SBF/MSMA researcher, partner, and beneficiaries’ content elsewhere on the web

Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs website

We are developing the project’s online presence to be launched in early 2025.

1. Website design: The layout and organization of materials has been established and we are gathering content.
2. Directory of project members: We have developed new functionality to allow members of SBF/MSMA to be profiled within the website, if they choose. This aspect of the website has been specially designed and implemented according to the Partnership’s needs and initial information about project members has been gathered as a foundation for the development of their profiles.
3. Preservation: A system has been put in place to take regular snapshots of SBF/MSMA content for long-term preservation in the national Borealis data repository run by a consortium of national research libraries.
4. Needs assessment: What has been done so far re: scoping/shaping the website; what we anticipate doing.
5. Sustainability: We are seeking funding to build on the SBF/MSMA Archive to create The Intersectional Archive (TIA), a space with extended capacity to support in innovative ways the values and activities of the Partnership, such as enhanced data governance and sovereignty; community-driven accessibility features; and nuanced understandings of identities. TIA will be created in collaboration with the entire SBF/MSMA Partnership. 
6. Translation: We have set up the technical process and an editorial workflow for implementing translation of the website interface from English into French, which is now underway.

Website architecture & content

To date the Archiving team has been collaborating with the other Knowledge Sustainability Clusters to create or prepare the following content for inclusion in the website: 

1. A directory of profiles of project members, who will be able to decide on the level of publicity associated with them and their content based on self-identified attributes such as language, gender, sexuality, and disability.
2. Community-produced landing pages showcasing each cluster’s mandate, aims, and work, policy documents, Partnership descriptions, and other resources related to project practice and governance.
3. A bilingual French-English set of project keywords with annotations and links to one another, showing how ideas central to SBF/MSMA relate to each other across languages. This set of keywords will also ensure that bibliographical content and project member profiles can be searched within the website.
4. A fully searchable and filterable bilingual bibliography, containing resources relevant to SBF research areas, governance and methodology. The bibliographic records can be searched using bilingual keywords.
5. Open resources for teaching and learning created by SBF/MSMA research clusters and affiliated projects. The first of these is Youareacritic.com, an open-source introductory course on equitable theatre criticism, developed by Brock University researchers with educational technology firm Say Yeah! 
6. The materials produced by SBF/MSMA research clusters for our first annual Symposium.

Currently, the Archiving Cluster membership includes Jeffery Antoniuk (CWRC Technical lead), Susan Brown (Cluster lead), Luciano Frizzera (Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow), Alice Hinchliffe (Archiving Cluster Graduate Research Assistant), Mihaela Ilovan (Assistant Director, CWRC), often working in collaboration with other members of SBF/MSMA, including Nicole Nolette and Jennifer Roberts-Smith (Co-directors), and Jeff Gagnon (Community-Driven Methodology Postdoctoral Fellow). There will be regular opportunities to provide input on Archiving activities throughout the project.