Year End 2021 Updates
December 2, 2021
A lot of people ask us how we are able to get so much done as “just three people.” While Shift Collective was co-founded by Bergis Jules, Jon Voss, and Lynette Johnson, we are able to accomplish so much in the field by convening diverse teams to tackle big issues on a project-by-project basis. This year we’ve completed several projects that brought together dream teams for research, design and activism, including The Flowerings Project at James Madison University, Alliance for Cultural Equity, and Reimagine Descriptive Workflows.
This fall, we’ve embarked on several new projects that will roll into 2022 and beyond. We continue to welcome projects that center diverse narratives and promote community-driven initiatives to boost social, cultural and resource equity. Let us know if you’ve got something you’d like to work on together.
“Shift Collective is a wonderful group of creative and socially conscious thinkers. It was our good fortune to be mutually inspired by each other.”
Documenting the Now Announces $850k additional investment by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In this third phase of work, themes of sustainability and maintenance will inform all our activities as we focus on strategies to help secure long-term support for the tools, practices, and the community we have developed over the past six years. Since 2016 Documenting the Now has become a trusted project in the web content archiving space and has led the way in advocating for and designing tools to support archiving practices that prioritize care for content creators when working with web content that documents the lives of marginalized and oppressed people. Shift Collective will be the administrative home of Documenting the Now and we are excited to work with our partners, Princeton University Libraries and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), to accomplish these important goals. Bergis Jules (Shift Collective), Dr. Meredith Clark (Northeastern University), Francis Kayiwa (Princeton), Dr. Ed Summers (MITH) will lead project activities.
Audience Research and Analysis for a National Museum Project. We’re excited to have the chance to work with colleagues in the museum field to apply a ground-breaking and diversified research approach that leverages the analysis of large-scale media consumption, ethnographic research, and Community-Centered Design to inform permanent exhibit space. We’ll be joined by an all-star research team comprised of Michelle Magalong of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation, Harmony Labs, and Gretchen Barton of Worthy Strategy Group.
Archiving the Black Web National Forum. We’re proud to be a partner in this national forum funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). After an incredibly successful spring consortium focused on strategies for collecting and preserving Black history and culture online, this effort is continuing to develop a community of practice for Black cultural memory organizations and practitioners interested in web archiving. Shift Collective will continue to support the project as we turn to strategies and design for the future of documenting the contemporary Black experience on the web. Read more on the project website.
Community Engagement on a National Finding Aid Network. In partnership with California Digital Library, Chain Bridge Group, OCLC, and the University of Virginia Library (UVA), and in close partnership with statewide/regional finding aid aggregators and LYRASIS (ArchivesSpace), we continue to support this national IMLS-funded project to increase sharing and discovery of archival materials, especially on the level of community-based archives. Read more here.
Historypin. Earlier this year we announced that we received a two-year, $375k award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue to advance the Historypin platform and take this project into another decade of community-engaged storytelling around local history. Development is now getting underway and you can expect some major announcements and design previews in the first quarter of 2022.
Shift Collective founding member Lynette Johnson served as a consultant on the award-winning documentary film A Place Called Desire, which aired on New Orleans PBS station WYES in November. Filmmaker Leonard Smith III’s documentary film highlights and shares the stories of the New Orleans Upper 9th Ward Desire community. He recreates the historical memory of a community and documents the legacy of pride by those who lived in this post-World War II development. Smith enables the viewer to look beyond unfair stereotypes and see the thriving, loving community of Desire’s public housing community.