The Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University is pleased to announce an IMLS-funded national forum on "Design for Diversity": a public conversation that focuses on constructing a collaborative pedagogical toolkit to encourage inclusive and ethical practices in information sciences and system design.
This IMLS grant will support a series of public events and working meetings on the ways in which information systems embody and reinforce cultural norms, and ask how we can design systems that account for diverse cultural materials and ways of knowing. The end results will be a teaching and learning toolkit for cultural heritage practitioners in systems design which will better inform both future work and the education and professional development of new practitioners.
We envision this toolkit combating problems of colonizing, appropriating, silencing, and marginalizing; we are counting on your participation and involvement. It is essential to the success of this project that we partner with participants with a broad range of experience and backgrounds, to help us think through these complex questions of design and pedagogy from many different perspectives.
We are especially interested in partners who are practicing cultural heritage systems design, whether in a formal organization or not: we seek activists, community organizers, and other grassroots collectors of history as well as librarians, archivists, scholars, and curators. We seek to involve the many different kinds of people undertaking information systems design, from activities like cataloging, building metadata schema, and creating automated re-use policies to building databases, designing web interfaces, and more.