Social Software, or Why Would I Want to Consult an Encyclopedia that Would Have Me as a Contributor?
Speakers
In the last four years, broad, collaborative authoring (for example, Wikipedia), collection building (for example, September 11 Digital Archive and Hurricane Digital Memory Bank) and organization of information (for example, folksonomies) have emerged as forms of social computing. Advocates champion the democratic nature of the collaboration. Critics decry the lack of provenance and thus trustworthiness of the information gathered in this way. Clearly, though, the technology and techniques can support both democratic collaboration and the collaboration of experts. Such technology and techniques offer an opportunity to advance the application of computing to teaching and research beyond the margins.
Speaker Bios
Pitti is the Director of the Social Networks and Archival Context Cooperative (SNAC), University of Virginia Library; and chair of the International Council on Archives Expert Group on Archival Description (ICA EGAD). From 1997 until 2017, Pitt served as the Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). During his time in IATH, Pitti participated in the design and implementation of many of the faculty fellows' projects, as well as being the principal architect of two international archival description standards, Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). Based on EAC-CPF, Pitti launched SNAC in 2010 as an R&D project. In 2015 SNAC became a cooperative program, currently with 29 member repositories. SNAC has received funding from NEH (2010-2012), IMLS (2011-2013), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2012-2019). As chair of ICA EGAD, Pitti is leading the development of the Records in Contexts (RiC) standard that aspires to be the foundation of next-generation archival description and access. Prior to coming to UVa in 1997, Pitti served as the Librarian for Advanced Technology Projects at the University of California, Berkeley.
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