Assistant Professor Karen Wickett has received a $30,000 Arnold O. Beckman Research Award from the University of Illinois Campus Research Board for her project, "Who is seen? New digital frameworks to address archival silences." The award, which recognizes research of exceptional distinction and promise, will support Wickett's efforts to develop new approaches for representing marginalized voices in digital archives.
Archives play a vital role in preserving essential evidence of our collective past, but they often reflect the perspectives of dominant social groups, creating "archival silences" and leaving gaps around the experiences of those who were marginalized, misrepresented, or excluded. Wickett's proposed research, which evolved from an ongoing collaborative project with doctoral candidate Yingying Han and Ruohua Han (PhD '23), aims to address that gap by analyzing archival representation and silences around the Rock Springs Massacre, an act of collective anti-Asian racial violence that occurred in Wyoming in 1885.
The Rock Springs Massacre began on September 2, 1885, following an altercation in a Union Pacific Railroad coal mine. In its aftermath, white miners attacked Chinese miners and people, and set fire to a large portion of the town. The massacre resulted in at least 28 people killed, with hundreds more robbed and displaced from their homes. This event signifies a key moment in the history of Chinese immigration and anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States.
"Our previous research has shown how the perspectives and experiences of the victims and survivors of the massacre are silenced in the archival record, through past selection of material and the reinforcement of anti-Asian narratives through content and descriptions," said Wickett. "For our new project, we will develop novel methods for the representation of historic massacres and injustices in digital archives, demonstrate how current digital collection management systems hamper the ability of curators and educators to build collections that address the harms to communities that arise from archival silences, and characterize how archival practices for the management of digital collections reinforce and contribute to archival silences."
A poster detailing the team's previous work on the topic, "Tracing the Contours of Archival Silences: A Case Study of Critical Collection Building on the Rock Springs Massacre," received the Best Poster Award at the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting.
Wickett's research areas include the conceptual and logical foundations of information organization systems and artifacts. She is most interested in the analysis of common concepts in information systems, such as documents, datasets, databases, digital objects, metadata records, and collections. Wickett earned her MS and PhD in library and information science from the University of Illinois and her BS in mathematics from The Ohio State University.