Hello I am Martina Svyantek and I'm sharing a piece of my dissertation in my
flash talk, "Going beyond 0 search results".
Some background on my work: I have been collecting and analyzing documents related
to accessibility and Disability from multiple universities.
Due to time, I will only be discussing Virginia Tech documents.
I searched during the 25 years after the passage of the Americans with
Disabilities Act (from 1990 to 2015) in 5 year intervals.
I use July 1st to June 30th to represent an academic year.
At each of these 6 time frames, I was searching for 13 different documents- some
were specifically related to disability policies, but I also searched for
general academic and employment manuals, as well as materials related to campus
experiences, such as parking, to determine if missing documents were more likely
to be missing due to their content or general preservation issues.
As a part of this process, I broaden the types of research that fit under
disability studies methodology, developed by Price and Kerschbaum in 2016.
My own work criticizes higher education's use of "open" in open access,
which typically focuses on direct costs.
I'm pushing for "open" to go beyond affordability by focusing on documents
created at public institutions; for the people, if not by them.
I also believe such documents should, by nature, be Universally Designed, starting
with text that can be searched via optical character recognition and read aloud.
My process also highlights the researcher themselves; research being conducted at
their own pace, using their own tools, and in their own spaces.
Not requiring academic affiliations,
though still requiring internet access...which may have been
recognized as a more precarious resource than believed prior to the current crisis.
This frame promotes the idea of "Nothing about us, without us," a driving force
as an overwhelming majority of the research regarding Disability and
accessibility is undertaken by non-Disabled researchers.
My search protocol used document collection from public,
land-grant institutions as my starting point,
proposing a counter-surveillance of higher education.
Beginning with Virginia Tech, I searched for the 78 documents.
The initial search results via institutional sources yielded few
downloadable documents, altering my search protocol and
turning into an interesting dive through the Internet Archive.
This is the 1st of 2 results slides.
From the digital wall that shades nearly the 1st half of the results,
it is apparent that document preservation has not been a deliberate process.
Out of 78 potential data points, 10 were scattered in multiple pieces, and
27 were in a cohesive single source.
In terms of "open" research,
is much easier to state "I found this document" when it was a single source.
I further differentiate
those cohesive elements between university sources and WayBack sources.
On screen, the matrix uses double-encoding (letters and
patterns)- no downloaded document for
a time point is indicated as solid black, polka dots for multiple sources,
vertical lines for university sources, and no pattern for WayBack sources.
Out of all 27 single source materials, only 9 were actually
found using university resources; none of these were Disability or
accessibility-specific materials.
This also leads to the conclusion that materials (7 out of 9) that were
directly related to academic or
employment purposes were more likely to be preserved intentionally.
For those familiar with wading through the accommodations process, it should not be
a shock that there was no single source of information related to accessibility.
You have to keep digging, keep peeling back layers to figure out what policies
and procedures actually govern how you can request access.
Key takeaways for this work: we could and should be pushing for
archival preservation of documents, such as those I'm researching.
University libraries already have systems in place-
let's learn to use them properly.
When earlier documents were more likely to be developed for print publication,
current documents are "born digital," though as my matrices imply,
their existence fizzles without intentional steps towards preservation.
My work implies that anything that we do has the opportunity to fizzle out,
to fade if we don't work to consider its future.
If we don't deliberately ensure that there are no documents made about us,
without us, and our collective potential in mind.
Thank you very much for following along, and
I look forward to any follow-up questions.