ABSTRACT
In ‘Rethinking research library collections’, theorist-practitioner Dan Hazen discusses the ‘exuberantly expressive’ new modes of both authorship and authority he saw emerging in the digital age. ‘Libraries,’ Hazen wrote, ‘are on uncertain ground as they engage with the fractious, seductive, alien, and essential universe’. Afrofuturism, as an artistic and aesthetic practice, dates to the mid-20th century, with much deeper roots in 19th-century Black speculative fiction, including the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Delaney. Inherent in Aftrofuturism is an orientation towards past culture as future-oriented technology: codes to crack, tools to use, and collections to transform. T. Schofield and his co-authors outline attempts to bring open, broadly participatory, and temporally aware design and visualisation to archival collections—not as something enabled by or resulting from expert metadata creation, but rather happening synchronously with processing by archivists and cataloguers, and in community with end users.
