"Abortion Access Has Everything to Do with Access to Information": A Digital Collection of Abortion Memories
Creators: name: Urban, April
Publisher: name: unknown
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Indiana
subject: Archival materials--Digitization
subject: Digital humanities
subject: Archives
subject: Abortion
subject: Reproductive rights

description: In recent years, digital humanists have promoted digital collection-building tools as a powerful means of documenting marginalized voices and sharing their histories with a wide audience. In June 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States issued the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wadedecision that ensured the right to abortion at the federal level; this resulted in the establishment of laws banning or restricting abortion in many states, including Indiana. In fall 2022, I created a digital collection showcasing the history of abortion access in Bloomington, Indiana and its surrounding areas. I digitized materials, such as mid twentieth-century oral history records and feminist pamphlets, from the Indiana University Archives. To organize and exhibit these materials, I used the open-source platform CollectionBuilder. 

This poster presentation shares the practice and theory behind this digital collection of abortion memories in southern Indiana. The poster outlines the workflows of digitization, metadata, and website organization. It highlights the specific affordances of CollectionBuilder, including its modularity and streamlined approach to metadata. Theoretically, this poster considers how the practice of building a digital collection of archival materials converges with issues of knowledge, power, and the relation between past, present, and future. A collection focused on abortion access and motivated by the Dobbs decision highlights these issues in several ways. First, it reveals how sharing information can, on the one hand, facilitate empowerment and agency, and on the other hand, create risk for the marginalized. Second, the Dobbs decision reorients our perspective on documents representing pre-Roe abortion advocacy; this invites consideration of how digitized archival materials do not just preserve the past, but also resituate these documents within the present of digital space.
description: In recent years, digital humanists have promoted digital collection-building tools as a powerful means of documenting marginalized voices and sharing their histories with a wide audience. In June 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States issued the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wadedecision that ensured the right to abortion at the federal level; this resulted in the establishment of laws banning or restricting abortion in many states, including Indiana. In fall 2022, I created a digital collection showcasing the history of abortion access in Bloomington, Indiana and its surrounding areas. I digitized materials, such as mid twentieth-century oral history records and feminist pamphlets, from the Indiana University Archives. To organize and exhibit these materials, I used the open-source platform CollectionBuilder. This poster presentation shares the practice and theory behind this digital collection of abortion memories in southern Indiana. The poster outlines the workflows of digitization, metadata, and website organization. It highlights the specific affordances of CollectionBuilder, including its modularity and streamlined approach to metadata. Theoretically, this poster considers how the practice of building a digital collection of archival materials converges with issues of knowledge, power, and the relation between past, present, and future. A collection focused on abortion access and motivated by the Dobbs decision highlights these issues in several ways. First, it reveals how sharing information can, on the one hand, facilitate empowerment and agency, and on the other hand, create risk for the marginalized. Second, the Dobbs decision reorients our perspective on documents representing pre-Roe abortion advocacy; this invites consideration of how digitized archival materials do not just preserve the past, but also resituate these documents within the present of digital space.