Apparitional Representations: Disability History, Reparative Descriptions, and Ethical Failings in a Special Research Collection

Abstract

In this presentation, I discuss the process and outcomes of a reparative description project I undertook for my master’s thesis at the University of Oklahoma. My thesis focused on remediating disability-related descriptions in the Western History Collections. I examined a variety of theoretical models and attempted to apply them as I remediated descriptions. My presentation covers the challenges of trying to remediate descriptions in an archive not dedicated to disability history and provides a methodology for doing remediations that might help archivists struggling with incomplete information about items in a collection.