Upcoming: 

No talks currently scheduled for the remainder of 2022 – but if something pops up, I’ll put it here!

Recent:

October 2022 saw me return to a conference (and community) I’ve been absent from for several years: The LEVA (Law Enforcement Video Association) Training Symposium! I got to reconnect in San Diego, CA with lots of cherished colleagues from the SWGDE Video Committee, which was terrific — and I met new folks who are working in forensic video examination everywhere from Oslo to Australia. This was my first opportunity to staff the booth in my new role as Community Director for Medex Forensics, and it was a great time to get to know clients who are using our tools in different and interesting ways. I also gave a talk on the connections between the kinds of digital preservation being done in GLAM institutions and law enforcement agencies, and what these seemingly different communities of practice have in common when it comes to the challenges of managing big data files for the long term. Slides for that talk are here (PDF).

I’m presenting at the new and exciting Archival Kismet symposium, about the uncanny nature of objects in (and out of) the police property room! Slides for my talk, “This Is (Not) A Paper Bag,” are here (PDF).

AMIA 2020 included a crazy good lineup of morning keynotes, and I moderated the last of them on Friday, 11/20/20–a presentation by, and conversation with, the phenomenal artist, filmmaker, and producer Zackary Drucker. Can’t wait! Zackary’s latest project, which draws on a ton of primary sources and archival footage, is The Lady and the Dale, streaming on HBO now.

It’s all about webinars these days! In early November, I helped kick off the ARSC Continuing Education series with a session on precarity and navigating the archival job market. A PDF of my slides is here; I’ll post a link to the recorded version of the session here as well, as soon as it becomes available.

On June 10, I shared thoughts and strategies for professional development with the inaugural cohort of AMIA Diversity & Inclusion Fellows. For this session, I developed a one-page Professional Profile Assessment (PDF) that anyone can use to reflect on their level of visibility, involvement, and the kinds of social capital they’re creating through activities alongside their daily work and study.

On April 23, I was delighted to join my friend and colleague Ed Benoit and a group of amazing students from the LSU iSchool in a virtual coffee talk. I shared some tips on job-hunting during the COVID-19 crisis, and we shared perspectives on how we’re all getting through this thing the best we can. A PDF of the slides I shared is available here.

Not-so-recent:

• We have an exciting lineup of guests coming for our weekly IS Tea Breaks at UCLA in the spring quarter! I’ll be trying delicious new recipes and looking forward to hearing the fascinating professional life stories of colleagues working in a range of information professions. These events are open to all, no RSVP required, so if you’re curious about our department or the work of anyone who’s visiting, please join us!
• Since turnabout is fair play, I’m doing a fair bit of guesting myself in the coming months. I’ll be speaking to undergrads in our Digital Cultures & Societies course about privacy and surveillance; to UCLA MLIS students on the Media Archives track about preserving born-digital content; and to UNC SILS students in Electronic Records Management about bodycam footage and other evidentiary media.
• March will find me heading back east not once, but twice — first for a workshop on teaching and learning with PBCore, hosted by WGBH in Boston, and then to D.C. for the 2019 iConference, during which I’ll be co-chairing an interactive session on complexity and professional ethics in work with surveillance technologies and recordkeeping with my “On the Record, All the Time” project partner Jean-François Blanchette.
• My cherished pal, and possible long-lost twin Liz Coffey (FKA Film Conservator at the Harvard Film Archive) will join me in a two-fisted pie fight keynote address at the 4th semi-annual Bastard Film Encounter in Baltimore, MD, in April. The rest of the #BFE4 program will be finalized and posted shortly, but trust me when I say we’ve got some humdingers in there, and this event will be everything you’ve come to expect from Bastards (and more)…

Recent:

• Fall 2018 was the Season of the Keynote for me, which was both flattering and a bit overwhelming. In October, I helped kick off DigiPres 2018, which was themed around In/Visible Work, and rounded out an exciting week of DLF Forum programming related to digital work in libraries, archives, and information organizations. In November, I addressed members of the Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists at their annual meeting, which focused on audiovisual archives (a topic close to my heart, obvs), and which led into the 2nd annual Archives as Muse project presented by ArtHyve. The 2018 theme as “Orphan Films” and participating artists contributed a visually rich and emotionally moving array of original works based on and inspired by orphan material. And then I did a last-minute, pinch-hit welcome plenary for AMIA 2018, which you can read a slightly modified version of here. Whew!
•  AMIA came back to Portland for its annual meeting in November 2018, and I once again chaired a fun and fascinating session on far-out film formats with my colleagues Dino Everett, Marsha Gordon, and Stefanie Zingl (in absentia). We talked about some exceptionally rare materials, all of which were projected on original vintage devices! Those in attendance posted lots of great pics and video with the hashtag #amia18; our session tag was, once again, #FFFF–you can scroll back through the timeline to see freaky films from AMIAs past, as well.
• In August 2018, I once again led a week-long workshop on the history, identification, and preservation of AV materials for the California Rare Books School. CalRBS always brings together expert instructors and highly engaged working professionals who are keen to continue their education and deepen their knowledge on a range of topics. It’s a real treat to teach in this program: the M-F/9-5 format gives us plenty of space to supplement theoretical instruction with hands-on exercises and site visits, so students get a lot out of it, too.
• Eliot Wilczek’s SAA Research Forum session last year on “wicked problems” (societal challenges that are complex, amorphous, politically charged, and urgent), led to him chairing a panel session on archival engagement with wicked problems  for this year’s SAA conference in D.C. I presented on the challenges of evidentiary media, along with my esteemed colleagues Eira Tansey, who discussed appraisal in the anthropocene era, and Anne Gilliland, who spoke on the subject of borders, records, and refugees.
• Also at SAA: As part of what promises to be a (possibly) demented and (definitely) inspired pop-up session on the pros and cons of digitization as a preservation strategy, I attempted a five-minute whiz-bang multimedia demonstration of how digitization falls short when it comes to motion picture film, complete with REAL film and WORKING projector! In the event, the projector bulb blew out AND the digital surrogate was inaccessible as well…which ended up kind of helping me to make a further point about the fallibility of all media. Slides are here.
• In late July 2018, I presented a webinar for AAPB Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellows on July. The main focus was on how to get the most out of attending SAA’s Archives2018, as several of the Fellows were attending this as their first-ever conference, but the content should be helpful to anyone who’s looking to optimize their conference-going experience at SAA or elsewhere. Slides from the webinar can be viewed here (PDF).  Webinar participants and PBPF Fellows can view the session recording and access related resources here (password required).
• May 2018: Attended the 2018 EYE Film International Conference (conference theme: “Activating the Archive: Audiovisual Collections and Civic Engagement, Political Dissent, and Societal Change”) and participated in the “Pedagogy Against the Grain” roundtable discussion with Jon Naveh (UCLA MLIS 2018) and educators from media archiving and preservation degree programs based in the U.S., Canada, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.
• April 2018: Attended the 11th Orphan Film Symposium at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
• In November 2017, I visited New Orleans to gather with my colleagues in the media archiving and preservation community at AMIA‘s annual meeting. I helped offer a warm welcome along with AMIA leadership and various committee and interest group representatives at the pre-reception mixer on Wednesday, 11/29, got a second viewing of the great new documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, and moderated the Q&A afterward with its distinguished director, Bill Morrison. Along with my colleagues Ed Benoit, Janet Ceja, and Karen Gracy, I also presented an update of our project on core competencies for A/V archiving in the heritage sector. Slides from my talk and livestream recording of the full session are available online, and I always welcome feedback.
• Home Movie Day 2017 saw me helping out as emcee for the two Los Angeles-area events–the first of which was held on Saturday, October 7 at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater, and the second of which was part of the special programming for the annual LA Archives Bazaar at USC’s Doheny Library. At the latter, I was pleased to share the Super8 footage that incoming students shot during our Media Arts Boot Camp at the start of the school year. For a bunch of first-time filmmakers, they did an absolutely amazing job!
• On Sunday, June 25, I attended the second annual Media Archaeology Workshop sponsored by the UCLA AMIA Student Chapter, the fantastic LA Archivists Collective, the Hammer Museum, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I led a segment that I called a “gross anatomy clinic” for videotape media — helping people get into the guts of VHS tapes, so they can understand why we take the steps we do to preserve them, and discussing how this medium works in comparison to film and other video formats.
• The fabulous Amelia Abreu, principal of Abreu Consulting and founder of Portland’s UX Night School, and I are collaborating on an online workshop on “Approaching your job search as a UX project”–look for that in the UXNS Online offerings soon!
• Along with Det. Sgt. Brandon Epstein of the New Brunswick (NJ) Police Department, I presented a workshop at this year’s IACP Technology Conference on ensuring secure, long-term storage and preservation for digital media evidence (DME). We covered the various challenges to law enforcement agencies in managing DME, identified skills required for optimal DME management, and enumerated benefits of dedicated DME staffing. Click here to access slides from our presentation (PDF).
• Each odd-numbered year brings us another Bastard Film Encounter. This year, I was part of the program committee, and helped put together a great selection of screenings to stimulate discussion and debate about the challenges posed to archives and archivists by audiovisual materials that are difficult, in all sorts of ways. Our Nixon filmmaker and legal scholar Brian Frye keynoted, along with New York-based bon vivant/artist/provacateur Bradley Eros. We also reprised the live-band karaoke experience from Bastards 2 with the help of NCSU librarian Jason Evans Groth and some more great local talent. Bastards 4 will be scheduled for spring of 2019 at a venue to be determined: If you’re interested in hosting or attending the next Bastards, please sign up for updates via the home page, http://bastardfilmencounter.com/, or email the gang directly: info (at) bastardfilmencounter (dot) com.
• The Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association offered a warm welcome and an additional venue to share findings from our National Forum meeting at their 2016 annual training conference in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Pittsburgh, PA hosted the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ annual meeting November 9-12, 2016. I was there for a panel session called “Managing Bodycam Video: Challenges, Needs, and New Approaches,” where I shared preliminary results from our August National Forum meeting at UCLA. Joining me on that panel was Cmdr. Ed Trapp of the Pittsburgh Police Bureau, who discussed their experiences with launching a new body-worn camera program in 2016. I also chaired the latest iteration of the always-popular “freaky film formats” panels (this year’s theme: Mad Scientists!) with my colleagues Marsha Gordon, Dino Everett, and Susan Etheridge.
• On October 21, an outstanding group of people convened for a panel, “On Janus and Justice: Archives, Access, and Ethical Use of Video Evidence,” that media scholar Amy Herzog and I put together, which was hosted by the Mediating the Archive Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and the CUNY Graduate Center for the Humanities.
• On September 30, I discussed how Home Movie Day organizers have used a deceptively simple game–Home Movie Bingo–to engage audiences more deeply in the visual and historical content of minimally identified amateur films, as part of the third annual Extending Play conference at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information.
• For the recent Long Beach Indie International Film, Media and Music Conference, I presented a paper–“Between High School and Hollywood: Diversity, Industry, and the Student Academy Awards“–as part of the conference’s focused track on Gender, Race and the Entertainment Industry. The dataset I compiled on Student Academy Award winners is now posted on Google Docs; click the links for access to the raw data or selected data breakdowns, or email me for a draft copy of the paper, which provides further details on the project.
• The Daily Bruin highlighted our new seminar on surveillance, bodycams, and records management, which I’m co-teaching this fall with my UCLA colleague and “On the Record, All the Time” collaborator Jean-François Blanchette.
• Film scholar and critic Peter Labuza kindly invited me to be a guest on his podcast, The Cinephiliacs, in early August. We discussed my career trajectory as a media archivist, the relationship between historic home movies and the amateur videos of the present day, and the IMLS-funded “On the Record, All The Time” national forum on bodycams and data management I co-organized with Jean-François Blanchette.
• My History, Identification, and Preservation of Motion Picture Materials course for the California Rare Books School ran from August 1-5, 2016, and included a great crop of students from diverse backgrounds and interest areas. Next year’s CalRBS course offerings and application information will be posted on their site in the coming months.
• I was part of the AAPB National Digital Stewardship Residency program’s Immersion Week in Boston in late July, leading a half-day session on professional development and networking. Video of my session is available via the Forum Network site, along with the other informative presentations from that week. WGBH also summarized the professional development session with a feature post on their news blog: Top 10 Pro Tips for Networking.
• From June 6-10, I attended the summer meeting of the Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidence, which was generously hosted by CU Denver’s National Center for Media Forensics.
• My paper “Extracting the Evidentiary: Ethical archival practice in the bodycam era” was part of Mediating the Archive: A Conference on Moving Images and Social Histories at the CUNY Graduate Center on 4/15/16. Audio recording of the presentations should be available on the site soon.
• Delano Massey’s recent coverage for WKYT-TV of the Lexington (KY) Police Department’s body-worn camera program included a few comments from me on the challenges of video technology, long-term storage and access for bodycam recordings.