Agency, Deaf Agency (N)

"In social science, agency is defined as the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.

By contrast, structure are those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit an agent and their decisions. The influences from structure and agency are debated—it is unclear to what extent a person's actions are constrained by social systems.

One's agency is one's independent capability or ability to act on one's will. This ability is affected by the cognitive belief structure which one has formed through one's experiences, and the perceptions held by the society and the individual, of the structures and circumstances of the environment one is in and the position they are born into.

Disagreement on the extent of one's agency often causes conflict between parties, e.g. parents and children."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(sociology)

"Deaf people have always had a sense of their history as it was being passed down in stories told by generations of students walking in the hallways of their residential schools and by others who congregated in their clubs, ran associations, attended religious services, and played in sporting events.

With these activities, the deaf community exhibited hallmarks of agency — an effort to maintain their social, cultural, and political autonomy amid intense pressure to conform as hearing, speaking people."

BRIAN H. GREENWALD AND JOSEPH J. MURRAY, in: Sign Language Studies, Volume 17, Number 1, Fall 2016

Appropriation (N)

The act of appropriating or taking possession of something, often without permission or consent.

Archives (N)

A place where historical documents or materials are stored.

Also: documents or materials that have been archived.

"There are two main archiving options that all open access journals should consider—“dark” archives and publicly accessible archives.

• • Dark archives: A dark archive is a private archive that cannot be accessed by any users. The purpose of a dark archive is to secure access to content in the event of a publication being lost or discontinued. Dark archives will only release content when there is a “trigger event” such as confirmation that a journal is no longer in publication. Commonly used dark archives include Portico and CLOCKSS.
  • Public archives: As the name suggests, public archives are openly accessible to users. Public archiving options include preprint servers, public archive databases, and institutional repositories. Some well-known public archives include SSRN, arXiv, PMC, and Deep Blue.

(..)

Many archives have specific article formatting and deposit requirements to ensure that they can properly process content. In the past, we’ve written about how indexes must ingest conent in machine-readable formats in order to parse it, and archives are much the same. Most archives require journal publishers to deposit machine-readable, front-matter XML metadata files into them. Front-matter XML files contain the front matter of the article-but do not include the article’s actual body text."

From: https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/why-archiving-essential-for-open-access-journals-how-to-get-started/

Artefact (N)

An object made by a human being, typically an object of cultural or historical interest.

NB: in American English, the word is spelled as artifact (with an i instead of an e).

Assessment Phase (N)

The production cycle ends with an assessment phase where the exhibition development process is evaluated.

The intended outcome is a number of suggested improvements to the production process and ideas for future exhibitions.

A large number of evaluation methodologies exist, including questionnaire surveys, in-depth interviews, structured and semistructured interviews and behavioural observation. Often, several of these evaluation methodologies are combined to triangulate the findings and strengthen the conclusions of the data analysis.

Asset (N)

• • A useful or valuable thing or person.
  • Something valuable belonging to a person or organization that can be used for the payment of debts:
    * A company's assets can consist of cash, investments, specialist knowledge, or copyright material.

    * liquid assets (= money or things that can easily be changed into money).

     

    from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/asset

Audism (N)

Audism is the notion that one is superior based on one's ability to hear or to behave in the manner of one who hears, or that life without hearing is futile and miserable, or an attitude based on pathological thinking which results in a negative stigma toward anyone who does not hear.

 (N)Tom L. Humphries coined the term in his doctoral dissertation in 1975, but it did not start to catch on until Harlan Lane used it in his own writings. Humphries originally applied audism to individual attitudes and practices; whereas Lane broadened the term to include oppression of deaf people.

from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audism

Sorenson: Watch the video to learn more about audism and how to prevent it. (ASL, English subtitles)

Augmented Reality, AR (N)

Augmented Reality or AR is a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image or video on a the real world. 

AR can be used by a museum to add 'virtual' sign language explanations to objects or texts. The visitor sees the explanations on a mobile phone or tablet, superimposed on the real world.

It is for example used by the The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre,  see the video (BSL):