While historical cultural materials inform users of the past, they may also contain language that perpetuates long-entrenched patterns of discrimination. In organizing and providing access to such materials, cultural heritage institutions must negotiate historical language and context with the comprehension and perspectives of modern audiences. Excerpted from a larger project exploring representation and access around historical terminology and personal identity, the present work offers insight into how knowl­edge organization systems may be used to help modern users confront and make sense (...) of past, discriminatory language in the archive. Using keywords drawn from the titles of 19th and 20th sideshow performer photographs, this work details the construction of a mapping dictionary that brings together corresponding terminology from several vocabulary sources along with annotations designed to explain historical terms to modern audiences. The development of this dictionary revealed several major types of problematic and potentially discriminatory language including historical euphemisms, misnomers, outdated terms, and sensationalist monikers. The finished dictionary offers opportunities to address these through explanatory annotations and to provide a richer, multi-perspective approach to subject analysis for these and other historical materials. (shrink)

Archives are responsible for presenting historical materials to users while also placing them in context. Historical individuals and their identities pose specific challenges for the archive, including how to negotiate changing cultural perspectives on identity and how to convey and explain contexts to modern audiences. Contemporary subject representation practices in cultural heritage tend to offer a reductivist view of personal identity. Using a collection of visual images of nineteenth and twentieth century sideshow performers, the present work explored a faceted approach (...) to representing personal identity in order to: 1) offer a more holistic view of historical individuals, their identities, and relationships; and 2) help place historical terms and perspectives into context in order to better support user understanding. Utilizing an inductive approach, the researchers developed a framework of seven facets of personal identity. A textual keyword analysis of existing title metadata for images in the collection was implemented in order to identify distinct individuals depicted and any facets associated with them. Finally, collection-based language and closest matches from several controlled vocabularies were used to assign values to the facets for all individuals. The resulting metadata offers a flexible, richer, more holistic analysis of personal identity for these materials, while also exposing some deeper issues concerning identity, performance, and visual imagery. Opportunities exist for further automation and application of this faceted system to other historical collections. (shrink)