Joel Zika, Ph.D., is an academic and experience designer from Melbourne Australia. For the last 15 years, he has studied, archived and evangelized the importance of the entertainment phenomenon known as the dark ride. The term refers to indoor amusement rides, such as ghost trains, haunted mansions and old mills which have been a key feature of fairgrounds and theme parks for more than a century.
 
Sadly, of the thousands of spooky rides which used to adorn amusement parks across the USA and the world, almost none are left. Little has been done to archive the impact of the dark ride on visual culture despite the popularity of other haunted media and horror movies.
 
Since 2015, Dr. Zika has used virtual reality to archive the remaining examples of the dark ride media format. This unique approach has led to rich media being collected from rides dating back to 1932, experiences which have never been shared beyond their darkened corridors.
 
Dr. Zika will discuss the importance of ride culture in society and the impact that archiving entertainment experiences can have on other media practitioners.

Professor Aviva Avnisan (she/they) will speak about "Among Relatives: Indigenous Voices in the Cuyahoga Valley," an immersive installation that asks what we can learn from the rich and varied perspectives of Northeast Ohio’s Indigenous people as we grapple with the dark legacies of settler-colonialism, white supremacy and the human-caused climate catastrophe. The work transports viewers into a ghostly rendering of pre-contact Indigenous earthworks located within the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The rendering, derived from high-resolution 3D lidar scans, is complemented by an atmospheric soundscape algorithmically influenced by current weather conditions in the park. The soundscape includes field recordings created in the park as part of a scientific study, bird calls of species that citizen scientists have identified in the park, and, most importantly, the voices of Indigenous folks and scientists reflecting on their relationship to the diverse human and non-human communities of Northeast Ohio.

Asantewa Sunni-Ali
Title: Photo Ethnography and Talking Revolution in These Streets
 
This presentation explores select photographs and street interview videos collected for research and documentary film series, "Seedz of Revolution." Seedz examines, documents and celebrates the lived experiences and revolutionary practices of African descendants working in pursuit of individual and collective liberation.

L.P. Coladangelo
Learn about the data harmonization, enrichment, and publication processes for Digital Scriptorium 2.0 (DS 2.0), a project to redevelop the technical platform of a national union catalog representing a range of global manuscript cultures in U.S. collections. The overview will detail the data management workflow used for aggregating and transforming metadata records for manuscripts to structure and publish them as Linked Open Data (LOD). Results to be discussed include semantic enrichment strategies, the creation of metadata repositories and local authorities, and Wiki-base records which enable SPARQL querying of manuscript metadata values. The presentation will conclude with recommendations for how heterogeneous, cross-institutional published LOD can be leveraged by the community of scholars, librarians, curators, and citizen scholars who participate in Digital Scriptorium to enhance and build upon existing knowledge about their collections.