iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

📢 Now out in the world: Immaterial and Material Archives in the Caribbean: New Sources and Approaches, co-edited by yours truly together with and Raphael Dohardt and @teresagoeltl.bsky.social Offered open access thanks to funding from @dependencybonn.de . www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Just published! New co-authored article in the edited collection Libraries, Archives and Collective Grief. Its title: "The Past(s) We Access Online: Ethical Challenges of Digital Archives." Editors: @kpalex91.bsky.social & @librarianchef.bsky.social bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/libraries-ar...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

We have published a new collection of advertisements about apothecaries and medicines in 18th c. Bridgetown, Barbados. dloc.com/collections/... More information in the thread. 1/

Screenshot of digital items of the collection Apothecaries and Medicines in colonial Bridgetown.

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

The booklet is part of the "Drawing Self-Emancipation," a art competition and exhibition for young people residing in Barbados. You can learn more about the competition here: heritedge.org/events/drawi... Please share widely with your networks. 2/

Flyer for the competition "Drawing Self-Emancipation"

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

We have created a booklet with advertisements of self-emancipating enslaved people in Barbados in the 18th and 19th centuries. It aims to make these ads more accessible and contains images of c. 20 ads, their transcriptions, and a short introduction contextualizing them. tinyurl.com/26zkuxf7 1/

Cover of a booklet of advertisements for Self-Emancipating enslaved people in Barbados, in 18th and 19th centuries.

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Here is a bug among the pages of the #BarbadosMercury newspaper, May 17, 1814. (The bound volumes are at the Barbados Archives, the newspaper has been digitized and is available online).

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

The University of Virginia Archival AI Protocol governs "how artificial intelligence systems may access + use arch collections." Core rules: - item-level provenance + attribution - institutional control - donor + community responsibilities #ai #archives libraopen.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

🎉 Today I defended my dissertation and passed with summa cum laude. The title is "Dependent Lives In and Beyond Archives: Enslaved People in Sephardic Jewish Households in Early Modern Bridgetown, Barbados (1654-1800)." The abstract is below, and I hope to publish it soon.

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

11/11 "...our understandings of history and ourselves rest on those invisible foundations. This book clarifies those foundations [labor and theory that upholds archives] while offering new possibilities for imagining archival futures in and outside of institutional holdings." www.weherepress.org

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

7/ "This book reveals the profound importance of genealogy that was chronicled by family records, cultural artifacts, and court documents. These materials...demonstrate the culturally and historically specific nature of genealogical interest." global.oup.com/academic/pro...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

3/ Assessing selection biases in large digitized content such as Google Arts academic.oup.com/dsh/article-...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

1/ An analysis of the images of Early English Books Online (EEBO), and the texts of its hand-transcribed subset, EEBO-TCP. academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

📣 Officially submitted--all 450 pages of it! My PhD dissertation titled "Dependent Lives In and Beyond Archives: Enslaved People in Sephardic Jewish Households in Early Modern Bridgetown, Barbados (1654-1800)." Defense is being scheduled for December!

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

10/10 "Models make words, but people make meaning." AI can never be representative because 95% of human wisdom and knowledge has not yet been digitized and is not accessible to LLMs. arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

8/ To resist the coloniality of data, scholars suggest "possible alternative data epistemologies that are respectful of populations, cultural diversity, and environments." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

6/ In fact, "digital colonialism" means that today imperial control is translated into a system of global surveillance capitalism. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

3/ Empires have not disappeared but are now in "the cloud," and data center infrastructures follow the global expansion of super powers. dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

2/ In Africa, Internet infrastructure managed by private Western big tech corporations "not only replicates colonial logic but also follows the same infrastructural path laid during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Thankfully, nature blooms despite humankind.

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

😍 Archival materialities! "How do born-digital records transform our understanding of the materiality of the archive? How do digital techniques provide new insights into the materiality of older archives?" Looking forward to seeing this--what a great ToC. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

First built by the 1660s, destroyed during the catastrophic 1831 hurricane, rebuilt in 1833, sold off after the end of the community in the 1920s, and restored in the 1980s, the historic "Nidhe Israel" (Outcasts of Israel) synagogue in Barbados. As other early synagogues in the Americas, 1/

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Dear publisher of academic books: why?

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

"There is no bloodless data in slavery’s archive. Data is the evidence of terror, and the idea of data as fundamental and objective information...obscures rather than reveals the scene of the crime." Jessica M. Johnson, "Markup Bodies," p. 70 read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/...

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Under each document we access in archives, there is a long, invisible, (un)intentional trail of fragmentation of information. Recognizing these pivots in the path of documents can help us better contextualize why we find what we find.

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Last week, at @dependencybonn.de we held an insightful workshop on manumissions as process, leading not to freedom, but precariousness. Case studies were as geographically dispersed as from S. Africa to the Crimea, and from the Ottoman Empire to Chile, and ranging from antiquity to late 19th c.

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