A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
For those who find themselves in a battle for public records, Access with Attitude: An Advocate’s Guide to Freedom of Information in Ohio is an indispensable weapon. First Amendment lawyer David Marburger and investigative journalist Karl Idsvoog have written a simply worded, practical guide on how to take full advantage of Ohio’s so-called Sunshine Laws.
Journalists, law firms, labor unions, private investigators, genealogists, realty companies, banks, insurers—anyone who regularly needs access to publicly held information—will find this comprehensive and contentious guide to be invaluable. Marburger, who drafted many of the provisions that Ohio adopted in its open records law, and coauthor Idsvoog have been fighting for broader access to public records their entire careers. They offer field-tested tips on how to avoid “no,” and advise readers on legal strategies if their requests for information go unmet. Step by step, they show how to avoid delays and make the law work.
Whether you’re a citizen, a nonprofit organization, a journalist, or an attorney going after public records, Access with Attitude is an essential resource.
For over sixty million Americans, possessing a criminal record overshadows everything else about their public identity. A rap sheet, or even a court appearance or background report that reveals a run-in with the law, can have fateful consequences for a person’s interactions with just about everyone else. The Eternal Criminal Record makes transparent a pervasive system of police databases and identity screening that has become a routine feature of American life.
The United States is unique in making criminal information easy to obtain by employers, landlords, neighbors, even cyberstalkers. Its nationally integrated rap-sheet system is second to none as an effective law enforcement tool, but it has also facilitated the transfer of ever more sensitive information into the public domain. While there are good reasons for a person’s criminal past to be public knowledge, records of arrests that fail to result in convictions are of questionable benefit. Simply by placing someone under arrest, a police officer has the power to tag a person with a legal history that effectively incriminates him or her for life.
In James Jacobs’s view, law-abiding citizens have a right to know when individuals in their community or workplace represent a potential threat. But convicted persons have rights, too. Jacobs closely examines the problems created by erroneous record keeping, critiques the way the records of individuals who go years without a new conviction are expunged, and proposes strategies for eliminating discrimination based on criminal history, such as certifying the records of those who have demonstrated their rehabilitation.
Roger Douglas compares responses to terrorism by five liberal democracies—the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—over the past 15 years. He examines each nation’s development and implementation of counterterrorism law, specifically in the areas of information-gathering, the definition of terrorist offenses, due process for the accused, detention, and torture and other forms of coercive questioning.
Douglas finds that terrorist attacks elicit pressures for quick responses, often allowing national governments to accrue additional powers. But emergencies are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for such laws, which may persist even after fears have eased. He argues that responses are influenced by both institutional interests and prior beliefs, and complicated when the exigencies of office and beliefs point in different directions. He also argues that citizens are wary of government’s impingement on civil liberties and that courts exercise their capacity to restrain the legislative and executive branches. Douglas concludes that the worst antiterror excesses have taken place outside of the law rather than within, and that the legacy of 9/11 includes both laws that expand government powers and judicial decisions that limit those very powers.
Cryptology, the mathematical and technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic study of natural or human languages, are typically understood as separate domains of activity. But Brian Lennon contends that these two domains, both concerned with authentication of text, should be viewed as contiguous. He argues that computing’s humanistic applications are as historically important as its mathematical and technical ones. What is more, these humanistic uses, no less than cryptological ones, are marked and constrained by the priorities of security and military institutions devoted to fighting wars and decoding intelligence.
Lennon’s history encompasses the first documented techniques for the statistical analysis of text, early experiments in mechanized literary analysis, electromechanical and electronic code-breaking and machine translation, early literary data processing, the computational philology of late twentieth-century humanities computing, and early twenty-first-century digital humanities. Throughout, Passwords makes clear the continuity between cryptology and philology, showing how the same practices flourish in literary study and in conditions of war.
Lennon emphasizes the convergence of cryptology and philology in the modern digital password. Like philologists, hackers use computational methods to break open the secrets coded in text. One of their preferred tools is the dictionary, that preeminent product of the philologist’s scholarly labor, which supplies the raw material for computational processing of natural language. Thus does the historic overlap of cryptology and philology persist in an artifact of computing—passwords—that many of us use every day.
The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive?
Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author’s efforts, Restricted Data traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power.
What would it mean to unsettle the archives? How can we better see the wounded and wounding places and histories that produce absence and silence in the name of progress and knowledge? Unsettling Archival Research sets out to answer these urgent questions and more, with essays that chart a more just path for archival work.
Unsettling Archival Research is one of the first publications in rhetoric and writing studies dedicated to scholarship that unsettles disciplinary knowledge of archival research by drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, and community perspectives. Written by established and emerging scholars, essays critique not only the practices, ideologies, and conventions of archiving, but also offer new tactics for engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on efforts to unsettle and counteract racist, colonial histories, confront the potentials and pitfalls of common archival methodologies, and chart a path for the future of archival research otherwise. Unsettling Archival Research intervenes in a critical issue: whether the discipline’s assumptions about the archives serve or fail the communities they aim to represent and what can be done to center missing voices and perspectives. The aim is to explore the ethos and praxis of bearing witness in unsettling ways, carried out as a project of queering and/or decolonizing the archives.
Unsettling Archival Research takes seriously the rhetorical force of place and wrestles honestly with histories that still haunt our nation, including the legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and systemic racism.
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