Photo courtesy of Amanda Focke
Event Title: Beyond the Ordinary: A Paranormal Archive
Date/Time: Thursday, September 26, 2024, at 1:00 PM (ET)
Format: Webinar via Zoom
Join us for a virtual conversation with Amanda Focke, Rice University's head of special collections at the Woodson Research Center (WRC). Focke will discuss WRC's mission to preserve and share significant collections related to paranormal experiences. Collection highlights include the papers of Jacques Vallée, a French-born American astronomer and computer scientist whose work inspired Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," as well as an oral history collection of interviews with leaders in the field of ufology and supernatural studies.
This is a free, virtual webinar hosted via Zoom. Advance registration is required. Upon registering for the webinar, you will receive a confirmation via email with a link to join the webinar. This webinar will be video recorded.
ABOUT:
WRC collects and professionally archives materials related to paranormal currents in American history. Ranging from once highly classified government remote viewing files to thousands of firsthand abduction accounts, the Archives of the Impossible Collection at Woodson has become one of the largest and most significant collections of research materials related to these marginalized or tabooed topics in the world. It is also the archival basis necessary for inaugurating a new phase of scholarly attention to this field.
Beginning during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Rice University graduate students in the Department of Religion began conducting oral history interviews with some of the archive’s major donors. These interviews, which were largely carried out via Zoom, focused on the donor’s collections and their personal and professional work related to the paranormal. These oral histories, which include video, audio, and text transcriptions, represent a significant supplementary archive of paranormal currents in American culture. The oral histories can be found in Rice University's Digital Scholarship Archive.
Amanda Focke, CA, DAS
Amanda Focke, CA, DAS, is the Head of Special Collections, Fondren Library, Rice University, and has over 25 years experience in academic archives. She works with donors and researchers on the Archives of the Impossible, among other collecting areas, such as the Rice University Archives, Houston Asian American Archives. Focke has served in the past as president and board member of the Society of American Archivists, and currently serves as the Academy of Certified Archivists' Regent for Certification Maintenance. She has worked with digital archives and digital preservation systems for many years and is now collaborating with others to explore what the functions of AI might bring to scholarship in sensitive archival collections, such as the Archives of the Impossible. In this context, "impossible" means what people refer to as paranormal - encounters with non-human intelligences or UFOs, psychic espionage, or physical mediumship.
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