Browse
This chapter explores how York’s city archives can be used to open up different kinds of democratic relationships. It focuses on archival collections relating to Hungate, an area of York that was designated a ‘slum’ and demolished by the council during the 1930s. The chapter looks at health inspection records, explores maps and the 1911 census, and reads angry letters from people whose lives were being affected by local government decisions. Seeing the breakdown in relationships between local people and local government — and the way in which this is reflected in cynicism towards the council today — has led to the development of a conceptual intervention this chapter dubs the ‘Utopian Council’. The Utopian Council seeks to imagine and stage a more positive and reciprocal relationship between the council and local people.
This chapter considers the Pebble Mill project. The project is a multi-media online resource, with social media interaction on Facebook, where members of an online community build an ‘idiosyncratic archive’ of memories and artefacts, including photographs, videos, audio, and written text, creating a democratic history of BBC Pebble Mill, which complements the BBC’s institutional archive. Some of the tensions and limitations of community archive projects are explored, including moderation, ethics, and legal matters, namely defamation and copyright. One of the major challenges for community archives regards the continuing commitment of ‘citizen curators’, the facilitators of online community projects, whose labour includes devising policies, moderating, and encouraging engagement. Issues of longevity and sustainability are considered, along with the vulnerability of online collections in a precarious virtual world, where platforms are subject to evolution, or removal — threatening the survival of small projects.
Community archives are often viewed as repositories of knowledge and experience that are nevertheless somehow remote from the taxpayers who often fund them. However, the idea of an archive has more recently been popularized by digital resources that allow access to established archives and also permit users to create archives of their own. This book examines the changing relationship between citizens and their notions of archives. The growing number of archives, and the evolving practices associated with collecting and curating, mean that we are now in the process of remaking the very idea of the archive. Communities have been at the heart of this exciting work and their experiences are both central to our understanding of this new terrain and in challenging the traditional histories behind the control of knowledge and power. Using a wide range of case studies, this edited collection shows how community engagement and co-creation is challenging and extending the notion of the archive.
This innovative book examines the changing relationship between communities, citizens and the notion of the archive.
Archives have traditionally been understood as repositories of knowledge and experience, remote from the ordinary people who fund and populate them, however digital resources have led to a growing plurality of archives and the practices associated with collecting and curating. This book uses a broad range of case studies which place communities at the heart of this exciting development, to illustrate how their experiences are central to our understanding of this new terrain which challenges traditional histories and the control of knowledge and power.
This chapter describes the community archives and corresponding developments over the course of the 20th century. It tracks the rise of an ‘archival multiverse’, which has transformed the way in which collective memories are curated. The growth of the archival multiverse reflects many intellectual, cultural, technological, social, and political currents. The most significant of these developments is the growth of community archives and the active participation of ordinary citizens in their formation. As community archives have become more widespread and influential, the professional archive community has started to radically rethink many of its own assumptions about how archives are created, preserved, and made available. This chapter briefly considers this phenomenon, asking what the notion of ‘community’ entails within this context and how archives have ‘turned’ in its direction. Finally, the chapter looks at how digital tools have helped to shape the growth of community archives.
This chapter discusses the issues surrounding the use of digital technologies by community archives. Community groups often find that the technical, financial, and logistical demands of maintaining digital resources are considerable. This tempts them to use commercial platforms whose longevity is not assured and which raise issues of privacy and manipulation. As everyone is increasingly working in a digital environment, the quality of that environment affects day-to-day life almost as profoundly as the physical environment. The health of the digital ecosystem on which we all depend affects the ability of community archives to achieve their aims of creating shared spaces of self-representation, collaboration, and memory. Every day seems to bring further revelations of the manipulation of social media, security breaches, personal abuse, and digital disinformation. These anxieties can make it seem that the vision of a digital space promoting community self-representation and collaboration is under threat.
This chapter explores the potential and significance of digital broadcast archives (DBAs) and associated tools for supporting civic engagement with complex topics. It draws on a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, Earth in Vision, which worked with a sample of 50 hours of environment-themed broadcasts drawn from over five decades of BBC television and radio archives. The project critically examines the potential of such broadcast archive content as a resource for the making and debating of environmental histories in the context of imagining and planning for environmental futures. It builds on the principles of co-production and social learning and aims to support more plural and dynamic accounts of environmental change. The overarching question the project addresses is how digital broadcast archives can inform environmental history and support public understanding of, and learning about, environmental change issues.
This chapter examines the transition and alignments of communities through a consideration built around the changing role of the community in the photographic archive and the shift from subjecthood to agency. It also examines the use of the photographic archive as a means of exploring the new potentialities of the community archive. The chapter reflects on the sense of the community as pictured within the archive and the increasing potential of self-archiving and curation afforded by new digital technologies. It draws on recent projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Connected Communities and Digital Transformations schemes. A model in which the disruptive can be privileged and the counterfactual become an essential component of the archivist’s armoury is offered.
Community archives are often viewed as repositories of knowledge and experience that are nevertheless somehow remote from the taxpayers who often fund them. However, the idea of an archive has more recently been popularized by digital resources that allow access to established archives and also permit users to create archives of their own. This book examines the changing relationship between citizens and their notions of archives. The growing number of archives, and the evolving practices associated with collecting and curating, mean that we are now in the process of remaking the very idea of the archive. Communities have been at the heart of this exciting work and their experiences are both central to our understanding of this new terrain and in challenging the traditional histories behind the control of knowledge and power. Using a wide range of case studies, this edited collection shows how community engagement and co-creation is challenging and extending the notion of the archive.
This chapter first explores the motivations behind the creation of class as self-authorised sites of popular music heritage — those created and curated by citizen and activist archivists that are devoted to the archiving, preservation, and sharing of popular music heritage. It then turns to the use of social media platforms and the communities of interest that form online and who take a ‘Doing-It-Together’ approach to harvesting vast amounts of popular music materials and memories. Such platforms offer the opportunity or the celebration and sharing of obscure or niche music cultures. However, they also pose issues for their creators and those who may have an interest in participating or studying them. The loss of materials in the rapid ‘churn’; the lack of search, navigation, and retrieval functionality; the potential of technologies becoming redundant; and founders, owners, and administrators losing interest in their sites, all resulting in the loss of substantial numbers of musical memories, are just some of the issues that need to be addressed.
