How can we ethically work with sources in the digital realm? How do we meaningfully engage with online collections without stealing research, erasing community work, and mining histories which were only ever meant to be seen by a select few?
With the rise of family history, increases in digitisation initiatives, and museums turning to digital collection to plug gaps in their physical collections, how do we, as researchers, navigate these spaces? Recent years have seen digital ephemera become commonplace, yet how academics (in particular) use it is not part of the conversation.
Before we go any further I want to flag that there are many types of digital archive. In this blog I am not talking about items held in physical collections which have been digitised for the public. Instead, here I am talking about community generated digital archives and large institutions which request material from members of the public to plug gaps in their collections.
If we take large museum-based collection drives, ethical questions about what kind of history they are collecting become more pressing.
The memory of the First World War as one which is white, male, and Western Front-oriented, means that the types of material uploaded tend to be highly racialised, gendered and focused on a particular theatre of war. The National Library of Wales tried to get around this by calling for items that focused on the home front, to plug a gap in their collection. However, the cultural memory of the war was so strong that people overwhelmingly brought in information about soldiers, not life on the home front (Dafis, Hughes and James, 2014). The implications of this for research using these collections are vast – it means that we are beginning with a highly skewed sample of material which focuses on an already popular facet of the total war experience.
Community-based sites can push back against these white, male, narratives, yet these online archives are often under threat of digital death.
Lorna Hughes has said that the First World War is ‘the most digitally documented period in history, thanks not least to the vast amount of material on community websites’ (Konstantelos, Hughes and McBride, 2019). Yet she, and others, have warned that these sites are at risk of disappearing from the web, and in the research for this project, the team have already found that some websites have disappeared a mere four years after the end of the centenary period. The funding to keep these community-based archives online long-term is often lacking, and while these sites are brilliantly researched and curated, they are at risk of disappearing from the web due to a lack of adequate resources. How can we, as researchers, take a full view of history if the archives we used are unbalanced, or are lacking other material which tells the diverse history of the First World War?
I don’t think that there are necessarily any easy answers to the questions I posed at the beginning of this blog. Working with the past requires constant reflection on your practice and how this aligns to your ethical compass. But what is clear is that using digital collections is not the same as using in-person ones, and we need to continually think about how we use these sources in our work, but more importantly, consider how we can use our funding to help preserve at risk digital archives.
References
- Dafis, L., L.M. Hughes R. and R. James (2014). What’s Welsh for ‘Crowdsourcing’?: citizen science and community engagement at the National Library of Wales. In: M. Ridge, (ed.) Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, edited by M. Ridge. Series: Digital research in the arts and humanities. Ashgate: Farnham, pp. 139-159.
- Konstantelos, L., L.M. Hughes and W. McBride (2019). ‘The Bits Liveth Forever? Digital Preservation and the First World War Commemoration’. University of Glasgow (licenced under Creative Commons).