HASTAC 2016

Advances in digitally networked technologies, combined with increasingly plentiful space for electronic storage have resulted in an expansion of opportunities for archiving cultural artifacts. The ability to create digital media and to digitize analogue media democratizes the role of the archivist and allows new opportunities for collaboration and, in so doing, highlights the underlying value systems that have informed digitization and preservation efforts to date. In place of a few official archives, copious personal and participatory archives have arisen, collections that are characterized by a more diverse content base, a realignment of knowledge objects, and a reimagining of the connections among and between them.

The clear delineation between data and metadata, for instance, is called into question with the recognition that context, in many ways, dictates meaning. So too the boundary of any single archive is increasingly in flux as each exists in a larger online network. Moreover the fixedness of a single artifact becomes destabilized as digital copies, failing to exhaust the original, result in potentially limitless replicas. In this media landscape then, discoverability is a key issue when considering archival practices. Do digital spaces merely amplify those voices that are already heard loudly and clearly? What sort of stewardship issues prevail in a network controlled by the private sector? And how might considering all such issues help us to reimagine other knowledge objects (the memoir, the monograph), as well as structures of knowledge (the edited anthology, the university-held collection) in order that their buried assumptions might be openly scrutinized and evaluated?

The four presentations (long papers) in this panel tackle such questions, using a current project to illuminate aspects of contemporary archives and archival practices in all of their rich diversity.