Archiving

Archives and archiving have expanded from their once traditional role as restricted and institutionalized domains into a growing host of autonomous, often community-orientated but also artistic resources and practices that act against the exclusions and notions of ‘historical significance’ which permeated their formal counterparts (Schwartz and Cook 2002). These alternative archives, sometimes referred to as counter-archives or community archives, can be invaluable resources for researchers of citizen media, and the alternative archive itself may be seen as an instance of citizen media in practice. Alternative archives are not simply repositories for excluded narratives. They contain documents and enable practices that can bear witness, affirm identities, forge collective memories and new socialities, offering sites for critical engagement with both the past and the present (Flinn 2010; Baldi 2016). In that sense they are anticipatory, even hopeful endeavours (Appaduri 2003).

The affordances of digital technologies have enabled the growth of alternative archives and made them more visible to researchers, with a proliferation of online archives and digitization projects now readily available for analysis. However, the counter-archive has a longer history. This entry initially draws on examples of pre-digital counter archives such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York (established in 1974), and then proceeds to engage with more recent counter-archiving activities, including 858: An Archive of Resistance, an online archive of 858 hours of video footage from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. It also engages with some of the vulnerabilities of alternative archives, both online and offline varieties (Bosi and Reiter 2014).

References

Appadurai, A. (2003) ‘Archive and Aspiration’, in J. Brouwer and A. Mulder (eds) Information is Alive, Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers, pp. 14-25

Baldi, L. (2016) ‘Archiving a Revolution in the Digital Age, Archiving as an act of resistance.’ Ibraaz. 010_03 / 28 July. Available at https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/163.

Bosi, L. and H. Reiter (2014) ʻHistorical Methodologies: Archival research and oral history in social movement research’, in D. della Porta (ed.) Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 117-143.

Flinn, A. (2010) ‘Independent Community Archives and Community-Generated Content: Writing, saving and sharing our histories’, Convergence 16(1): 39-51.

Schwartz, J.M. and T. Cook (2002) ‘Archives, Records, and Power: The making of modern memory’, Archival Science 2: 1-19.