Digital Memory Project Reviews, Vol. II
Written by: Anthony Wheeler & Allison Elliott (when the speaker shifts or 1st-person is present, there will be a [Wheeler] or [Elliott] inserted to avoid confusion)
Joining Digital Memories: Theory and Practice
Since Spring 2019, I [Wheeler] have been working for the CUNY Academic Commons, a CUNY-specific WordPress instance that is an open educational resource (OER) providing unlimited group and website hosting to the 25-camps urban university system, which has introduced me to countless instructors using digital various approaches to teach wildly exciting courses that featured collaborative community projects. I was an M.A. student in Digital Humanities at the time, working for Dr. Matthew K. Gold (the Program Director) as a Program Assistant before he brought me on to work on the Commons’ social platforms. Eventually, I began performing web design consults and facilitating faculty development workshops, and that is how I met Dr. Borrachero. At the time, she was building out the course website for the new Digital Memories: Theory and Practice elective the program was offering in Spring 2021, which I was providing support for. By this time, I had graduated from the Digital Humanities program (Cohort #1) as well as the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate program and moved on to working towards my Ph.D. In Urban Education at the Graduate Center. I recall complaining to my colleague how the DH program was expanding and offering such cool electives now, but I was not able to take courses outside of my program until I had completed my first year.
Fast forward to November 2021, I caught wind that Dr. Borrachero was teaching this course for the 2nd time, and I immediately requested permission from Dr. Gold to enroll in the course as a visiting student from my doctoral program. Having seen the interesting work that had been curated by Brianna Caszatt during the first run of the show, I had to check it out. I was immediately engaged with the course after my initial combing through the syllabus, seeing the wide range of topics touching on intergenerational memory, transnational memory, memory and its relationship with violence, and Indigenous ontologies. During our first class (which was the first in-person class most of us had in almost 2 years) Dr. Borrachero was outlining the tasks we could expect to perform throughout the semester, making the official call for someone to take on editing the next volume of Digital Memory Project Reviews. The prior spring semester, at the time Brianna was putting together Volume I, I had been assisting my professor and cohort mates assemble our collection of texts containing our respective positionality statements that described our experiences and goals as doctoral educational researchers, which was published as Woven Knowledge here on Manifold. Having this unique position as a doctoral student conducting research on ethical ed-tech and digital pedagogy, and having some preliminary experience with Manifold, I felt this was the best way to expose myself to the multiple intersections of knowledge that had converged within our classroom space.
For myself [Elliott], as a Media Studies graduate student visiting from Queens College, the Digital Memories course offered an incredible opportunity to become more familiar with the ethics, processes, and methods of digital memory making. As an archivist, I prioritize open-resource platforms for my digital projects as praxis and protection for contributors' materials to protect privacy and ownership, and as larger resistance to big tech. Open-source platforms are a relatively new skill of mine, so editing the Manifold class page was an opportunity to get more familiar with publishing on them, creating metadata, curation, and collaborating with other digital humanists.
Approaching Volume II
As described by the past editor, the digital project reviews that exist on CUNY’s Manifold instance are real-time examples of digital humanities graduate students learning about different tools and platforms for preserving memories, ways to repurpose them for their own research, and understanding when and how to properly critique these technologies. Caszatt left a phenomenally detailed infrastructure in place for next-gen digital memory reviewers as we began Volume II of this work, so naturally, passing the torch to us, as editors, felt slightly daunting.
What’s funny about this volume of project reviews though is that this time around there are two editors; myself [Wheeler], and my colleague and friend Allison Elliott, who is a talented visiting graduate student of Media Studies and Social Justice Program from Queens College. Elliott works as an archivist at The Feminist Institute and brings an astonishing amount of knowledge surrounding curation, multimodal archiving, queer history, and the political landscape. Overlapping our interests in decolonizing and abolition, we came to this collection wanting to foster a level of transparency between us as scholars within the academy and the public population that we expect to engage with our research. Memory Studies require a lot of intervention and remediation (Chidgey, 2012), with Digital Memory Studies being far from exempt. Being a mysterious group of graduate students critiquing the collective and cultural memory projects that exist within the public domain, we decided it was appropriate to employ what Nieves (2021) refers to as a digital queer witnessing lens.
Introducing a Digital Queering Framework
While reading a chapter out of The Digital Black Atlantic (Risam and Josephs, 2021), we were particularly struck by Angel David Nieves’s (2021) concept of “digital queer witnessing” as a messy praxis for deconstructing digital projects, or histories. In his chapter, Nieves (2021) defines digital queer witnessing as “encompassing the viewing of reconstructed spaces and places online, using available open-source 3D technologies that allow these sites to act as the virtual containers for testimonies, personal narratives, biographies, and other forms of life writing that have long been silenced or erased through acts of state-supported violence.” Nieves (2021) discusses this concept in relation to fostering transparency in the construction of knowledge, and in some regard, lending more humanity to the digital by baring all aspects of the project for scrutinization. Academics, while producers of knowledge, often act as gatekeepers simultaneously. As practitioners aimed at reviewing and upholding virtual pockets of memory, it is crucial that we align ourselves theoretically in a way that shows appreciation for the existence of open educational technologies that make this work possible, the messiness involved in these memory projects, but also be mindful of the ways our work/these digital memories will exist beyond this moment.
Positionality Statements
One of the responsibilities that Nieves (2021) refers to as a guiding principle of digital queer witnessing is to question what we, as practitioners who are purely communicating information, owe the community who is impacted by these memories? In an attempt to further transparency between knowledge construction, those who participate, and those who consume it, we have asked that all reviewers submit a positionality statement for us to include in the collection. These contributions can be found here, as well as just above the reviews on the project home page so that readers can refer back to them as they explore this archive. Having insight into the reviewers’ ontological and epistemological beliefs grants our readers an added layer of understanding into how the reviewer’s own experiences may affect our interpretation of digital artifacts.
Technical Insights for Future Curators
Fortunately for us, having undergone this process once already, Caszatt left our class with a handful of resources that we could remix/recycle. This included her style guide, which we had our group of reviewers emulate in the same manner, using a master Google Doc to collaborate and make edits across reviews. Where we deviate from Caszatt was our approach to ingesting the reviews. Caszatt had taken the route of pulling each review from the master doc in the form of Microsoft Word documents, which she then translated into Markdown for uploading to Manifold. While an understandable approach from a technical perspective, as Manifold does have an easier time translating Markdown code, this approach was not particularly sufficient when approaching it as co-editors. Instead, we opted to create a shared Google Drive folder that stored all of our project’s content (such as project images and our Markdown code).
A few weeks prior to the end of the semester, we had requested everyone finalize any edits they wanted to make their reviews before we went through and left comments/made edits. Once completed, we began pulling individual reviews from the master doc and began creating individual documents organized within the shared drive. Once we both vetted the reviews for upload, we ingested the Google Doc directly using the ingestion feature on Manifold. In order to streamline this process a bit, we requested that our reviewers formatted the text of their review using specific text styles so that Manifold could translate it how wanted (see example review for styling documents for ingestion).
I [Elliott] assisted Wheeler with the organization of the reviews, mostly by creating categories and metadata. While this can sound simple, it’s a method of knowledge production. More so, as people hold many identities, placing projects in just one history or identity category was something I struggled with. I decided to create a disclaimer in both the history identity category, stating that our histories and identities are entangled, and it shouldn’t be assumed that the people in these digital memory projects wouldn’t fall into more than one category. I placed the projects where I did for useability and easy searching. Then, Wheeler went into Manifold and replicated the metadata as tags across all of the included resources, so that searching keywords within the project should yield any related materials across all included projects within the search results.
One hiccup we encountered while putting together the collection was attempting to replicate our own version of Caszett’s thesaurus, which she also used Markdown for. Neither of us was super proficient in Markdown, with only Wheeler having lower-level experience writing in that coding language. Having some knowledge, though, I [Wheeler] had decided to take on practicing my Markdown in an attempt to create our own aesthetically pleasing Table of Contents. I will be transparent in that this is a tedious task, and it took me an entire evening (not exaggerating) to get the code just right so that it appears as you see it now. If you aren’t super into that kind of thing, Manifold does offer an automated Table of Contents feature, however, this only works if you include everything that you want indexed in a single master document. Given the reviews are all placed into a single doc, this is definitely feasible, but we would encourage sharing text style guides from the beginning of the semester so that you aren’t left editing the text styles on 50+ pages. If you do want to use Markdown, we were sure to include all of our code within the Creating the Table of Contents PDF resource within the collection. Once you have a grasp of basic Markdown language functionalities, the process isn’t too bad. We hope having our code to compare yours to will be helpful!
Thank You and Happy Reading!
Working as a co-editor [Elliott] with Wheeler served as practice in working with living cultural artifacts in a collaborative graduate setting, and reading through everyone’s specific eyes during the curation process has been insightful (and pleasure) for my [Wheeler] own research. Working with Elliott opened my eyes to new methods of archival praxis, and I encourage any future editors to work alongside someone purely for the collaborative experience in itself (also because this project is a heavy lift). Working on this project has been super fascinating on all fronts. We want to thank everyone involved for contributing and making edits where we directed, and want to give special thanks to Dr. Aránzazu (Arancha) Borrachero for her wisdom and stellar facilitation throughout the entire semester; guiding us all down productive paths for our respective research interests in memory work. Additional comments and insights from Dr. Borrachero can be found at the start of the Positionality Statements page. We hope that the foundation laid out by Caszatt, paired with the additions made by us, create accessible alternative approaches to creating future iterations of this work.
References
Chidgey, R. (2012). Hand-Made Memories: Remediating Cultural Memory in DIY Feminist Networks. In E. Zobl & R. Drüeke (Eds.), Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship (pp. 87–97). Transcript Verlag. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1wxr2f.8
Nieves, A. D. (2021). Digital Queer witnessing testimony, contested virtual heritage, and the apartheid archive in Soweto, Johannesburg. In R. Risam & K. Bakers Joseph The Digital Black Atlantic.