Dr. Aránzazu Borrachero, Professor

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Jacques Ranciére tells us the story of Joseph Jacotot, an 18th-century French educator who, exiled in Belgium, faced the task of teaching French to a group of Flemish speakers. Jacotot, who knew not one word of Flemish, had his students learn French from a Flemish-French bilingual edition of Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse (François Fénelon). And learn they did!

Based on this experience, Jacotot formulated his “universal teaching” method, which affirms the equal intelligence of all human beings and defends the ability of all students to teach themselves anything. For Jacotot (and for Ranciére), educators should shun the role of “explicator” because explaining is, he argues, an insult to the students’ intelligence. Rather, they should embrace the “emancipator” role, a presence who unconditionally supports the students’ will and ability to learn independently.

The project reviewers, along with the editors and curators of this new volume of Digital Memory Project Reviews, have shown superb organizational and analytical skills in the process of deconstructing twenty digital memory projects. Very importantly, they have done so without the need of an “explicator.” Consequently, I am tempted to say that they have pushed me one step closer to Jacotot’s emancipating figure but, truth be told, they are the emancipators, for they have freed me from the cage of “explicator.”

During this Digital Memories class, we have collectively understood that memory construction is a storytelling process. Most of the projects reviewed in this volume aim at intervening in hegemonic narratives by disrupting or altering them, and by telling other stories or telling them differently. One of the review goals, therefore, was to evaluate the potential of the digital humanities methods and tools to provide memory resources that challenge authoritarian, patriarchal, colonial, heteronormative, or neoliberal understandings of the past. A related question was whether these alternative narratives can successfully navigate the magma of digital and analogic information powered by and for money, and steer collective memories in non-violent and non-exploitative directions. I believe that the reviews, and the class in general, do not arrive at definitive answers, and it must be so: an evolving complex reality requires, to borrow Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue, an evolving conversation in which the participating voices must never fully merge.

I thank all the contributors of this volume for their generosity in sharing their thorough and inspired project explorations. A special thanks to Anthony Wheeler and Allison Elliott for taking on the arduous task of compiling, editing, and publishing this collection in Manifold. Whether they know it or not, Anthony and Allison have proved to be true practitioners of Jacotot’s universal teaching method, for they have led this collection with unreserved trust in the equal-intelligence principle, while inviting us to manifest our idiosyncrasies and “situated knowledges” (Haraway) by way of our positionality statements.

May all readers enjoy this new volume of Digital Memory Project Reviews, and may the conversation continue!

Anthony Wheeler, Co-Editor/Project Reviewer

As co-editor of Volume II of the Digital Memory Project Review collection, I am coming into this work calling on my knowledge as an experienced practitioner of the digital humanities/social sciences as well as what I’ve dubbed critical intersectionality to review the contributions made to this project. As a doctoral researcher of Urban Education and Digital Humanities, I carry with me the experience of interrogating the equity and accessibility of digital projects and the knowledge of digital ethics, and how to implement digital praxis in learning. More specifically, as a biracial, disabled, queer scholar, I use my research to think about the unique experiences that are produced based on overlapping identities, and in the context of memory studies, the shared identities that make up the infrastructure of many historical memories.

For myself, this entails being an advocate for open educational resources (OER) and open digital tools for collaborative/shared knowledge production. This informed our decision to attach a creative commons license to each review, keeping in line with the goals of digital memory projects, and extending the remediated narrative beyond their work and into other public discourses. The license permits anyone who visits the project to recycle the knowledge produced by our reviewers, with the minimal requirement of crediting (citing) them for their work. The participating reviewers are all graduate students of digital humanities, media studies, and/or memory studies and are bringing complex perspectives and intellectual backgrounds into their reviews. In this collection, you will hear the voices of teachers, archivists, media justice practitioners, data analysts, philosophers, and other diverse talents, all of which have a shared passion for storytelling, cultural awareness, and truth. We hope you take a moment to read about each of our reviewers’ specialties and experiences that they are bringing into this work.

Allison Elliott, Co-Editor/Project Reviewer

As the other co-editor of Volume II of the Digital Memory Project Review collection, I’m coming at this work from working within both digital and physical archival collections mostly focusing on queer history. As a dyke from a small town in Maine, being able to access queer culture digitally before moving on to Mount Holyoke and then New York City was essential to my feelings of belonging, purpose, and generally fighting off the existential dread. As such, I have a firm belief that digital and physical memory projects are necessary tools in world-building for marginalized groups. Moreso, as a second-year Media Studies graduate student, I hold important the need for these projects to be on open-source platforms as a means of accessibility and to subvert the overwhelming surveillance, censorship extraction, and exploitation of our data on proprietary platforms.

The selection of projects reflected my interest in queer + obscure media, as well as generally collaborating with Marisa Iovino, as I reviewed the NYC Trans Oral History Project (NYCFOHP), XFR Collective (thanks Marisa), and Lesbian Herstory Archives. While it was my first time interacting with NYCFOHP and XFR, I had done extensive work and research with the Lesbian Herstory Archives since 2017; it was my first exposure to a memory/archival project specifically focused on lesbian/queer histories. Getting further into my career as an archivist, it’s important to me that my actions are matching my value system that prioritizes information activism, non-normative histories + alternative storytelling, abolitionist politics, and feminist/queer approaches to digitization/sharing of materials that were once only circulated in community-based settings. In short: my work comes from the desire of wanting to shake up/queer the normative information structures we have now and putting my archival skills to use in any way I can to advance the struggle for liberation from the late capitalist hellscape we all currently inhabit.

Marisa Iovino, Project Reviewer

My belief system motivates my work in Digital Memories. As I selected projects to review, I focused on ones that aligned with my political ideology and graduate research. For example, I am deeply concerned about the erasure of non-hegemonic narratives. I realize that the state holds power over what stories remain accurate and which are manipulated or erased. This framework prohibits my ability to be objective. As I reviewed these projects, my inability to be objective manifested as somewhat harsh criticism. But I hope this lens rendered efficient reviews.

The desire for conservation and my work as a Media Studies academic were present throughout my reflections. As a Media Studies student, I am interested in alternative storytelling mediums, so I probed the X.F.R. Collective. I discovered that the organization provides the tools and insight for individuals to record and store their narratives. Being a first-generation college student, I believe in making information accessible to those without professional/academic training. The X.F.R. Collective successfully does that. While working on my third project review on the Witness Media Lab, I discovered they do not. This organization claims to provide tools for people to record incidents, yet the site is incomprehensible. I cannot imagine that someone without academic training would have the time to sleuth through the unorganized platform. In my opinion, it is inaccessible, which renders the site useless.

Finally, my abolitionist framework was the impetus behind my work on the Stop Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) The non-profit organization demonstrates the discriminatory technology abuses by the New York government. As a prison abolitionist, I execrate the carceral system. This disdain was present. Additionally, my research focuses on surveillance, specifically the proliferation of biometric technologies. Scholars such as Michel Foucault, Simone Browne, and Kelly Gates inform my work. Their contribution to surveillance studies was present throughout my reflection on S.T.O.P.

Yesenny Fernandez, Project Reviewer

When I first looked through the list of projects to be reviewed, I intended to choose projects that could align with my long-term project on Domestic Violence in New York City. I started working on researching this issue more in-depth because nowadays those in power "decide" what we can see as a way to obscure how feelings of compassion, empathy for the suffering of others, catastrophic events, and death can be represented and viewed by the community. Therefore, the first project I chose was “It Starts With Us,” a dedicated website to honor the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, trans, and two Spirits in Canada. I have never read anything about Canada’s having prostitution legal and neither I know anything about these types of digital spaces created to digitize information to balance the death-related details the media tends to over-focus on. When I started reviewing, I had not much background on what digital memory is; all I knew was that digital memory is created to store the most important information related to a group, an individual, or even an object. I learned this when I did a digital memory project on the sister of St. Joseph’s, where I interviewed them and asked them about their history with St. Joseph’s College. Therefore, with this project, I was hoping to get started on learning more about digital memory and its importance, and how they are done and like this to learn techniques and apply these to my final project. The website does a great job of representing exactly what they intended to do and allowed me to learn what a digital memory project is.

The second project I had chosen was “Black Women Suffrage” and do not have much background on it because I arrived in the United States in High School and when I was taught about it, I didn’t know much English. I do remember reading about Rosa Parks and Ida B. Wells, but when reviewing, I had a blurry memory and was hoping to clarify what I know and learn what I never had the opportunity to learn in classes due to my limited English proficiency. These past two years I have been attending workshops on critical race theory and learning about how female key figures from the abolitionist movement, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism helped me understand the many innovative tactics that activists began to end discrimination against women of color. In addition, it was great to see how their site stores and preserves the material from over 4,000 institutions. Undoubtedly, this project helped me to understand more about the history of New York by learning about the struggles of Black Women, and I am confident it will help me with my long-term project.

Finally, in the past, I had done a long-term project on the Harlem Renaissance, and reviewing the third project I had chosen “Digital Harlem” helped me to see the tremendous work that the creators of this project have done; All the material from 1915-1930 has been digitized and restored on that site. I was eager to learn the tactics used on this project to make it a research tool and learn about daily activities, places, and the communities that made up and impacted Harlem. Before reviewing this project, when I used to think of Harlem during that time, it used to remind me of the revival of artistic and cultural activities of African Americans. I had never stopped to think until now that besides being a time filled with individuals practicing with pride their skills, it was also filled with drinking and gambling. Moreover, the maps displayed on the site gave me insights on how to create interactive maps which I could potentially add to my final project.

Kevin Pham, Project Reviewer

My reviews were motivated by a desire for honest engagements with the archived materials. I come into this project both as a Digital Humanities student as well as a UX designer at a tech company—the latter of which has revealed to me the ways in which technology is often leveraged in violent ways in the guise of progress or a “greater good.” And so, as it concerns the projects I’ve selected, I look to read their methods and strategies in a way that can show what the project is really saying: that is, their ethical and political goals beyond what is written on the page itself.

I grew up in California, which is a place uniquely skilled at hiding existing structural violence with dishonest images of liberal good-feeling. Despite California being considered a melting pot of sorts, racial animosity (especially anti-blackness) and the messiness of multi-racial politics often navigates everyday life below the surface. Noticing this has molded my political commitments and methods of reading. So I chose to review my selected projects (SlaveVoyages, Mapping Police Violence, and Texas After Violence) with an existing interest in theories of race and blackness, especially in the work of scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, etc. Combining my professional background in tech with these interests, and in trying to grasp a project’s less obvious ethico-political claims, my reviews may come off as harsh; despite this, I hope that more than anything, I am able to communicate an honest account of what these projects are doing, but also of what they are hiding.

Hampton Dodd, Project Reviewer

As a first semester Digital Humanities student at the Graduate Center, my approach to reviewing Digital Memories projects this semester was primarily rooted in openness and eagerness to learn from the marginalized narratives, digital tools, and archival ambitions illuminated through my critical evaluation of each project, resulting in what might be interpreted by some as a benign analysis. Given that my first exposure to the reviewing of Memory Projects was the broken-link-riddled Um’O’Ho Indian Heritage (Omaha Indian Heritage) Project, I chose instead to focus on the intent and potential utility inherent in the framework of the project despite its seemingly abandoned state, commending the still operational archive of texts, images, and artifacts for the impact their collection was noted to have had amongst Omaha communities in the years following the project’s inception. My collaborative report exploring the effectivity of The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project’s Hikvision Camera Census was rooted in familiarity and fascination with issues pertaining to algorithmic governance and the surveillance of the public sphere, as well as theoretical critiques of technologies of hyper-control grounded in the work of recent philosophers such as that of Bernard Stiegler. Though these sentiments were largely imperceptible through my contributions to the review, it is through my prior engagement with such matters that I came to deeply appreciate the aspirations of S.T.O.P.’s camera census and attempt to communicate the importance of such organizations, while lamenting the project’s limited outreach and lack of significant legislative advancement. Lastly, my work with Brian Millen on our cooperative survey of Vincent Brown’s Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative project sought to highlight the powerful potential present in the interactive spatial history provided through this cartographic investigation of neglected histories. Perhaps the most innovative and engaging project of the three, my appraisal of Brown’s work is one of admiration, and I think we could all aspire to create something as novel and successful in its aim of recovery and preservation of lost narratives. Though there wasn’t a consistent thematic thread that ran throughout my selection of projects for review, I’m indebted to the diversity of approaches found throughout each of these important endeavors of retention and the elucidating experience I had discovering the scope of possibility as to what a Digital Memories project could offer, sustain, and protect.

Brian Millen, Project Reviewer

What drew me to the world of digital humanities was the work of philosopher Bernard Stiegler. He writes about the centrality of memory in human experience, the even more central centrality of artificial memory, and the archive as providing part of the material funds for the individuation of collectives and individuals. Thus, an essential part of his work is exploring the transformations in knowledge-production that digital memory technologies pose. This is the theoretical framework that I approach memory projects with, and I think that Miriam Posner’s technique for reverse-engineering digital projects is a good mobilization of it. She teaches us to look at the sources of the project, the way these sources are processed, and the way the results are presented. This corresponds well with Stiegler’s conception of knowledge production as a process of transindividuating information. We start with the information funds and use the hermeneutic faculty of our minds (which rely on already-existing knowledge) to create new knowledge. Posner gives us a way to analyze this process via its constituent organological parts, giving us a better understanding of the knowledge produced, as well as a departure point for our own projects of knowledge-production.

Benjamin Mørch, Project Reviewer

With a background in teaching, media production, and cultural studies, I moved to New York at the beginning of this year to study for my master's in Digital Humanities. My academic knowledge is founded on a bachelor's in Ethnology with a focus on the possible positions for marginalized groups in our society and an interest in using media tools to communicate and empower young people. I’m bringing with my experience in pedagogy as a teacher and convening a message as a former NGO campaign leader. I have therefore approached my reviews with a focus on the narratives they tell and how they communicate their projects.

The area of creating projects by digital means is new to me, and throughout the process, I have also learned and got inspired by the many different projects and ways to communicate memories. At the same time, I have learned about different areas of memories I was not aware of before, like the project “Papakilo Database” about Hawaiian history. I’m not an expert in the field of digital memories, but I hope my reviews will give insight into the project and maybe new perspectives on it.

Kyle Sherman, Project Reviewer

As a liberal studies major at Lehman college whose interests lie in exploring the impact digital technology has on society, the digital memory class offered at the Graduate Center was a great fit. It exceeded my expectation as we dove deep into the complexity and nuance of memory construction. One central theme that continually resurfaced from our readings and the memory projects I analyzed was the relationship between power and memory creation. I personally bore witness to the damaging effects of memory degradation and suppression coming from deep south Texas where the indigenous community faces cultural extinction from abusive Anglo influences. The multiple perspectives explored in class (individual, collective, authoritative, unconscious, etc.) helped explore the power dynamics that are imbued in memory creation and by effect, humanity itself. My academic foci in the posthumanist tradition have been positively impacted by this course and helped drive me to critically analyze memory collections that centered on the power dynamics of memory narrative (as seen in the Documenting the Now) and mapping the negative impact of our techno-social lives from hegemonic powers (Stop Technology Oversight Project).