Introduction

Dr. Aránzazu Borrachero, Professor

Collective memory is a collaborative enterprise by definition. It refers to the narratives that communities create to make sense of the past and understand lived experiences. In our class, Digital Memories: Theory and Practice, we try to ascertain what the impact of the digital environment is on collective memory processes. We do it collaboratively, in congruity with our topic. Part of the work entails looking at digital projects as interventions in collective memory –an analysis that includes assessing the projects’ objectives, design, and tools; their strengths; and their potential as memory mobilizers. Because we compile and publish these analyses each year, the review collections represent, in a sense, a collective narrative and memory archive of this class.

Successful collaboration requires care. Volume III’s editors Patricia Belen and Majel Peters have adopted a “feminist ethics of care” framework to curate this new collection of reviews, and they have invited Volume III reviewers to reflect on their chosen projects through that prism. The editors themselves have implemented a caring ethics at every step of their work. Their coordination and planning, their class discussions about their proposed theoretical approach, their editorial comments, their communication style, and their technological contributions have all shown great attention to “the relational,” and have skillfully found and maintained a balance between firm expectations and high respect for the reviewers’ work.

Majel and Patricia’s commitment to applying a care approach is also palpable in the time and technological expertise they have devoted to improving the user’s navigation experience (see their Introduction: Approaching Volume III, and to facilitating the task of future editors. With their knowledge of various markup languages, they have been able to resolve a problem detected by their predecessors, which was the cumbersome experience of converting into Markdown a large and unwieldy Google Doc containing all the reviews, and subsequently ingesting it into Manifold.

Volume III editors have also “recycled” --a caring exercise-- and further advanced the practice of transparency that has accompanied previous volumes. In Volume I, Brianna Caszatt meticulously documented, compiled, and shared her work methodology and tools along with best practices and recommendations for anyone wanting to embark on a similar publication. Volume II editors, Anthony Wheeler and Allison Elliott, enriched Brianna’s “laying-bare” practice by introducing a positionality statement from each reviewer. Patricia and Majel have further encouraged and facilitated contextualized and situated readings by linking positionality statements and reviews. Like previous editors, they have compiled, organized, and publicly shared all the documents they have worked with, and other useful resources.

The editors’ decision to envelope Volume III in a feminist ethics of care has a sense of urgency. As we face a pandemic that continues to kill or incapacitate the most vulnerable among us, as neofascist and neoliberal politics continue to trample on the concept of public good and dismantle public services, and as we obstinately move toward self-destruction following hundreds of years of planetarian recklessness, understanding what an ethics of care means, and applying it throughout all the layers of our humanly experience, including memory work, is a life and death matter –which, in fact, care always was.

Memory work, of the caring and non-caring kind, is exploding in the digital environment. Vol. III reviewers and editors have superbly scrutinized 22 digital projects to assess their ability to oppose oppressive memory narratives and create narratives that speak to care. I am enormously proud of them.

I invite you to dive and find in this new collection not only the editors and reviewers’ exercise in intellectual rigor but also their hope for, and contribution to, a practice of care in digital and collective memory work.

I would also like to add that, with Volume III, Digital Memory Project Reviews has reached a youthful maturity! We believe that our creature is ready to see the world outside Manifold, and we are submitting all three volumes for further review by Reviews in Digital Humanities.

Approaching Volume III

As the editors of Digital Memory Project Reviews (DMPR), Vol. III, we found ourselves in the fortunate position of benefiting from the work of our predecessors, the Vol. I and II editors, Brianna Caszatt, Anthony Wheeler, and Allison Elliot. Brianna’s foundational work on Vol. I resolved critical structural and procedural questions, while leaving room for future editors to bring their own influence to future volumes. Her work defining the components, mechanics, and methodologies of producing the volume have been invaluable. The Vol. II editors, Anthony Wheeler and Allison Elliot, thanks to Brianna’s work, were able to expand and overlay a thoughtful lens of queer witnessing to their investigations of Digital Humanities projects. Their inspired approach directly influenced our choice to introduce a feminist care framework to Vol. III. We recognized an opportunity to consciously sit with and practice this powerful approach to bringing feminist practice into our daily lives. In our research, presentation, and practice, this methodology directly engaged ourselves and our peers in the work of embedding feminist care in our scholarly understanding of Digital Humanities projects, with the prospect and intention of its application becoming intrinsic to our worldview.  

As editors of DMPR Vol. III,  we see it as our responsibility to engage in the practice of care at every stage of our process, including the selection of projects that include diverse perspectives and project styles, appraising evidence of care by project creators as part of our reviews, and ensuring transparency of our positionality including the perspective from which we approach our work and the parameters of our knowledge. We feel that this dovetails with our predecessors, Wheeler and Elliott’s approach of employing a “Digital Queering Framework” that “bares all aspects of the project for scrutinization” as a way of acknowledging and deconstructing our role as “gatekeepers” of knowledge production (Elliott and Wheeler). Our goal, ultimately, is to develop and present our output as an offering that examines methods of knowledge production, while continuing to act as a rich resource for exploring methods in Digital Memory with a focus on a methodology of “care”.    

Infusing Feminist Care

To facilitate the practice of care in the development of DMPR Vol. III, we have chosen to include the following activities in the various stages of the process, including the curation and reviewing of projects and the sharing of our output.

Curating:

It is our intention that projects included in Vol. III not only represent a wide variety of cultural perspectives, with special attention to projects elevating stories of “nonhegemonic classes,” (Portelli), they should also come to life in various digital forms and constructs. There are, for example, projects that present Digital Memory within the constraints of digital products which have enshrined specific techniques to convey the work, while others may be custom built or in other ways uniquely formulated experiences that embody decentralized approaches to narrative production that acknowledges and intertwines the knowledge of the project creator with that of  the individuals and communities featured. In the spirit of E. Patrick Johnson who found performance to be a fitting and impactful expression of his oral history interviews, “Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South”, (Murphy, Pierce and Ruiz), we will aim to include work that invites the user to examine how the impact of both contributors and shapers of Digital Memory work can inform its “final” expression. Professor Borrachero has provided us with a wide selection of projects that speak to this aspect of the work, and members of the class have offered additional projects.

Reviewing:

There are two layers of reviewing that take place in the production of the final volume of published reviews—the reviews of the projects and our reviews, as editors, of their work. Considering these two points of intervention, we have provided a questionnaire to help prompt the class’s assessment of the evidence of care (or lack thereof) practiced by the creators of the projects we review. When editing and offering feedback to reviewers, in addition to considering the framework of sources/processing/presentation (Posner) and the individual reviewer’s impressions and observations based on their unique knowledge and perspective, we have encouraged the addition of their interpretation of how care was expressed in the production of the work.

Situating:

Continuing in the tradition of previous volumes,  positionality statements for each of the collaborators, including ourselves and Professor Borrachero, have been included to provide additional context to our points of reference. To facilitate access to the positionality statements,  we have included links of relevant positionality statements directly from each project review page. Additionally, links to each reviewer's projects appear below their statement enabling navigation to perspectives that readers may find of interest.

Explanatory language has been added to the volume regarding the Table of Contents to help clarify methods of indexing, including the cross listing of projects under multiple headings to account for their intersectional content. As part of our attention to care, we reviewed and adjusted some of the index labels, removing some to facilitate navigation and increase accessibility, while adjusting at least one, LatinX to include Latin American. This adjustment was arrived at through a rich class discussion that brought to the surface differing and nuanced perspectives on LatinX and Latin American representation and self-identification.

Technical Insights for Future Curators

Using the resources provided by previous volume editors, we expanded upon the limitations of the Manifold platform by using our technical knowledge of Markdown, HTML, and CSS. Through our professional experiences in design and communications, we are sensitive to issues of UX and usability and made an effort to make the content accessible through added functionality–this speaks to how we’ve incorporated feminist care at every stage of this process, including the creation of the publication itself.

The Table of Contents is written using a combination of Markdown and HTML. This allows us to format the information in an organized manner. While adding categories and labels enables the user to access the reviews through multiple channels and points of views, the structure can also be unwieldy and confusing. To counter this, we’ve included the four main categories (“Process and Presentation”, “Histories and Identities”, “Events and Time Periods”, and “Geographic Locations”) at the top of the Table of Contents which “jump” to the section further down the page when clicked. Sub-categories are then displayed. The Positionality Statements, created in Markdown, contains a similar functionality–names are displayed at the very top and “jump” to the individual statement. Each contributor’s reviews are linked directly from their statement, eliminating the need to return to the Table of Contents.

For the reviews, we took guidance from Vol. II and separated the main review document into individual Google docs which could be formatted in Markdown and ingested easily into Manifold. It took many trials and errors to format the reviews in a way that maintained a strong typographic hierarchy and legibility while maintaining styles, links, and formatting. To help with this issue, we modified a global CSS stylesheet which was added to each review in the Manifold admin area.

Overall, we are excited at the outcome and appreciate Manifold’s ability to create a publication available to all audiences. To help future creators of Digital Memory Projects Reviews, we’ve included all of the aforementioned documents and files in the Project Documents Collection.

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CITATIONS

Agostinho, Daniela. “Archival encounters: Rethinking access and care in digital colonial archives.” Archival Science, 19(2), 2019, pp. 141-165.

D’Ignazio, Catherine; Klein, Lauren. “Chapter 6: The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves.” Data Feminism. Mar 16, 2020 https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/czq9dfs5/release/3

Murphy, Kevin P., et al. "What Makes Queer Oral History Different." Oral History Review, vol. 43 no. 1, 2016, pp. 1-24. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/615536.

Portelli, Alessandro. “The Peculiarities of Oral History.” History Workshop, No. 12, Autumn, 1981, p. 99.

Posner, Miriam. “How Did They Make That?” 2014, archive.org/details/howdidtheymakethat.

Elliott, Allison and Anthony Wheeler. “Introducing a Digital Queering Framework.” Digital Memory Manifold Publication, Vol. 2., 2022.

Thompson, Alistair. “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History.” Oral History Review. vol. 34 Issue 1, 2007, pp. 49-71.