Introduction

By: Cecilia Knaub, Leila Markosian

Digital Memory Projects Reviews, Volume IV consists of 24 project reviews. Each of the 24 project reviews examines one digital project, identifying key elements of the project: the project’s title, the site link(s), data and sources, processes, presentation, digital tools used, and the language(s) in which the project is accessible. The project reviews also include evaluative text by the student reviewer, which assesses how well the project achieves its goals. The structure of the reviews is based on Miriam Posner’s "How Did They Make That?” video, which serves as our class’ guide for deconstructing and analyzing digital projects. The digital projects selected for review represent projects that have not yet been reviewed in a previous edition of Digital Memory Projects Reviews, and many claim relevance in our current moment’s heightened attention to critical archival studies and information justice.

With the explosion of digital technology into our cultural and intellectual lives, our ability to access information — about any topic, from any kind of source — is seemingly limitless. All kinds of public records, personal collections, images, writing, and datasets about virtually any topic have undergone a mass digitization and are accessible to any inquiring mind by way of the internet. But, in a question raised in 1999 by scholar and management consultant Peter Drucker and quoted in Stephen M. Sloan’s “Swimming in the Exaflood: Oral History as Information in the Digital Age”, “What is the MEANING of information and its PURPOSE?”.¹ Later on in his article, Sloan states that less than 2 percent of global data is non digital, and that since the advent of the computer age humanity has produced enough digital data to total the content of more than 8.18 million libraries the size of the Library of Congress. It is undeniably incredible — and indispensable to our production and analysis of knowledge — that we have access to information on this scale. The contemporary potential for intellectual discovery, cultural understanding, and historical review (and revision) intersects with the field of critical archival studies as new materials and archival methodologies — such as the slow archives movement — proliferate. Digitization holds power over our political consciousness, too: in an article on crisis documentation in Sweden, Tureby et al. explain that the country’s digitizing policy “states that the purpose of digitizing cultural heritage is to release its potential to nurture cohesion in society. Indeed, digitization is often associated with public access and, by extension, with democratization.”² However, without a clear politics of organization, “the online archive, without assessment of its content, communities, and cultures of use, is allegorical to the dumpster”.³ In this collection of digital memory project reviews, we contend with the information glut: which projects sidestep comparisons to the dumpster by virtue of their collection practices, accessibility, and political intentions? Which projects risk adding to the flood of information that otherwise subsumes our digital lives, and what can be done to avoid this? New currents in digital technology also call for consideration of how media is shared and with whom.⁴ In analyzing the following digital memory project reviews through a lens of information justice, we hope to understand how memory archives might enhance our lives instead of overwhelming their audiences with data. Through this approach, Digital Memory Projects Reviews, Volume IV will examine 1) the relationships between digitization and democratization present in the projects reviewed, 2) how the projects make sense of information, and 3) how memory communities are created and shaped through the projects’ presentation of information.

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