Reassembling digital archives—strategies for counter-archiving

Abstract

Archives have long been a key concern of academic debates about truth, memory, recording and power and are important sites for social sciences and humanities research. This has been the case for traditional archives, but these debates have accelerated with the digital transformation of archives. The proliferation of digital tools and the fast-growing increase in digital materials have created very large digitised and born-digital archives. This article investigates how new digital archives continue existing archival practices while at the same time discontinuing them. We present novel methodologies and tools for changing memory and power relations in digital archives through new ways of reassembling marginalised, non-canonical entities in digital archives. Reassembling digital archives can take advantage of the materiality and the algorithmic processuality of digital collections and reshape them to inscribe lost voices and previously ignored differences. Digital archives are not fixed and are changed with new research and political questions and are only identified through new questions. The article presents six distinct techniques and strategies to reassemble digital archives and renders these according to three different types of new digital archives. We consider both the extension of archives towards evidence that is otherwise thrown away as well as the provision of new intensive, non-discriminatory viewpoints on existing collections.