Event Title
Digital Feminist Archiving: Connectivity, Evidencing and Resistance
Panel
1A: Online Archiving and Creating Digital Resources
Abstract
Women's Archive, exploring new models for creative online curation and digital archive experience. The Archive will aim to offer an educational space that opens up women’s diverse heritage and histories whilst also enabling new voices and experiences to be evidenced, and sectors to connect. An accompanying programme supports feminist curatorial practice and digital up-skilling of women and girls via a place-based heritage focus. The initial research and development phase is supported by ACE and the Ida Carroll Trust, delivering hack events and workshops, bringing together artists, curators and archivists, digital technologists from MadLab, women’s community groups and activists to explore new approaches for curating collections and digital spaces for women’s cultural production. The next stage will be to build an innovative online archive space built on a model of collaborative practice DWAN’s approach to digital feminist archiving is informed by DWAN’s Manifesto for Feminist Archiving (or disruption) (Ashton, forthcoming, 2017). The Manifesto is a creative, playful document, and reimagines the archiving process, suggesting women and men use this outline to rethink their interactions with the archive. The bulk of the Manifesto is divided into five sections, each outlining a generally accepted archival practice, highlighting the challenges for engagement. The Manifesto is a catalyst for archiving to be a test-bed for wider social action and feminist organizing. At the crux of the Manifesto is a desire to creatively open up ways of evidencing experiences and producing knowledge; a social framework for archival memory work which does not take place in social isolation “but in a flow of continuous interaction” and creative, critical engagement (Ketelaar, 2005, 2). The aim of digital feminist archiving is to consider how approaches of feminist archiving (very much based on social models of engagement) can be rethought through and with digital spaces and technologies. “Strategies should not be restricted to merely digitizing what archives-as-a-place already do” (Ketelaar, 2003, 8). The role of the digital space in archiving is to think beyond preservation and provision of digital documentation, towards different models for connecting people with archives. I also argue that we need to take yet another step beyond this; the digital isn’t just about connecting people with archives, but for generating new spaces, networks and forms of evidencing that support feminist agendas for social justice. Digital feminist archiving is therefore a call to action and participation beyond existing processes within current digital heritage practice. I propose that digital feminist archiving can enable girls and women to actively participate through the collaborative building of interconnected digital women’s archives (DWAs). DWAs could act as visual, interactive and user-led repositories, connecting existing materials and encouraging women and girls to share cultural practices and production. DWAs would aim to shift power dynamics in terms of heritage production and transmission, to: -create a global, visible cultural resistance to the eradication or marginalization of women’s histories and experiences -empower girls and women to be producers of knowledge-enable access to existing archive content that is suppressed or buried -encourage digital skilling for continued educational and entrepreneurial opportunities Digital feminist archiving –as a process and form –can offer new spaces for women and girls’ creative and cultural resistance through content curation and connectivity. Archiving is a process of shaping knowledge, and knowledge has the power to transform. By empowering individuals and groups to shape their presence in cultural heritage, women and girls can create a global, visible cultural resistance to the eradication or marginalization of their histories and experiences.
Digital Feminist Archiving: Connectivity, Evidencing and Resistance
Women's Archive, exploring new models for creative online curation and digital archive experience. The Archive will aim to offer an educational space that opens up women’s diverse heritage and histories whilst also enabling new voices and experiences to be evidenced, and sectors to connect. An accompanying programme supports feminist curatorial practice and digital up-skilling of women and girls via a place-based heritage focus. The initial research and development phase is supported by ACE and the Ida Carroll Trust, delivering hack events and workshops, bringing together artists, curators and archivists, digital technologists from MadLab, women’s community groups and activists to explore new approaches for curating collections and digital spaces for women’s cultural production. The next stage will be to build an innovative online archive space built on a model of collaborative practice DWAN’s approach to digital feminist archiving is informed by DWAN’s Manifesto for Feminist Archiving (or disruption) (Ashton, forthcoming, 2017). The Manifesto is a creative, playful document, and reimagines the archiving process, suggesting women and men use this outline to rethink their interactions with the archive. The bulk of the Manifesto is divided into five sections, each outlining a generally accepted archival practice, highlighting the challenges for engagement. The Manifesto is a catalyst for archiving to be a test-bed for wider social action and feminist organizing. At the crux of the Manifesto is a desire to creatively open up ways of evidencing experiences and producing knowledge; a social framework for archival memory work which does not take place in social isolation “but in a flow of continuous interaction” and creative, critical engagement (Ketelaar, 2005, 2). The aim of digital feminist archiving is to consider how approaches of feminist archiving (very much based on social models of engagement) can be rethought through and with digital spaces and technologies. “Strategies should not be restricted to merely digitizing what archives-as-a-place already do” (Ketelaar, 2003, 8). The role of the digital space in archiving is to think beyond preservation and provision of digital documentation, towards different models for connecting people with archives. I also argue that we need to take yet another step beyond this; the digital isn’t just about connecting people with archives, but for generating new spaces, networks and forms of evidencing that support feminist agendas for social justice. Digital feminist archiving is therefore a call to action and participation beyond existing processes within current digital heritage practice. I propose that digital feminist archiving can enable girls and women to actively participate through the collaborative building of interconnected digital women’s archives (DWAs). DWAs could act as visual, interactive and user-led repositories, connecting existing materials and encouraging women and girls to share cultural practices and production. DWAs would aim to shift power dynamics in terms of heritage production and transmission, to: -create a global, visible cultural resistance to the eradication or marginalization of women’s histories and experiences -empower girls and women to be producers of knowledge-enable access to existing archive content that is suppressed or buried -encourage digital skilling for continued educational and entrepreneurial opportunities Digital feminist archiving –as a process and form –can offer new spaces for women and girls’ creative and cultural resistance through content curation and connectivity. Archiving is a process of shaping knowledge, and knowledge has the power to transform. By empowering individuals and groups to shape their presence in cultural heritage, women and girls can create a global, visible cultural resistance to the eradication or marginalization of their histories and experiences.