The 6th Digital History in Sweden Conference: Unboxing Digital Methods, Practices and Public Engagement
Whether or not it is a conscious choice, most digital history projects involve, engage, or inform the public in some way. This can be anything from crowdsourcing or creating a digital educational resource, to inadvertently enabling easy access to newly digitized material for everyone – not just researchers. Historians need to be aware of the potential of the digital in the dissemination and collection of historical knowledge, as well as the vital role they play in providing a context for local histories. This conference aims to address this issues.
Fusing the sharing of memories and amateur history-writing online – where it can easily be disseminated – means that historians have started to be more aware of and open to the public’s role in collecting memories and sources, building networks, and enabling cross-border, non-Eurocentric ways of writing history. The internationalization of access to sources and histories leads to academic and amateur historians gaining insights into regions that previously were inaccessible, yet infrastructures for citizen participation remain limited to only a few. In many ways, digital methods, practices, and public engagement put a spotlight on history’s relationship with collective memory and how interactive practices, collaborations, and co-creation affect both the field and the public in general.
In the following talks, selected from the 6th Digital History in Sweden Conference, the learner will gain new perspectives on the use of AI and citizen science in digitization and digital history projects. In addition, the learner will gain insight into the creation and care of digital archives applying postcolonial perspectives.
The conference was organized by the Division of History at the Department of Cultural Sciences, with support from the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University, Sweden.
Further information about the conference can be found on the official website.
1.Re-thinking the Crowd. AI, Lay Expertise, and the Sourcing of Historical Data
While public engagement in historical research has a long history, in recent years digital technology and the open-culture movement have profoundly changed historians’ ability to build on lay expertise. Emerging AI-based methods in turn enable us to draw on the work of even larger crowds obscured through black boxed technology. These developments could be considered the foundation of a public humanities, formed through mutually beneficial collaborations. However, such an idealistic conception risks hiding more problematic relationships of asymmetric reward structures and exploitation. In this lecture, Dr. Jacob Orrje critically reflects on the global fiscal and moral economies of public engagement in a digital history that increasingly relies on pre-existing datasets and models. How do we create mutually beneficial collaborations if we rely on data and technology that systematically obscure the work we rely on? And finally: what are the connections between crowd sourcing and our contemporary online gig economy?
2.Archival Whispers – Finding and Showing Black Women in Caribbean Digital Archives
Historical discussions regarding early modern women of color, free and enslaved, have predominantly been framed around the “silence of the archive”, highlighting how stories and voices of women of color have been hidden from archival sources. While documents concerning free and enslaved Black women are disproportionately harder to find than those of white administrators, they are not as rare as is often imagined. The question is rather, what does one do with documents concerning Black women, and how should they be considered? In this lecture, Dr. Ale Pålsson and Dr. Annika Raapke discuss the intersection between Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “archival silencing” and the information avalanche of digital archives.
3.Global Archives Online and GAO-S: Key Takeaways from Building and Teaching History with Digital Archives
Global Archives Online is a directory of open digital collections for the study of colonial and global history. Aimed primarily at students and researchers interested in imperial, colonial, and global history, the directory provides users worldwide with an overview of major digital collections containing a variety of primary sources, including digitized manuscripts, newspapers, books, pamphlets, maps, images, and audiovisual material. A powerful search function allows users to quickly identify relevant collections. Global Archives Online is maintained by the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies as a free service to the global community of researchers and students.
Linked to the directory, the Global Archives Online Graduate School (GAO-S) is an interdisciplinary and international initiative organized by Stockholm University in collaboration with Linnaeus University and Lund University, along with PhD students from universities in Sweden and abroad. Offered in a hybrid format during the fall term of 2024, GAO-S focuses on two primary aims: the methodological development of digital archive work and the pedagogical enhancement of undergraduate supervision. The program seeks to foster a bottom-up dialogue between scholars and students both within and beyond Swedish research institutions. In this talk, two of the authors, Prof. Stefan Amirell and Simon Ottosson, present the GAO-S project and share key pedagogical insights gathered during the initial months of teaching.
Part 1: Global Archives Online and GAO-S
Part 2: Global Archives Online and GAO-S
4.Digitizing migrated colonial archives: infrastructures and connections
A lot has been said about cultural theories as well as debates in archival science regarding the digitization of colonial archives. The collection “Joseph Stephens’ time in India” (1860-1869) in the Joseph Stephens Archive is a collection of papers which migrated with Stephens from Bombay to the Huseby estate in southern Sweden at the end of the 1860s. The collection contains rare sources about contractors and sub-contractors, the relations between them, and their relation to the colonial state and the informal labour force’s composition and work conditions during an intensive period of infrastructural expansion in India. In this paper, Dr Eleonor Marcussen begins by charting the history of the collection in order to contextualize the arguments for preservation and access which has resulted in its digitization. She then points to the possibilities and limitations of using digitized migrated archives by discussing how connections and infrastructure can enable access and shed light on the limits of the official colonial archives.