There is a dimension of historians’ work that is often overlooked when considering the nature of our profession: the archive. This reference is not to the traditional concept of the archive as merely the location where historians search for historical sources, but rather to the creation of archives. Today’s digital transformation is shaping the archives that future historians will explore. When observing a critical event of the present time, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine (2022-), it becomes evident that many actors are actively involved in documenting and archiving events of their current times – including historians. The various ways in which these archives take shape are critical to understanding what kinds of histories will be possible to write based on such digital resources. The project “LivArch – Documenting Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Challenges of Living Archives for Historical Knowledge Production” aims to explore such questions, delving into the impacts of transformation on archival practices and, simultaneously, providing an assessment of the current state of the art in emergency digital preservation. But before introducing the project, I propose to reflect a bit more on the relationship between historians and archives, which has been fundamental to our discipline since its consolidation.
Although archival science is a distinct discipline, historians have consistently been involved in defining archival criteria, such as which documents to preserve and how to contextualize and access them. This involvement has been evident since the advent of modern archives in Europe around the 19th century and continued with establishing the first national archives in post-colonial nations from that time onward.[i] Historians are well aware of the significant impact archival resources have on the writing of history.[ii] Since the emergence of the so-called “archival turn”, the multitude of factors concerning the archive, from the involved actors to the technological choices, have increasingly entered historiographic discussions.[iii] With the widespread adoption of digital devices and the internet, the complexity of these debates has only intensified as the realm of digital archives has gained considerable attention within the fields of digital humanities and digital history.[iv]
Since 2020, I have been conducting research in the field of digital archives within Latin America, focusing particularly on the informal archives on the internet in Brazil and, more broadly, the landscape of Latin American digital archives in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. My doctoral research, conducted in Brazil from 2021 to 2024, centered on a fundamental question: how have records of the COVID-19 pandemic been archived in Latin America? In my dissertation, entitled “Archiving the Pandemic: Digital Transformation and the Fight for Memory in Latin America”, I explored the impact of digital transformation, examining the various actors, strategies, documentation processes, and projects specifically designed to archive aspects of life during the pandemic in the region.[v]
A significant portion of this work was composed during my tenure as a DH fellow at the IEG. During this period, I was able to discuss my research questions and findings with colleagues and through this very blog.[vi] To summarize briefly, the diversity and complexity of digital archiving are embodied in the wide array of initiatives undertaken by actors at various levels of formality, depicting a reality marked by both innovation and instability. Universities, public archives, activists, social media platforms, anonymous contributors, scholars, and volunteers represent some of the groups that have implemented varying methodologies to collect, organize, and provide access to records documenting life during the pandemic in Latin America.
In 2024, I returned to the IEG to once again study how current technical conditions influence the process of archiving contemporary events. However, this time my research is part of a broader project involving several institutions in Germany and beyond. The project, titled “LivArch – Documenting Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Challenges of Living Archives for Historical Knowledge Production”, is part of the Leibniz Collaborative Excellence funding program. It involves participants from the IEG, the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the Center for Urban History in L’viv, Hochschule Darmstadt – University of Applied Sciences, the University of Marburg, and Justus Liebig University Giessen.
The LivArch project is in its early stages. Nevertheless, I can already discern promising indicators that resonate with someone like me, who has been engaged in working with digital archives addressing today’s disruptive events for several years. The ongoing war in Ukraine, beginning in 2022, emanates characteristics also present in other disruptive events of the 21st century that encapsulate the challenges of archiving contemporary life. This is apparent through the emergence of new types of community-driven archives, the creation of archival material in real-time, and the dependency on digital sources due to the inaccessibility of physical archives, as one can see when visiting the website of the Ukrainian monitoring project The Most Documented War. It is reasonable to say that historical research on this conflict will depend on a multitude of digital-born sources that are primarily by grassroots activities through social media posts, chats, videos, mobile device snapshots, or georeferenced data from satellites. In essence, historians will be required to explore such archives to chronicle the history of this event, as well as to develop methodologies and theories to approach similar digitally archived events. Furthermore, from discussions with the LivArch partners in Ukraine and other locations, I have noted that there are sensitive and ethical considerations concerning such archives, especially when documenting traumatic scenes and potential war crimes, as might occur in a country invaded in a war. These shifts, moreover, present us with challenges regarding the integrity and sustainability of data when archiving the war.
All these aspects have not yet been systematically analyzed. Even within the broader boundaries of digital history, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how to foster the necessary digital advancement of the field of historical research in the context of new forms of archiving, particularly those that have developed during the war. Our research agenda for the upcoming years within the LivArch project aims to explore the impacts of transformation on archival practices and, at the same time, provide an assessment of the current state of the art in emergency digital preservation. We aim to achieve this with a strong focus on learning from the Ukrainian experience and establishing forms of shared authorship among scholars working on living and real-time archives as reusers of data, the scholars and activists who have created them, and the individuals behind the voices that constitute these archives. Through various formats of transnational collaboration, including an online workshop to be held at the IEG in January 2025, the LivArch project also seeks to identify and reflect on ethical challenges, develop heuristic tools, and consider the impact of the current scenario on the practice of writing history. However, if all of this seems overwhelming from the perspective of a blog post reader, we can always recall, as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, that we are not engaging in activities that are unprecedented for historians. As always, we are merely reacting and archiving (in the present), aiming for the continuity of history as a practice (in the future).
[i] Theodore R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques (Society of American Archivists, 1996).
[ii] Mario Wimmer, “The Present as Future Past: Anonymous History of Historical Times,” Storia Della Storiografia 68, no. 2 (2015): 165–83, https://doi.org/10.1400/240647.
[iii] Carolyn Hamilton et al., eds., Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002); Louise Craven, What Are Archives?: Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2016).
[iv] Ina Blom et al., Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology, and the Social (NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462982147.
[v] Ian Kisil Marino, “Arquivando a pandemia: transformação digital e luta pela memória na América Latina” (Campinas, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2024), https://www.repositorio.unicamp.br/acervo/detalhe/1395330?guid=1723471851654&returnUrl=%2fresultado%2flistar%3fguid%3d1723471851654%26quantidadePaginas%3d1%26codigoRegistro%3d1395330%231395330&i=1.
[vi] Ian Kisil Marino, “Digital archives of the COVID-19 pandemic: research notes,” Billet, Digital Humanities Lab (blog), September 12, 2022, https://dhlab.hypotheses.org/3582.
Featured image: Kornmarkt, Nürnberg, 20.02.2022, Markus Spiske at Flickr, CC BY 2.0
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Ian Marino (25. Oktober 2024). Historians and the archives of today: the LivArch project and the process of documenting the war in Ukraine. DH Lab. Abgerufen am 13. Februar 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/12kn5