This was not a very good paper. I was very busy and I did not put my whole heart in it, which is always a shame. But a learning moment to remember to plan these things better

Slides

Google Gemini Summary of OHD_PRS_0118 - Connecting with history through our screen
[generated 06 / 01 / 2025]

Challenges with Existing Digital Archives: You effectively critique current digital archives, highlighting their limitations in capturing the serendipity and emotional connection often associated with physical archives. Issues such as clunky interfaces, limited search functionality, and the loss of contextual information are identified.

The "Archive-Robot" Metaphor: This is a novel and insightful perspective. By framing digital archives as "archive-robots" still under development, you emphasize the need for ongoing refinement and improvement. It shifts the focus from simply replicating physical archives to exploring new possibilities for digital interaction and engagement.

The Importance of Human Connection: You emphasize the importance of human interaction and the emotional connection to physical archives. You highlight the limitations of purely digital experiences and the need to consider the social and cultural contexts of archival research.

Ethical Considerations: You raise important ethical concerns regarding data privacy, digital inequality, and the environmental impact of digital technologies.

A Call for Innovation: You advocate for a more human-centered approach to digital archives, emphasizing the need for creativity, collaboration, and a willingness to experiment with new technologies and methodologies.

Key takeaways for your PhD research:

Focus on User Experience: Design digital tools that are intuitive, user-friendly, and enhance rather than hinder the research experience.
Embrace Collaboration: Foster close collaboration between oral historians, archivists, technologists, and community members throughout the design and development process.

Prioritize Sustainability: Consider the long-term sustainability of digital technologies, including maintenance, data preservation, and environmental impact.

Explore Innovative Approaches: Experiment with new technologies and methodologies, such as AI and machine learning, while also recognizing the limitations of technology and the importance of human interaction.

Overall, this presentation demonstrates a strong understanding of the challenges and opportunities presented by the intersection of oral history, technology, and heritage management. Your insightful observations and critical thinking will undoubtedly be valuable assets as you embark on this exciting research journey.

Script

Since the start of my PhD in January there are two things I have observed when people talk about archives during COVID.

1. People complain about the digital archives 
2. People express how much they missing brick and mortar archives

I, too, hold these opinions. I have recently started digging through the National Trust’s oral history archive which is housed at the British Library and it has not been the most relaxing affair. Every time I clicked on an entry and then wanted to go back to my search results I would have to refresh my page and if I accidentally clicked on any of the names that were hyperlinked in the entry pages I would lose my place in the archive and have to go back to the start. I also have very little experience of actually working in an oral history archive so really need to visit a brick and mortar archive that houses oral history. The only information I do have on listening to oral history in a brick and mortar archive comes from my friend who told me in horror how they had given a CD player and a broken set of headphones. 

What I am going to do for this presentation is dissect these two observations and explore how I can reframe these in order to use them in my work for my PhD.

Point 1! 

Let us start with the digital archives that so many of us have had to rely on over the last year. Digital archives exist because they are following the bigger trend of moving our lives online. But this move from brick and mortar to digital is about a literal as it can get. When I was going through the National Trust’s oral history archive it felt as if the British Library took the index cards that accompanied the recordings and just transcribe them into a webpage. They moved the collection online without thinking about how this new realm could enhance the experience of archive. Other than the fact that this makes going through the archive a bit frustrating and boring you also lose that serendipity that everyone always talks about when they are in brick and mortar archives: the scribble in the margins, the note lost in the pages of a book. These two things: the loss of serendipity and the direct translation is why I believe people are complaining.

So how do we solve this? To start with I suggest a reframing of what we think a digital archive is. As I previously mentioned a digital archive is not the digital equivalent of a brick and mortar archive because we lose that serendipity that we love so much. So what if we view the digital archive as a tool to access the information in the brick and mortar archive. Our computers, browsers and webpages then become the tools that grant us access to the archive, which is a role normally held by archivists. They are the people who usually accompany us in our journey through the brick and mortar archive. But our computers, browsers and webpages are not the same as a fully trained archivist. An archivist is a human who is capable of complex and creative thought. They can solve problems and navigate around barriers, while a computer is only as creative as its database and code allows it to be. So we could view digital archives as a digital alternative to archivists but I believe this would still cause frustration, because within this framing we are still comparing the new digital archives to the old brick and mortar archives and in this fight the brick and mortar archives have the creative upper hand (for now.)

So I would like to propose another way of framing our digital archives. A couple of weeks ago I attended a seminar on AI. During the seminar, Professor Irina Shklovski from the University of Copenhagen presented a paper called AI as Relational Infrastructure. She discussed how the way we view AI is all wrong. We view AI as a tool we can used but Shklovski suggested that we should view it as a relationship, an exchange of skills and knowledge. So I translated this principle onto my work in the National Trust’s oral history archive. This translation made me view my computer, the browser and this British Library portal as an archive-robot that was trying to help me navigate the messiness of the brick and mortar archive on the other side of my screen. However this archive-robot is very new to the archive; we need to remember that digital archives are the new kids on the block and these archive-robots do not know the ways of the archive yet. The way that I currently picture this relationship is as follows. Here we have our archive-robot who has just started their new job at the archive, they do not really know what they are doing, they might have even lied a bit on the CV. Along come a lot of random people who start handing all their documents, notes, and other bits and bobs over to the archive-robot, who and I cannot stress this enough has no idea what they are doing, and expects them to just sort everything out. This is a rather tall order as we already know that archive-robots cannot think as creatively as a human-archivist – yet. What we need to do now as a community that uses these archives is train these new kids in archiving because in the end they will help us in our research. 

I know this sounds like I am advocating robot rights. Maybe I am a bit but what I really trying to say is that instead of viewing digital archives as the digital equivalent of brick and mortar archives, or viewing them as tools to access those archives, you can view them as an archive-robot who is trying to adapt to this new world as much as you are. It might sound like a silly idea but I can tell you from experience it eases the frustration a bit. And most importantly if we view our digital archives like this we put ourselves into a mindset that allows us to seek progress and development in our digital archives and not just settle for this rather crude translation of brick and archives. Digital archives are still in development and I think that if we see them more like archive-robots in training then maybe we can help them help us. 

Point 2!

People miss brick and mortar archives. Other than the fact that we don’t really like digital archives right now, I think there is something deeply emotional about people’s desire to reenter brick and mortar archives. Even though we might have access to certain documents online, people still want to be near the physical document. Just like how people travel to see the Mona Lisa despite the fact that everyone knows what the Mona Lisa looks like. This feeling, this desire, this need to be in the physical space I also see in my mother, who because of the pandemic has not been able to travel to her motherland the Netherlands for nearly a year now. Just like the archive-robots allow us to connect to the brick and mortar archives, my mother has been able to connect to her homeland via her devices be that FaceTime with her sister, watching dutch tv, reading dutch newspapers or listening to dutch radio. But we know it is not the same as physically being there. She wants to connect to the land. She wants to be in that physical environment. And I think this feeling is very similar to people missing brick and mortar archives as if the archive is their motherland.

I think it is necessary to understand the importance of this connection when it comes to research. Connecting with your subject of your research in an emotional way can help one be more responsible in how we handle our archival material. This is especially important in cases where the archival material is from someone who is still alive or has close living relatives, which is something that is very common with oral history. When we use our digital devices to access archival material or in fact do anything that involves interacting with humans dead or alive online we have something I am going to call “digital distance”. 

Through our screens we reduce humans to a handful of pixels, a username and 240 character statements. This is digital distance and the reason why some people do or say bad things because that person to them is not fully human because the way they are presented on our screens is not fully human – you cannot look them in the eye. Now obviously you cannot look the creators of archival material in the eye because most likely they are dead. But their humanity is present in the archives in their bad handwriting, spelling mistakes and doodles. Physically being with the documents, imagining what they smelt, felt and saw when they were creating this document makes us connect on an emotional level. It reminds you that these are not just bits of isolated evidence but actually are part of a wider portrait of someone’s life. You become invested in this ghost type thing and the only way to truly feel their presence is by being in the brick and mortar archive. 

This feeling of closeness that people want to have with the Mona Lisa and feeling of belonging that people have with their motherland they can be found in people desire to go back into brick and mortar archives. It is a connection that is strange and maybe nothing completely logical but very human. I think by reframing this observation as the archive as motherland highlights the importance of the physical in archiving. It is a physical activity and the fact that it is physical plays an important role in responsible researching.  

How does this help me?

For my PhD I have been challenge with building an oral history archive-esque thing at the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland. 

So, how can this reframing of observations into the archive-robot and the archive-motherland help me build an archive?

Reframe 1

As I said previously by reframing the frustrations of the digital archive into the naive archive-robot we put ourselves into a position where we want actively want change. We are thinking about what the archive-robot might look like when they grow up. What this reframing allows me to do is start thinking in terms of design-driven innovation. Design-driven innovation is a term used by the design scholar Roberto Verganti in a book by the same name. The idea behind design-driven innovation is seeking to change the meaning of an object or system. For example, corkscrews are there to open my wine but this corkscrew by Alessi “dances” for you and plays on you inner child. Similarly portable music players allowed you to listen to music on the move, but the iPod allowed you to cheaply buy songs from iTunes and then curate them into your own personal soundtrack. 

Here we have two axis: change in technology and a change in meaning both have a scale from incremental to radical change. In the corner we have market pull/user-centered design. Here we have the bubble design-driven innovation, where see radical change in meaning and the bubble technological push where there is radical change in technology. In this yellow part where there is a radical change in meaning but not in technology we find designs like Alessi’s corkscrew. In this blue section we find technologies like the first mp3 player, which was a significant technological upgrade from portable cassette and cd players. Now in this green part we find the iPod. This green part is what Verganti refers to as a technological epiphany. 

Currently our digital archives and archive-robots live here in the blue section where there is an upgrade in technology but not in meaning. As I said using the British Library does feel like they uploaded the index cards. By the way, this is not a just people being silly, human kind always does this when there is a change in technology. The first cars looked like carriages and our save button looks like a floppy disc. We don’t like radical change so we keep the meaning and symbols. But for my PhD I want to do what Apple did in 2001 and also achieve a technological epiphany. I want to upgrade the archive-robot because I think this is the perfect opportunity to do so when everyone is using digital-archives so much and complaining about them. 

Reframe 2

So how will I use this idea of the archive-motherland in my work. As I briefly mention before oral history often deals with people who are still alive so looking after their archival material responsibly is imperative. That is why I do not think it is too much to ask that if you want to take information from the community you should probably think about becoming part of that community. And the only way to do that is to physically go there and look the people in the face. This is not a new idea there are many archives that only allow you to access the oral history recordings if you are in the building where they are stored. This is the case with the National Trust’s oral history archive which you can only listen to if you are in the British Library. Now I think you might be able to predict what my problem with this is. The British Library is in London and quite some miles away from Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland. So if I want to keep this principle of connecting to history through physical space I might have to very politely ask the British Library if they could maybe bend the rules for me. 

Conclusion!

I think that what I am trying to get at here is that through these observations and reframing I think I can say that connecting with history is a deeply human process. And the way we do it and the way it is changing because of technology and the pandemic is nothing new to human kind. I think that while we do pursue these new technologies we also need to remember that emotional connection we have within the brick and mortar archives. I do not know for sure what archives will look like in a years time but a lot of it with have started now during the pandemic.

I really want to end on a quick note that I think it is really important to remember that the internet and the servers that the internet is store on use up a truly insane amount of energy and are very bad for the environment and the majority is own by amazon, which is actually a terrifying idea when you think about it.