Salvador Barajas

Doing Collaborative Memory Work in the Age of Digital Technology

I welcomed the challenge of creating The Fight for Knowledge, using a communal approach to knowledge production, and figuring out the best digital platform to showcase the plethora of stories of school integration, civil rights, race, gender, education, and community in the city of Richmond, Virginia. While I had the technical skills to build an interactive repository, it would be challenging to build a new platform to incorporate all these voices and be a useful community and scholarly resource. 1

With Chris Kemp, Robert K. Nelson, and other digital scholars at the University of Richmond and in several online communities, I identified three possible open-source platforms—Omeka, Mukurtu, and dSpace—that addressed the needs of the digital archive for this project. After researching and testing all three, I chose Omeka, not least for its flexibility. Its "out of the box" content management tools facilitate integration of audio, video, and text-based elements without requiring the writing of complicated code. A number of open-source online communities shared patches of code or helped troubleshoot most issues with the platform, which was designed with communal sharing in mind. We painstakingly tested every available collaborative element in identifying the best platform for our project and having the most intuitive options available to our partners.

This platform gives our institutional partners full administrative access to upload and catalog primary sources, which have been digitized, into a "collection" or "exhibit" that best represents the civil rights focus of the collection. We integrated pictures and documents from the Valentine History Center's Robert A. Anderson Collection, including images of Dr. Martin Luther King's visit to Richmond in 1960 in support of Virginia Union University students who were leading demonstrations against segregation there. The James Branch Cabell Library's Special Collections shared a number of letters from white parents voicing their opposition to the integration of the Richmond public school system. We set up a similar mechanism, through our public contribution portal, for community members to upload written stories, images, or video that speak to their intimate experiences of this tumultuous time in Richmond's history. This is one way that nonacademic community members are able to contribute, to respond to, or to critique items in the collection. Contributors will have full attribution for the item(s) they share and will also be able to designate copyright parameters through either traditional understanding of copyright law or a Creative Commons license. This gives contributors some control over the personal memories they are sharing with our community.

Traditionally, archives have not been locations of democratic engagement and community empowerment. The history of archives as sites and mechanisms of cultural preservation and reservoirs of communal knowledge is troubling at best. In his limited but important discussion on the politics of the archive in Western thought, philosopher Jacques Derrida argues, "there is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory" (Derrida and Prenowits 1995, 11). The democratizing processes in the way we organize social relations and build communal knowledge "can always be measured by . . . the participation in and access to the archive" (Derrida and Prenowits 1995, 11). Communities have until recently been largely absent in the planning, design, and implementation of collecting processes. The promise of new technology is not an absolute solution to the difficult task of representing the plurality of communal memory and the relations of power (community/academic) that are still very much part of the archiving gesture (Jimmerson 2009). Part of our task is to raise some of these pressing concerns and engage with the larger academic dialogue about "delinking" the construction of communal memory from its privileged history and processes (Buchanan 2007). I draw here on the important work that questions knowledge and its relation to colonial mechanisms that, for the most part, favored Eurocentic models of knowing over those of their colonial subjects. Walter Mignolo (1992, 1995, 1999, 2007, 2011) stresses the importance of democratizing how we think about the production of knowledge by "delinking" it from colonial mechanisms and its replication in academic practices.2 In more simple terms, can we decolonize the archive? If so, how do emerging digital platforms make this possible?

Digital repository platforms such as Omeka are not designed to "decolonize" the archive, but they do make available features that in a small but significant way balance some of the asymmetries that have favored "professional" archivists and institutions. While Omeka still adheres to "professional" protocols and processes (metadata coding, digitizing parameters, and curatorial aesthetics), a "nonprofessional" archivist can, with some effort and time, learn the basic relational elements embedded in the platform and upload an item or create a collection.

As regards The Fight for Knowledge, we expect some community contributors will not be familiar with these processes, so we have created a series of do-it-yourself videos to help (http://www.thefightforknowledge.org/additional-resources ) . We will also have a place where educators will be able to download existing documents and upload new class resources to introduce and engage students in age-appropriate archival research. Educators will have administrative access to our YouTube channel and SoundCloud site where they may add their students' video and sound projects to our collection of interviews, digital stories, and news archival footage.

Incorporating these interactive and generative elements into our digital archive should help us open a productive dialogue with a new generation of learners that is not just using digital tools as supplemental resources but is already pushing our thinking about archiving personal and communal memory via social networks. We have high expectations for the design of this digital archive; however, we are aware that opening up a forum for dialogue around civil rights and communal memory can bring unexpected challenges. We are prepared to modify and update elements in the technology to meet the needs of a growing and shifting community of users. The tools we used should not stand in the way of anyone sharing their memories of living through this highly contested chapter in Richmond history. Part of our responsibility in creating a collaborative living memory repository is to value the university and community partners in equal measure—both in documenting and in opening a dialogue about Richmond's history of civil rights and education.

Works Cited