A Migrant’s Story: Digital Archives, the Other, and the Wokeward Shift

Hands on History session with Adam Crymble (UCL)

Who do we digitize for? Who did we forget?

The age of mass digitisation of cultural heritage may well be behind us. From the 1990s to about 2010, billions of images, bits of paper, and even physical objects were transformed into a digital form and served up – often freely – on the web. The work was done by archivists, librarians, museum and gallery staff, historians, humanities scholars, and sometimes even enthusiasts. But these digitisers and the funders who supported them were not from a representative cross-section of humanity. They made well-intentioned choices during the selection and digitisation process. But whose interests have been served by those choices? And now that the money for large-scale digitisation projects is increasingly hard to come by, what does that mean for other voices?

Adam Crymble is a historian of migration and digital humanities scholar. His work considers the migrant experience and the ways that digital methods, archives, and twenty-first century culture shape the ways we can and do understand the lives of historical people on the move.

If you want to participate in this online event, please send an e-mail to vanessa.napolitano@uni.lu to receive the link.