"Building Critical Decolonial Digital Archives: Recognizing Complexities to Reimagine Possibilities"

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About the Author

Bibhushana Poudyal is currently a doctoral student and Assistant Instructor in Rhetoric and Writing Studies program at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Her research areas are Critical Digital Humanities, Critical Digital Archiving, and Digital Humanities in Transnational Contexts. Presently, her inquiries are directed toward Theories and Praxes of Situating/Situatedness and Decolonizing-Depatriarchalizing of Epistemes, Epistemologies, Ontologies, Digitalism, and Digital Archives.

Contents

Introduction

Methodological overview of critical digital archiving project

Exigency for Critical Decolonial Digital Archiving Project

What is (or why) archiving and digital archiving?

Critical Digital Archiving: Terminological, Conceptual, and Methodological Shifts

Conclusion

References

Critical Digital Archiving: Terminological, Conceptual, and Methodological Shifts

I would like to begin the conversation vis-à-vis critical digital archiving by quoting Vosloo (1995):

to burn with a passion for the past, a passion for the archive, is to aim for faithful testimony. . . . It also implies that the attempt at faithful testimony is not to be separated from justice. . . . The faithfulness to the past, faithful testimony, is not without implications for the present (and the future). (pp. 390-1)

This passion to know the past differently and to do archiving differently is an attempt to ethically intervene in the past, present, and hence, future from the otherwise centers, from the multidimensionality of the Other worlds that are pushed into oblivion. I call these theoretical interrogations and the methodological performance of archiving in digital spaces "digital archiving against the grain," a recognition of complexities to reimagine possibilities. In the prototype of the digital archive I am building, I am training myself to remain faithful to the past, present, and future. I am trying to do that not only by bringing in as many diverse pictures of Nepal as possible, but by admitting/confessing the precarities and negotiations involved even in the most faithful intentions of working toward a justice-oriented future. I do that via documentation and theorization of all the complexities I am experiencing in my archiving performance. For instance, while I was building a prototype of my archive, I faced a dilemma regarding which photography collection to start with. I wanted to start with the collection that I found very interesting while doing my street photography. It was of Shivaratri, a Hindu festival celebrated every year in honor of the Hindu god Shiva. That photography journey was different than much of the other "mundane" everydayistic street photography I was doing before that. That day stood out to me. Even while working on those photographs later, I had a different experience. I wanted to start with this collection. But one fear never left me. Am I exoticizing Nepal like most of those colonial texts? Am I producing yet another colonial text? Am I becoming a native informant?

The dilemma concerning the first photography collections was so powerful that I could not start uploading photographs for some time. The dilemma made me aware of the constraints created by my present geographical situatedness. If I am not starting with photographs of the Shivaratri festival–the collection I would have started with if I were building this archive in Nepal–it means I am already letting my situatedness in the US academic institution and the burden of colonialism make my decisions. I am already surrendering my freedom to choose. I had to remind myself so many times of the reason behind this project. I am not offering the audiences of my digital archive a holistic picture of Nepal (and I doubt if such a picture exits), but offering the antenarratives of what happens while building decolonial digital archives to make it evident that every picture is already fragmented. I am building a critical decolonial digital archive to recognize complexities by documenting and theorizing them so that reimagination and invention of affordances become possible. My insistence through this project is not to present the final version of a decolonial archive. But I aim to raise questions, discuss possibilities, and avoid pretending giving final answers. Because there is no final answer but only precarities and possibilities.

One of the ways I am beginning to reimagine possibilities is by writing research articles about precarities and complexities as nakedly as possible. These articles are the platform to inform others about my work, to ask for help, and to invite collaborations for discussing possibilities. The next dilemma I faced in building my platform was related to the metadata spaces in my digital archive. Metadata is “the term applied to information that describes information, objects, content, or documents” (Drucker, 2013, para. 7). I am building my digital archive in Omeka, which is a “web publishing platform and a content management system (CMS), developed by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University” and “developed specifically for scholarly content, with particular emphasis on digital collections and exhibits” (Bushong and King, 2013, para. 1). And Omeka uses the Dublin Core metadata standard, “one of the simplest and most widely used metadata schema,” which is “comprised of 15 'core' metadata elements” (UC Santa Cruz, n.d., para. 1-2).² The next step in my project is to study more about (Dublin Core) metadata and find ways to provide antenarratives of all these precarities, negotiations, and affordances through these metadata spaces. For instance, what was going on when I was deciding to start my digital archive with a photo collection of Shivaratri from the geographical and academic location of the United States? Why did I decide to go with that collection? Would I have gone with that collection if I didn’t have access to theorization through these research articles and that metadata space? These are the stories that I hope my metadata can help me tell.

Raising questions relentlessly is extremely important in recognizing and foregrounding the impossibility of the existence of the final signified. This recognition allows us not to take things for granted, not to remain in self-congratulatory mode, not to be self-contended, and not to let anything pass unexamined. This is even more important for the scholars who are engaging in the performance of studying the theory and praxis of (digital) archiving with decolonial orientations. Cushman (2013) emphasizes on asking certain questions: “Why archive in the first place? What types of mediation and information make collecting and displaying possible? What types of knowledge work do archives make possible and limit?” (p. 118). I spent a lot of time contemplating questions like these. And after waiting quite a while before uploading photographs to my archive, finally I decided to start with the collection of Shivaratri. Paradoxically the limitations that I was fearful of started appearing before me as possibilities too. The same photography collection is allowing me to ask these questions and gave me opportunities to reflect upon and offer the precarities involved in archival practices especially, as mentioned before, when the ecologies of such archival performances are emerging from complicated phenomena of post/de/colonialism and de/patriarchy.

These reflections also protect us from another complacency that writing in digital spaces and building digital archives achieves the end goal of justice. That is why, emphasizing the importance of careful and critical engagement with digital space and digital archiving, L'Internationale (2016) cautions against unreflective technoutopian archiving: “Digitisation and online sharing of vast amounts of archival documents can however, when they are done with no reflection, easily turn into a pseudo-democratic end in itself, resulting in an overload of the material available online” (Decolonial Archives, p. 6). Selfe and Selfe (1994) too caution against an oblivious technoutopianism and draw our attention to this aspect of technology that “computers are associated with the potential for great reform–they are not necessarily serving democratic ends,” and they “are also sites within which the ideological and material legacies of racism, sexism, and colonialism are continuously written and re-written along with more positive cultural legacies” (p. 484). In arguing how the work of technical communication cannot be imagined by dissociating it from the nexus of power and ideology, Barton and Barton (1993) write, “visual signification serves to sustain relations of domination. . . . Ideology performs such service with a Janus face–it privileges or legitimates certain meaning systems but at the same time dissimulates the fact of such privileging” (p. 49). Thus, unreflective performance with technology, however benevolent the intention might be, can actually solidify imperialist interests in, as Said (1978) argues about Orientalist projects, “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (p. 3) and further othering of the Others.

And as I have been emphasizing since the beginning of this article, this critical and ethical reflection requires one to move beyond disciplinary walls. This critical reflection needs an exhaustive analysis, which makes one seek more ways of asking questions to avoid from falling into oblivious gratification of any sort. And that critical reflection and exhaustive analysis require interdisciplinary and collaborative ways of asking questions and seeking possibilities. Despite some digital humanists’ hack and/or yack³ binaric debate–for instance, Stephen Ramsay, at the 2011 annual Modern Language Association convention, declared, “If you are not making anything, you are not . . . a digital humanist” (as cited in Gold, 2012, p. x)–there are digital humanist scholars who are treating hack and yack or building and theorizing in a non-binary manner. One of them is Johanna Drucker (2012), who writes,

The insights gleaned from poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and deconstruction altered our understanding of notions of meaning, truth, authorship, identity, subjectivity, power relations, bodies, minds, nations, intelligence, nature, and almost any other ontological category of cultural thought. Computation and digital techniques have been subject to plenty of rich discussion along deconstructive and postcolonial lines. But the distinction on which I am trying to call for a next phase of digital humanities would synthesize method and theory into ways of doing as thinking. (2012, p. 87)

This passage resonates with the argument of Jamie “Skye” Bianco (2012), who asserts, “we are not required to choose between the philosophical, critical, cultural, and computational; we are required to integrate and to experiment” (p. 101), and he adds, “This is not a moment to abdicate the political, social, cultural, and philosophical, but rather one for an open discussion of their inclusion in the ethology and methods of the digital humanities” (p. 102). The rupture of disciplinary boundaries and hack-yack binary–as advocated by Drucker, Bianco, and many other scholars–and a critical reflection and an exhaustive analysis are the first steps toward critical digital archiving.