Digital Archives and Digital Publics

Catalog description

This course considers the (perhaps surprisingly) long history of digital archives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, surveying various efforts of academic institutions, community organizers, activists, amateurs, and anarchists, examining digitized and “born-digital” materials, reflecting on relationships between ideas of cultural value and forms of materiality, technology, access, and dissemination. Particular attention will be paid to imagined audiences and uses of digital archives: scholarly, political, speculative, creative, memetic, and otherwise. This course provides students with opportunities to learn from archivists (and to visit local special collections on/off-campus) and to develop projects informed by best practices in digital public humanities.