Moving Past: Making Space for Memory after the Boston Marathon Bombing

In the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, visitors from across the US and the world descended on Boston to pay their respects to the three people who were killed and the more than 260 who were injured at the race\u27s finish line. The public commemorated the tragedy in multiple and diffuse spaces, both physical and virtual. In recognition of this fact, I use the changing location of the spontaneous shrine as an organizing structure for this study, analyzing the memorialization in three movements,” each of which corresponds to a physical relocation of the shrine itself in the weeks following the tragedy. Conducting interviews with Springfield, Missouri, residents who were present for the 2013 Boston Marathon and analyzing stories and interviews from the digital archive, I argue that bodily movement is the defining characteristic of the Boston Marathon memorialization process. The reflexive process of sharing material things and personal stories related to the bombing enhances the significance of the Marathon\u27s finish line in the public imagination, lending these artifacts the iconic power to shape attitudes toward the event. My conclusion is twofold: first, digital archives, while increasingly common, are inadequate for fully preserving memory. Second, the fact that the archivists when preserving do not distinguish between sacred and non-sacred implicitly deems all things worth saving. What is discarded, however, is the constellation of embodied interactions that led to their coexistence at a location characterized as sacred space

Counter archives: unfolding hidden stories

We select what we value as history creating collective memory that can obfuscate or devalue other threads in the story intentionally or unintentionally. Through collections of material culture, curated and described by archivists, we receive information that constructs our collective memory of self. These cultural artifacts reflect and reconstruct the past. Material artifacts in the archives depend largely on the story that is told about their provenance to provide meaning. This paper takes photographic collections in archives as examples of material culture to demonstrate how archival presentation affects the stories of collections items, and examines modalities and subverted stories in archival collections. Often acting as boundary objects that create, subvert, or erase cultural memory, archival collections are subject to interpretation and in turn affect our collective memory. Text-based documents, manuscripts, were traditionally considered the core medium through which knowledge is transmitted in archives. The evolution of photography as a mode of recording the human experience impacted the archival approach and photographs soon became part of the historical record. Archivists are trained to treat collections objectively, taking cues for description from the context of the source, and to minimally interpret these objects. Instead, archivists largely leave interpretation to the researcher who visits the archives specifically for that purpose. However, as other scholars of archives have addressed elsewhere, archives are far from neutral. Addressing the gaps this supposed neutrality leaves, I take an ethnographic approach to further interpret and pull from the hidden stories within the collections by examining three archival collections processed over the past ten years. Applying an ethnographic lens to “read” the photos, multiple narratives become evident. Emphasized here is the impact of archival records on what we remember about ourselves as a society, because we are as much what we forget as we are what we remember

PROUST AND SCHELLING ON MEMORY AND TRUTH

Proust and Schelling ask, in their different ways, what is our rapport to the past? What is our relationship to the past such that it can offer us the truth about itself, about its appearance, about our perception of its appearance and finally, about ourselves? Were we there when it happened (which asks the same as ‘did we have being when it happened’), has it happened and has it finished happening? In the Ages of the World, Schelling explicates an ontology of the past. His formulation of being which exists although it has no being is a useful framework within which the past can be situated as a relationship to the present, that is to say, it is where non-being can exist in relationship to the being of the present, which I use as a formulation for memory throughout my discussion of Proust. KEYWORDS

Ancestral Queendom: Reflections on the Prison Records of the Rebel Queens of the 1878 Fireburn in St. Croix, USVI (formerly the Danish West Indies)

This article is written in what can be described as the “post-centennial” era, post 2017, the year marked by the 100th anniversary of the sale and transfer of the Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States. 2017 marked a shift in the conversation around and between Denmark and its former colonies in the Caribbean, most notably the increasing access of Virgin Islanders to the millions of archival records that remain stored in Denmark as they began to emerge in online databases and temporarily in exhibitions. That year the Virgin Islands Studies Collective, a group of four women (La Vaughn Belle, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer and Tiphanie Yanique) from the Virgin Islands and from various disciplinary backgrounds, also emerged with an intention to center not only the archive, but also archival access and the nuances of archival interpretation and intervention. This collaborative essay, Ancestral Queendom: Reflections on the Prison Records of the Rebel Queens of the 1878 Fireburn in St. Croix, USVI (formerly the Danish West Indies), is a direct engagement with the archives and archival production. Each member responds to one of the prison records of the four women taken to Denmark for their participation in the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history. Their reflections combine elements of speculation, fiction, black feminitist theory and critique as modes of responding to the gaps and silences in the archive, as well as finding new questions to be asked

All I could to save Our state Black Virginians\u27 participation in the Great War

Historians have started to devote more attention to the drastic changes experienced by African Americans during the First World War. Recent works that have investigated blacks’ participation in the army and activism during the war have focused on broad national movements, without taking into account the regional and local differences found at the state level. Through investigation of the Virginia War History Commission questionnaires, black newspapers, and other sources, a more complex view of black experience in Virginia during the war emerges. The unique political and racial landscape of the state, labeled as the “Virginia Way,” meant blacks faced higher rates of conscription, placement in all black service battalions, and rough conditions at camps both in Virginia and in France. However, these sources also point to a black community that understood the bureaucratic and racist implications of the war, and actively tried to better their situation

Native American Empowerment Through Digital Repatriation

Following the Enlightenment, Western adherence to positivist theory influenced practices of Western research and documentation. Prior to the introduction of positivism into Western scholarship, innovations in printing technology, literary advancements, and the development of capitalism encouraged the passing of copyright statutes by nation-states in fifteenth century Europe. The evolution of copyright and positivism in Europe influenced United States copyright and its protection of the author, as well as the practice of archiving and its role in interpreting history. Because Native American cultures practiced orality, they suffered the loss of their traditional knowledge and cultural expressions not protected by copyright. By incorporating postmodern perspectives on archiving and poststructuralist views on the formation of knowledge, this thesis argues that Native American tribes now use Western forms of digital technology to create archives, record their histories, and reclaim control of their traditional cultural expressions

The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age

Almost all aspects of the historian's research workflow have been transformed by digital technology. The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age equips historians to be self-conscious practitioners by making these shifts explicit and exploring their long-term impact. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

The DNA Cloud: Is it Alive?

In this analysis, I will firstly be presenting the current knowledge concerning the materiality of the internet based Cloud, which I will henceforth be referring to as simply the Cloud. For organisation purposes I have created two umbrella categories under which I place the ongoing research in the field. Scholars have been addressing the issue of Cloud materiality through broadly two prisms: sociological materiality and geopolitical materiality. The literature of course deals with the intricacies of the Cloud based on its present ferromagnetic storage functionality. However, developments in synthetic biology have caused private tech companies and University spin-offs to flirt with the idea of a DNA-based cloud system. This prospect inevitably gives birth to unaddressed questions pertaining to the biological (nucleotides instead of magnetic disks) materiality of an upcoming cloud system of this nature, since the relevant queries bleed into fields of materiality of the human soul and body and even the materiality of knowledge and memory. This novel investigation I will be conducting concerns a speculative cloud model, the technological mechanics of which are presently in an embryonic stage, and a basic question which is if this fabricated creation could be considered potentially alive

Let\u27s Go Camping: A Physical Experience on a Virtual Platform

Camp Kawanhee is celebrating its 100th Anniversary in 2020. How can creating an Esri Story Map using archival materials from the camp at its 100th Anniversary help individuals connect to their own time at camp, engage with the camp’s history, and offer present experiences? By utilizing the software Story Maps, I have created a platform that shares special moments in Camp Kawanhee’s history. Digitized items from my summer at Camp Kawanhee (brochures, pamphlets, letters, and photographs) are utilized in my story map to create a narrative of the past and present. By drawing upon literature on digital tourism and history, I created a plan that can be a guide for other situations, particularly small institutions that have rich archival collections. I have also examined the role summer camp plays in youth identity, and how memory and nostalgia interact with an individual\u27s sense of self. Through this project I make collections available to alumni who cannot be physically present, thereby strengthening alumni ties during important anniversary events. This has become increasingly important with the COVID-19 crisis. With this digital project alumni and current campers will be able to reflect on past events and how they have shaped the present camp space