Digital Personal Memories: The Archiving of the Self and Public History

By providing a facilitated access to data storage, digital technologies seem to make expression and preservation of the self more straightforward. They reconfigure the means and forms of access to data, thus also affecting the relationships and participation of individuals in heritagization and history, and potentially impacting historians. This renews questions that scholars already know well, such as the place of memories in the making of history, and that of self-narratives.
Examining how “ordinary voices” can/could archive digital/digitized data and documents, this chapter aims at investigating this increased interest in preserving the self and memories, the heritagization of these data, and finally the role played by user-generated contributions in Digital Public History projects and in historical research in general.