Keynote: Living Archives and the Challenges of Doing Digital Public History in Real Time

Historical research and the production of historical narratives relies on archives. With thedigital turn, both the notion and the function of archive have changed. The practices ofselection, curation, and interpretation of archival sources have been deeply affected by newscientific virtues such as accessibility, sharing, and participation. Web 2.0 technologies and the Internet gave rise to a new type of archive resulting from real time “capture culture” and “event crawls”. This ideological shift from long-term conservation to instant accessibility and online sharing in archiving challenges the doing of public history in the digital age. This lecture will look at recent memory-bank projects and discuss if they can be interpreted as a democratization of historical knowledge production and promotion of shared authority between professionals in the field of cultural heritage and academic history and citizens.
What are the epistemological implications of “writing” history in real time and how does the construction of “living archives” impact on future narratives of history? The lecture proposes the concept of “digital hermeneutics” as a conceptual framework for doing of digital public history in a multi-vocal perspective and aims at exploring the opportunities and limitations of sharing authority in transmedia storytelling.