Interface 1:2 Re/Collecting (original) (raw)

The three projects that are showcased in this issue—Digitizing Chinese Englishmen, the Re/Collecting Project, and 3-11—are part of a growing attempt to address these gaps by digitally recovering, collecting, and archiving the histories and presents of Asian and Asian American communities. The notion of recovery is of primary importance to both my own Digitizing Chinese Englishmen and Grace Yeh’s Re/Collecting Project. Digitizing Chinese Englishmen is a digital archival project that focuses on the digitization and dissemination of an Anglophone magazine, the Straits Chinese Magazine, produced by Malayan Chinese writers in the late nineteenth century. The hybrid identities of many of the publication’s authors—negotiating being pulled between the Chinese and British empires, while on Malayan colonial soil—provide a complex yet clear picture of the construction of later postcolonial Anglophone identity. In conceiving of the structure of the project, I also consider what makes up a “postcolonial” digital archive. Grace Yeh’s Re/Collecting Project, conversely, brings the importance of recovery to the mid- and late twentieth century, focusing on the narratives of voiceless Filipino workers in San Luis Obispo, on California’s Central Coast. Yeh’s project focused on turning objects that were not considered “collectible” by traditional archives into valuable historical memory— finding items in individuals’ garages, attics, and closets about a people’s forgotten agricultural labor and the impact of this labor. Though the project was originally conceived as a physical exhibition titled Routes and Roots, Yeh, realizing the importance of continued public access to these community stories and materials, launched the Re/Collecting Project to continue the project in virtual form. Re/Collecting is conceived of as an “ethnic studies memory project of California’s Central Coast.” Eric Dinmore’s digital archive of 3-11 brings us into the twenty-first century with documentation of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the associated tsunami and nuclear catastrophes of March 11, 2011. Dinmore notes that the type of collecting he encountered in creating a digital archive from 3-11 diverged greatly from the physical archives that he, as a historian, had been more used to encountering. While the historian’s usual archive generally means an often difficult-to-access, proprietary archive, the 3-11 archive was conceived of as “an open forum for the global online community to analyze, remember, and reflect on Japan’s envirotechnical tragedy.” This open forum included massive amounts of digital data, including social media posts from Twitter and Facebook, blog entries, discussion group postings, nongovernmental organization communications, and government websites. The sheer volume and rapid production of this material, Dinmore argues, demand that the twenty-first-century digital historian deeply reconsider the methodologies and impact of the archival process.