Digital archives of private memory

Abstract

The author analyzes Russian and foreign, personal and public, private and institutional digital projects related to sources of personal memories. Descriptions of projects, their goals, the organization of personal memories are discussed in detail. At the center of the analysis is the project “The People's History of Russia” (pastandnow.ru), launched in 2018. This project involves collecting oral stories about the cities of Russia and districts of Moscow told by the locals. The article provides examples of how private memories become part of a public history, and reveals how the researchers work. The aim of the article is to show how knowledge about the past is produced in digital data storages: how the “exploratory selection” of memories takes place, how the researchers' knowledge about the content of interviews is structured, which fragments of personal memory are unrepresented on the map and “forgotten”. The main ideas of the article are 1) to show the ever-increasing role of non-institutional archives of private memory (lifelogging, blogging), private digital archives, scattered publications of memories on social networks; to collect collections of some of them in order to “save” them from digital oblivion; 2) to describe some digital archives, including English-language ones, analyzing their ways of organizing and presenting materials; 3) to make the process of creating a private memory archive “The People's History of Russia” (pastandnow.ru) an object of reflection: to show the tools of the developers, tools for analysis, search machine and data markup.