Counter-Archives in Digital Spaces

Author

Patricia Belen, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Capstone Project

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Digital Humanities

Advisor

Duncan Faherty

Subject Categories

Art and Design | Digital Humanities | History | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Keywords

archives, counter-archives, digital archives, interface design, caricatures, tobacco

Abstract

As evidence of human activities and time periods, archives are invaluable resources for research and the historical record. Digital, public archives are powerful sites of memory and discourse. The New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections platform has provided over 900,000 prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, and more on their public website. Recent calls for museums and heritage institutions to confront their legacies of colonialism have led to scholarly and activist work in the area of counter-archives that address inequalities and empower excluded voices. Counter-Archives in Digital Spaces (https://counterarchives.com) is an interactive website that explores history and visual literacy using a group of digitized objects from the NYPL as the basis to form new perspectives and alternative narratives by exploiting artistic, experimental, and ludic strategies in interface design, suggesting how archives can be seen through new lenses. Using a data set of problematic cigarette cards from 1889, the website presents three case studies in what I term a "reluctant interface" that purposefully slows down and obfuscates the viewing experience for visual materials, an interface that is ambivalent about what it shows. The project uses an interactive experience that places the cards in various frameworks to posit questions of absence, visibility, representation, human value, and other provocations. Displaying counter-archives in a digital space has the potential to transform relationships between visual materials and between the viewer and the materials.

Recommended Citation

Belen, Patricia, "Counter-Archives in Digital Spaces" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5903