More process, less product: the making of the Making African Connections Digital Archive
More process, less product: the making of the Making African Connections Digital Archive
Reflecting in 2014 on the transformative impact of digitisation on access to and the study of African collections, Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace argued that whilst there had been positive change, in some respects African collections were just as – if not more – hidden than ever. It is in this context that the Making African Connections project sought to make a digital archive whose ends were to investigate – and make investigable – our process of making a digital archive, what we did in the making rather than the outputs of that making. This article explores key aspects of that work – forgoing detail, foregrounding multi-vocality, collapsing hierarchies, digitizing with care – and documents what we found as principles became actions, as product succumbed to process, as tensions and conflicts arose in the making of a 'decolonial' digital archive.
African collections, care, cataloguing, collapsing hierarchies, digital archive, digitisation, digitising with care, Dublin Core, hierarchies, James William Baker, knowledge organisation, Making African Connections, Marion Wallace, multi-vocality, multivocality, Omeka, spectrum, Terry Barringer, ‘decolonial’ digital archive
423-436
Baker, James
96e66490-0844-46eb-bc81-fbbc6bf38692
13 March 2025
Baker, James
96e66490-0844-46eb-bc81-fbbc6bf38692
Baker, James
(2025)
More process, less product: the making of the Making African Connections Digital Archive.
Third Text, 38 (4-5), .
(doi:10.1080/09528822.2025.2461371).
Abstract
Reflecting in 2014 on the transformative impact of digitisation on access to and the study of African collections, Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace argued that whilst there had been positive change, in some respects African collections were just as – if not more – hidden than ever. It is in this context that the Making African Connections project sought to make a digital archive whose ends were to investigate – and make investigable – our process of making a digital archive, what we did in the making rather than the outputs of that making. This article explores key aspects of that work – forgoing detail, foregrounding multi-vocality, collapsing hierarchies, digitizing with care – and documents what we found as principles became actions, as product succumbed to process, as tensions and conflicts arose in the making of a 'decolonial' digital archive.
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More Process Less Product
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Accepted/In Press date: 23 January 2023
e-pub ahead of print date: 13 March 2025
Published date: 13 March 2025
Keywords:
African collections, care, cataloguing, collapsing hierarchies, digital archive, digitisation, digitising with care, Dublin Core, hierarchies, James William Baker, knowledge organisation, Making African Connections, Marion Wallace, multi-vocality, multivocality, Omeka, spectrum, Terry Barringer, ‘decolonial’ digital archive
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 474872
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/474872
ISSN: 0952-8822
PURE UUID: cbb040d7-4f27-4bd6-bc78-d9fd26526b3b
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Date deposited: 06 Mar 2023 17:33
Last modified: 26 Sep 2025 04:01
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