The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Institutional Repository

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
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.
0952-8822
Baker, James
96e66490-0844-46eb-bc81-fbbc6bf38692
Baker, James
96e66490-0844-46eb-bc81-fbbc6bf38692

Baker, James (2023) More Process, Less Product: the making of the Making African Connections Digital Archive. Third Text. (In Press)

Record type: Article

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.

Text
Baker_MAC_Third-Text_accepted - Accepted Manuscript
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (65kB)

More information

Accepted/In Press date: 23 January 2023

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 474872
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/474872
ISSN: 0952-8822
PURE UUID: cbb040d7-4f27-4bd6-bc78-d9fd26526b3b
ORCID for James Baker: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-2682-6922

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 06 Mar 2023 17:33
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 07:39

Export record

Download statistics

Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.

View more statistics

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact ePrints Soton: eprints@soton.ac.uk

ePrints Soton supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

This repository has been built using EPrints software, developed at the University of Southampton, but available to everyone to use.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies on the University of Southampton website.

×