Unruly Practice: Critically Evaluating the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives

Abstract

This essay critically analyzes the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), an online public collection of over 8,000 personal accounts related to literacy and learning. Intentionally designed to be somewhat unruly, the DALN’s collaborative collection and participatory curation of self-representations can also be understood as an experiment in critical archival practice. Through that lens, this article explores the ongoing challenges of open access and ethical curation in the hybrid academic, public, community-engaged DALN: How do technological and administrative infrastructures shape the power dynamics of open digital archives? Reflecting on its evolution, the authors examine the DALN’s processes and back-end design through key issues of provenance, custody, representation, and usability. This case study demonstrates how project infrastructure is inextricable from values, with implications for the study and practice of other unruly critical archives. We believe it is a strength of the DALN that the stories within it are voluntarily contributed, unedited, and personally composed. Narratives submitted to the DALN are screened only to ascertain that they are indeed about literacy, in the broadest possible sense, and not spam submitted by hackers. ... Collectively, we hope, these stories form an unruly collection that escapes the control of our own limited vision. —Selfe & the DALN Consortium, 2013 Becoming unruly is hard. —Bloome, 2013