Between Lived and Archived Memory: How Digital Archives Can Tell History

Abstract

Digital archives, as they are set up online by Indian stakeholders, perform the dual task of involving practices of lived memory and storing archival information. They decidedly claim to preserve the past, and they actively engage users as prosumers on the web who interact with the creation and sharing of the digital archives’ content. Two Indian digital archives exemplify how this is done successfully. These archives are thus digital spaces that scrutinize the distinct line between lieux de memoire and milieux de memoire as a conventional concept of distinguishing history from memory. Yet, at the same time, they rely on ideas of History and memory that reinvent notions of archives as authoritarian voices.