Making Memories
Memory without Body: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the 1947 Partition Memory on Facebook
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kovida Mehra
The collective memory of the 1947 Partition has persisted for its survivors through oral history and storytelling, passed from generation to generation. Since the early 2010s, online memorialisation and digital archiving have stepped in as carriers of memories, creating technological tributaries for these memories to spread beyond the confines of family history. The 1947 Partition Archive on Facebook is one such resource, that records memorial evidence of the Partition, and this project traces the trajectory of memory in a technologically mediated environment to identify its communicative and cultural qualities. Here, Aleida and Jan Assmann’s conceptions of cultural memory theory, emanating from collective memory, are used in conjunction with frameworks of technologically mediated memory. While memory theory largely forms the groundwork for this inquiry, Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis is used to examine the contents of the 1947 Partition Archive Facebook page to uncover textual, discursive, and societal themes of cultural memory production and dissemination. This study also provides insights into how Facebook conducts the production of cultural memory and artificially produces its themes when living testimonial memory fades. An additional outcome of this study is the induction of South Asian, and specifically, Indian postcolonial memory into literature on memory theory and mediated memory, which has previously been occupied majorly by World War 2 and Holocaust memory – although this has served as a significant entry point for this study, it is crucial to extend its scope for the admission of new ways of processing memory and re-living its lessons.
Digital Text's Documentation: Approaching Text as Documentation within the Digital Humanities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marc Kosciejew
Within the digital humanities, text is often privileged. The core concern of digital humanities research and studies tends to focus on text and textual analyses. The materiality of text is often overlooked. Text, however, does not exist outside of the physical support instantiating it. The materiality of digital text should be foregrounded within the digital humanities to illuminate its fundamental role in transforming text into diverse physical instantiations that are used for diverse purposes, needs, and tasks. This paper therefore calls for greater documentary analyses of text, with a specific emphasis on exploring the documentation of digital text. It argues that documentation is necessary for the materialization of text into material instantiations that can be interacted with, engaged, and used. Documentation determines the kinds, forms, and formats of text that can be inscribed into or displayed on a specific medium that, in turn, shapes the affordances of and practices with that text. By drawing attention to documentation and its associated affordances and practices, the object status of digital texts is foregrounded by documentary analyses. It presents a tripartite model of digital documentation to uncloak the complex material constitution of digital documents and, thus, digital text. This model helps demonstrate the extent to which digital text exists in and as digital documents. The virtual world of the digital humanities, and its respective texts and documentation, is indeed a material world.
