I was invited today by the American Centre in Colombo today to deliver a lecture on digital archives in general, from the perspective of a citizen archivist. The presentation looked at the ways information around contemporary events, issues and processes, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, are being generated digitally and largely lost for posterity, raising the challenge of archiving this plethora of content. The presentation also looked at how subjective curation, collective participation, the democratisation of technical platforms and their use have radically altered how we perceive our past, re-examine our present and capture multiple truths.
2. Origin early 17th cent. (in the sense ‘place where
records are kept’): from French archives (plural),
from Latin archiva, archia, from Greek arkheia
‘public records’, from arkhē ‘government’.
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The verb dates from the late 19th Century.