BBC Pebble Mill: issues around collaborative community online archives – a case study of the Pebble Mill Project

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-52
Author(s):  
Vanessa Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Online Community ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Community Archives ◽  
Collaborative Community ◽  
Online Resource ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Interaction ◽  
Community Archive ◽  
Community Projects

This chapter considers the Pebble Mill project. The project is a multi-media online resource, with social media interaction on Facebook, where members of an online community build an ‘idiosyncratic archive’ of memories and artefacts, including photographs, videos, audio, and written text, creating a democratic history of BBC Pebble Mill, which complements the BBC's institutional archive. Some of the tensions and limitations of community archive projects are explored, including moderation, ethics, and legal matters, namely defamation and copyright. One of the major challenges for community archives regards the continuing commitment of ‘citizen curators’, the facilitators of online community projects, whose labour includes devising policies, moderating, and encouraging engagement. Issues of longevity and sustainability are considered, along with the vulnerability of online collections in a precarious virtual world, where platforms are subject to evolution, or removal — threatening the survival of small projects.

scholarly journals Museums and the Traps of Social Media: The Case of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum

2020 ◽  
pp. 223-250
Author(s):  
Ewa Manikowska
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Good Practice ◽  
Mission Statements ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of

In this article I discuss both the recent threats as well as opportunities posed by social media to the activities of museums, taking into account social media’s importance as an evolving space of both social outreach and social activism. Recalling the controversies around the U.S. and UK museums’ social media responses to George Floyd’s death, I argue that museums run the risk of politicization and entanglement in controversial issues which are not necessarily linked to their profile and mission. I analyse museums’ social media guidelines, good practices, and mission statements, and posit that they play a fundamental role in integrating the new realm of the Web 2.0 into traditional museum activities. My main case study and example of good practice is the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. It has constantly embedded general ethical and educational principles and guidelines of Holocaust commemoration and education into its more than 60-years’ experience in dealing with and taming political and cultural controversies surrounding this memory site of universal importance, and this embeddedness lies at the core of its social media activity. Defined as an “online community of remembrance”, it consists of well-thought-out initiatives which aim at informing the public about the everyday history of the camp, involving itself in the current commemorations and anniversaries, and rectifying simplifications and misinformation about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. I also analyse the fundamental role played by the official social media profiles in managing the crisis which arose at the beginning of 2018 with the amendment of the socalled “Holocaust Law” in Poland.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

Turning Aliens into Socialists

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Jessica Moberg
Keyword(s):  
Outer Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Swedish History ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Highly Evolved

Immediately after the Second World War Sweden was struck by a wave of sightings of strange flying objects. In some cases these mass sightings resulted in panic, particularly after authorities failed to identify them. Decades later, these phenomena were interpreted by two members of the Swedish UFO movement, Erland Sandqvist and Gösta Rehn, as alien spaceships, or UFOs. Rehn argued that ‘[t]here is nothing so dramatic in the Swedish history of UFOs as this invasion of alien fly-things’ (Rehn 1969: 50). In this article the interpretation of such sightings proposed by these authors, namely that we are visited by extraterrestrials from outer space, is approached from the perspective of myth theory. According to this mythical theme, not only are we are not alone in the universe, but also the history of humankind has been shaped by encounters with more highly-evolved alien beings. In their modern day form, these kinds of ideas about aliens and UFOs originated in the United States. The reasoning of Sandqvist and Rehn exemplifies the localization process that took place as members of the Swedish UFO movement began to produce their own narratives about aliens and UFOs. The question I will address is: in what ways do these stories change in new contexts? Texts produced by the Swedish UFO movement are analyzed as a case study of this process.

Ethics of Conducting Virtual Ethnography on Visual Platforms

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-178
Author(s):  
Kayla Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Gender Segregation ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Virtual Ethnography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Standard Set ◽  
Potential Risks ◽  
Visually Based ◽  
Diverse Groups

For scholars, the internet provides a space to study diverse groups of people across the world and can be a useful way to bypass physical gender segregation and travel constraints. Despite the potential for new insights into people’s everyday life and increased attention from scholars, there is no standard set of ethics for conducting virtual ethnography on visually based platforms, like YouTube and Instagram. While publicly accessible social media posts are often understood to be a part of the public domain and thus do not require a researcher to obtain a user’s consent before publishing data, caution must be taken when studying members of a vulnerable community, especially those who have a history of surveillance, like African-American Muslims. Using a womanist approach, the author provides recommendations for studying vulnerable religious groups online, based on a case study of a YouTube channel, Muslimah2Muslimah, operated by two African-American Muslim women. The article provides an important contribution to the field of media studies because the author discusses a “dead” online community, where users no longer comment on the videos and do not maintain their own profiles, making obtaining consent difficult and the potential risks of revealing information to an unknown community hard to gauge.

A Case Study on the Process of Creating Interests in History of History-Deokhu

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Young-Seok Seo ◽  
Bong-Seok Kim
Keyword(s):  
History Of

Scales and Units

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn M. de Luna
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
The North ◽  
First Case ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
River Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Approaches

This chapter uses two case studies to explore how historians study language movement and change through comparative historical linguistics. The first case study stands as a short chapter in the larger history of the expansion of Bantu languages across eastern, central, and southern Africa. It focuses on the expansion of proto-Kafue, ca. 950–1250, from a linguistic homeland in the middle Kafue River region to lands beyond the Lukanga swamps to the north and the Zambezi River to the south. This expansion was made possible by a dramatic reconfiguration of ties of kinship. The second case study explores linguistic evidence for ridicule along the Lozi-Botatwe frontier in the mid- to late 19th century. Significantly, the units and scales of language movement and change in precolonial periods rendered visible through comparative historical linguistics bring to our attention alternative approaches to language change and movement in contemporary Africa.

Case Study: Rome's House of Memory and History: The Politics of Memory and Public Institutions

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Portelli
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Political Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambitious Program ◽  
The City

This article centers around the case study of Rome's House of Memory and History to understand the politics of memory and public institutions. This case study is about the organization and politics of public memory: the House of Memory and History, established by the city of Rome in 2006, in the framework of an ambitious program of cultural policy. It summarizes the history of the House's conception and founding, describes its activities and the role of oral history in them, and discusses some of the problems it faces. The idea of a House of Memory and History grew in this cultural and political context. This article traces several political events that led to the culmination of the politics of memory and its effect on public institutions. It says that the House of Memory and History can be considered a success. A discussion on a cultural future winds up this article.

The Wolf Man’s Glückshaube: Rereading Sergei Pankejeff’s Memoir

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 789-814
Author(s):  
Anat Tzur Mahalel
Keyword(s):  
Complex Matrix ◽  
Neurotic Symptom ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Wolf Man

A comparative reading of Freud’s canonical case study “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918) and the memoir written by the protagonist of that study, Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man (1971a), centers on the complex matrix of meanings embodied in the act of lifting the veil. The neurotic symptom of a veil seemingly in front of the analysand’s eyes is interpreted by Freud as a repetition of his birth in a Glückshaube (German for “caul,” literally a “lucky hood”). The veil is represented as an ambivalent object both for Freud and for Pankejeff, who are enticed by the sense of a final truth behind the veil yet constantly doubt the possibility of grasping it. For Freud, psychoanalysis is the very process of lifting the veil, yet his analysand remained for him an unsolved riddle. Pankejeff, in a volume dedicated to his identity as the Wolf Man (Gardiner 1971a), created an autobiographical text that deliberately avoids telling the story of the analysand, thus drawing a veil over his story. The paradox embodied in lifting the veil is discussed in relation to Walter Benjamin’s distinction between materiality and truth and his notion of the inherent unity of the veil and the veiled (1925).

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