Digital Archives as a Public Good: The Letters 1916-1923 Project

How can digital archives help societies confront contested pasts without merely replicating traditional historiography? Designing participatory digital commons can be a way to transcend the concept of digital archives as static repositories but make them sites of active, multi-voiced memory. Ideally, digital archives also challenge dominant interpretation frameworks and offer an important counterpoint to extractive (social media) platforms. Our paper explores how the Irish Letters 1916-1923 project, through its infrastructure and ethos, can serve as a model for participatory knowledge infrastructures.