Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Valuing oral and written texts in Malawi
- 2 Building an evidenced-based culture for documentary heritage collections
- 3 Value in fragments: an Australian perspective on re-contextualisation
- 4 Trusting the records: the Hillsborough football disaster 1989 and the work of the Independent Panel 2010–12
- 5 Sharing history: coupling the archives and history compilation in Japan
- 6 Memories of the future: archives in India
- 7 Business archives in Hong Kong: an overview
- 8 The search for Ithaca? The value of personal memory in the archive of the digital age
- 9 The commercialisation of archives: the impact of online family history sites in the UK
- 10 A search for truthiness: archival research in a post-truth world
- Index
8 - The search for Ithaca? The value of personal memory in the archive of the digital age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Valuing oral and written texts in Malawi
- 2 Building an evidenced-based culture for documentary heritage collections
- 3 Value in fragments: an Australian perspective on re-contextualisation
- 4 Trusting the records: the Hillsborough football disaster 1989 and the work of the Independent Panel 2010–12
- 5 Sharing history: coupling the archives and history compilation in Japan
- 6 Memories of the future: archives in India
- 7 Business archives in Hong Kong: an overview
- 8 The search for Ithaca? The value of personal memory in the archive of the digital age
- 9 The commercialisation of archives: the impact of online family history sites in the UK
- 10 A search for truthiness: archival research in a post-truth world
- Index
Summary
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.
(Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale, 2004, dedication)‘Living Backwards’, repeated Alice in great astonishment, ‘I have never heard of such a thing!’ ‘But there's one great advantage in it’, said the White Queen, ‘that one's memory works both ways.’
(Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass, 1871, 196)Introduction
How do we remember? By recollection from our own memory: recurrent and reliable. Memories can enrich lives, affirm communities and reinforce cultures; they can inform, enlighten and endorse our identity, our family, our place and our history. Memories can be discovered and uncovered; alternatively, they may hide the truth of events. ‘Memories’, writes Steven Rose, ‘are our most enduring characteristic’ (1992, 1). Memories make us what we are. If Steven Rose is correct, memories must be of huge emotional importance to us. But how do we value personal memory? Is this too difficult to assess, or something simply taken as read: a given? In this chapter I would like to look at individual memory in the archive of the digital age and at its value. Immediately, though, other questions intervene: if the notion of the value of memory is to be explored, can we say what memory is? And can the value of memory be defined?
The topic of memory is highly complex and hugely significant. One of the difficulties of attempting to write critically about memory is the sheer enormity of the subject: the breadth and depth, from the ancient world to the 21st century, from rhetoric to stories, from ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ to cognitive psychology. And now, discussion about memory and its importance is everywhere. In recent years fresh ideas and new thoughts have emerged in a number of fields. New research throws light on any attempt to understand the many and various areas of memory. A brief exploration of these new developments might help us to perceive a little more about the value of memory. But first, to get a proper perspective and some understanding of what we mean by memory, we need to look briefly into the historical place of memory as a faculty and a facility from the Classical world to the 20th century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Do Archives Have Value? , pp. 117 - 140Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2018