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Affective Collections: Exploring Care Practices in Digital Community Heritage Projects

  • Author / Creator
    Grant, Kaitlyn A.
  • My thesis examines how digital community heritage projects use care practices based in community participation and co-creation to build a care-based collection model. These grassroots initiatives aim to gather and document community history by engaging community members in the collection building process. This research investigates how the Flin Flon Heritage Project and Harvest Moon Oral History use collection, description, and engagement methods that fall outside of traditional archival theory and community archival scholarship to build collection models that meet the goals of the project and the community.

    This thesis investigates how care practices shape the actions used to collect, create, preserve, and share records. To do this work, I completed a thematic analysis of the projects at hand and examined the digital spaces, records, and modes of community engagement for care-based actions. This work uses a care-based framework that draws on the Queer/ed Archival Methodology and the feminist ethics of care framework to show how community heritage projects use critical methods to build their collections.

    The digital community heritage projects in this thesis use care-based collection models that are based in critical methods, including radical empathy and radical openness. I found that the digital environment and digital tools support the projects’ use of care practices and helped build connections between other records, the community, and beyond by generating more opportunities to collect, create, preserve, and share the records. This research supports using radical openness and radical empathy as key aspects of a care-based collection model that allows records and community actions to grow and change. These findings support the need for further research on digital community heritage projects.

  • Subjects / Keywords
  • Graduation date
    Spring 2020
  • Type of Item
    Thesis
  • Degree
    Master of Arts/Master of Library and Information Studies
  • DOI
    https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-acc8-d374
  • License
    Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.