Paul Longley Arthur

Trauma Online: Public Exposure of Personal Grief and Suffering

This article considers how traditional physical memorials to war and other catastrophic events differ from online memorials in the Web 2.0 environment and it asks what the benefits and drawbacks of each may be. There has always been an awkward fit between the public statements embodied in monuments to those who died in war and the personal stories told by individuals who returned. This disjuncture serves to demonstrate that the two ways of remembering traumatic events—the collective and the individual—have traditionally been poles apart and often contradictory. Gradually, over the past two decades, with the increasing influence of critical theories that have questioned national and other dominating discourses—and also with growing interest within the field of clinical psychology in what is now labeled posttraumatic stress disorder—there has been an increasing interest in the vast underlayer of personal stories that national narratives have shut out or silenced. What can new interactive digital modes for r...

Digital Biography: Capturing Lives Online

Every day, rivulets of information stream into electric brains to be sifted, sorted, rearranged, and combined in hundreds of different ways. Technology enables the preservation of the minutia of our everyday comings and goings, of our likes and dislikes, of who we are and what we own. . . .It is ever more possible to create an electronic collage that covers much of a person’s life—a life captured in records, a digital biography composed in the collective computer networks of the world. —Daniel J. Solove

Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing

In this first decade of the twenty-first century we are caught up in the midst of a technological shift of the kind that Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, attributed to the increasing popularity of photography in the early twentieth century. The essence of that change was the unprecedented capacity to create infinitely reproducible multiple copies. For the first time the idea of the primacy of the singular work of art was seriously open to question.1 ‘The history of every art form,’ writes Benjamin, ‘shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, a new art form’ (Benjamin, 1973, p. 239). Photography initiated a change that Benjamin recognised as being as profound in its impact on people’s lives as the introduction of the printing press. Each of these successive technological advances had the effect of putting within reach of the wider public products, information and knowledge that in the past could be enjoyed only by wealthy and elite groups and individuals, so much so that the concept of ‘art’ itself needed to be redefined to accommodate the many new forms that arose out of new technologies.2 Over the past three decades, the advances in digital technologies that have occurred have repeated that pattern of rapidly increasing accessibility, far beyond the bounds of art and into every sphere of experience, in a manner and on a scale that Benjamin could not have foreseen.3

Out of Frame

No, no, I am but shadow of myself: You are deceived, my substance is not here; For what you see is but the smallest part And least proportion of humanity: I tell you, madam, were the whole frame here, It is of such a spacious lofty pitch, Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t. (Shakespeare 2.3.52–58) Framing occurs but there is no frame. (Derrida, qtd. in MacLachlan and Reid 6)

Virtual strangers: e-research and the Humanities

This paper gives an overview of the ways that humanities research is embracing new digital resources and formats and suggests that the e-research revolution that is well advanced in the sciences is at an early stage in the humanities. Many of its potential benefits, and challenges, are different from those in the sciences and are just beginning to be understood. While researchers in the sciences have been accustomed to working collaboratively, this is less common in the humanities. Further, digital technologies seem to more naturally enhance and support existing methodologies and patterns of work in the sciences, whereas in the humanities they require more of a shift, a change in the traditional research culture. How then are the collaborative tools of e-research challenging humanities researchers to work differently? What are the new formats for publication and communication bringing to the most traditional disciplines such as history and literary studies? At which stages in the research process do e-res...

Material Memory and the Digital

Over the past two decades, memory, understood as both the act of remembering and a means of storing memories, has been relocating itself. In its daily usage it has been moving from the mind to the computer—from neurological systems to digital technologies—as people increasingly outsource memory to digital devices. In this essay I focus on the changing nature of remembering—and forgetting—in the digital era. With an emphasis on personal stories I ask: How is intergenerational memory transfer changing as a result of digital media technologies? Specifically, what are the implications of the shift to digital storage and communication processes for the way we retain, pass on, or receive private and intimate material? How has this changed the way we see ourselves and view our lives, and allow others to see ourselves and our lives?

Private Lives, Intimate Readings

In any attempt to report on the life of another, or even one’s own life, an inescapable ethical dilemma arises that relates to entering intensely private areas of experience and presenting intimate subject matter for the world to see. How much intimate material should be revealed? For what purpose? To whose benefit? At what risk? How? In an era when millions of people are willing to share the minutiae of their individual daily lives via social media and the private lives of the famous are exposed routinely to mass audiences, such questions loom larger than ever. With easier access to private information—by governments, hackers, marketers, and private citizens—this area has become one of global concern in the context of the fundamental human right to privacy. Critical engagement with the private and the intimate has always been a key characteristic of life-writing studies, and this field has made a noteworthy contribution to contemporary reconceptualisations of the private and the public spheres and the intricate interconnections between them. For many life-writing scholars, their own family history has constituted a central site of exploration that has informed and shaped their theoretical perceptions. Life writing frequently needs to use imaginative and fictional strategies to overcome gaps and absences (Miller; Hoffmann). Life writing is also required to perform acts of interpretation and translation—in the figurative and literal sense—concerning, for example, intergenerational acts of transfer (Hirsch) that may involve crossing languages, cultural contexts, time periods, or political ideologies. When dealing with intimate material, the choice of style, media, and degree of imaginative intervention can be a sensitive ethical as well as aesthetic matter. Further, there can be discord between place as a geographical entity today and its memorial implications with regard to lost and destroyed realities (Hirsch and Spitzer). Life Writing, 2015 Vol. 12, No. 2, 119–123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2015.1022926

Things Fall Apart: Identity in the Digital World*

ABSTRACT We are in the midst of a data revolution that has penetrated the daily life of most of the world’s population so suddenly and deeply that it is impossible to grasp the extent of its impact on the concepts of self and identity. At the same time as accessing the ever-expanding realm of data via our networked devices, we are also contributing to it with every click or touch and generating a new kind of self in the free and open space of the Internet – ‘the world’s largest ungoverned space’. Can the new inclusiveness that digital technologies have given us be understood as the fulfilment of campaigns waged by critical theories in the late twenty-first century against the authority and centrality of mainstream narratives and the visions they promulgated of the world and ourselves? Or are we facing a new kind of imperialism as we fall under the spell of algorithmic culture – the monster we ourselves have created, nurtured and set free? This paper considers identity in the twenty-first century in terms of the tensions and contradictions between freedom and chaos, definition and dissolution, location and placelessness that are inherent in the digital world.

Unearthing the Past: Dwikozy Revisited

When Hitlers troops invaded and occupied the city of Kharkov in Ukraine, my grandparents Nadia, 26, and Petro, 30, had two young children, aged 7 and 5. My mother had not yet been born. In this tense and uncertain period it was unclear whether Ukraine would ultimately be controlled by Stalin or Hitler. There was nothing to recommend one over the other, they often said. Both regimes were brutal and both targeted Ukrainians. Mid-1943 marked a turning point—the end of their lives in Ukraine and the first stage of a journey into the unknown that led to their eventual arrival in Australia in 1949 as post-war refugees. They were packed into railway goods wagons with other Ukrainians and were taken from Kharkov, where they had built their world, to Dwikozy in Poland. This was the place of their first displacement from everything that made up their history and identity—homeland, language, culture, family, community, and career. Like many other refugees my grandparents attempted to compensate for the loss of their past by trying to recover it repeatedly years later in the stories that they told. In 1998, when I was in my 20s, I travelled to Dwikozy to try to connect with my grandparents’ memories and to better understand their lives. The place I found was indeed in the same physical location but when I returned to Australia and showed them what I had found it did not refresh or enrich my grandparents’ memories, as I had expected it would, even though there were confirming landmarks and signposts that they recognised. To them the place I was anxious to describe in words and photographs was an alien place, not the place they told stories of, not the place of their memories. Drawing upon my grandparents’ own stories of Dwikozy, this paper raises the issue faced by all biography, but especially intergenerational family biography, of the need to tread carefully when intruding into the memories of others.

Migration Experiences: Acknowledging the Past, and Sustaining the Present and Future

Australia is recognised as one of the world’s most culturally and ethnically diverse nations. Immigration has historically played an important role in the nation’s economic, social and cultural development. There is a pressing need to find innovative technological and archival approaches to deal with the challenge to digitally preserve Australia’s migrant heritage, especially given the ageing of the European communities that were the first to come under the postwar mass migration scheme. This paper reports on plans for a national collaborative project to develop the foundational infrastructure for a dynamic, interoperable, migrant data resource for research and education. The Migration Experiences platform will connect and consolidate heterogeneous collections and resources and will provide an international exemplar underscoring the importance of digital preservation of cultural heritage and highlighting the opportunities new technologies can offer. The platform will widen the scope and range of the interpretative opportunities for researchers, and foster international academic relationships and networks involving partner organisations (universities, libraries, museums, archives and genealogical institutions). In doing so, it will contribute to better recognition and deeper understanding of the continuing role played by immigrants in Australia’s national story.