"Permanent Reminders": Digital Archives and the Irish Commemorative Impulse

"Permanent Reminders":Digital Archives and the Irish Commemorative Impulse Hannah K. Smyth (bio) In 2013 Catriona Pennell predicted that "on-line is a key space where discussion, reflection, and 'remembering' are going to take place" in this decade of commemorations.1 Who could have imagined that this would become a necessity with the onset of a global pandemic and cycles of national lockdown? More than ever before, "online" and "off-line" are interwoven in present and future cultures of commemoration, strongly reflected in the latest installment of the Decade of Centenaries program.2 Commemoration has been the major impulse for particular bespoke digitization projects in this period of national remembrance in the Republic of Ireland, just as digitization has coded the archive as heritage for commemoration.3 The Decade of Centenaries (DoC) project, particularly its commemoration of the 1916 centenary, is one such national-identity project rooted in cultural heritage: "We will proudly present to ourselves and to the world our achievements as a Republic, … expressing our individuality through our own distinctive culture and heritage in all its diversity."4 Conceived as commemoration for "digital natives" alongside more traditional remembrance practices, the official centenary programming has been characterized by the profusion of digitization [End Page 166] and digital-history projects.5 "The archives," thus digitized, have underpinned a historical lingua franca of the commemorations: nuance, complexity, and historical empiricism. Many of the innovations in public history and the evolving historiography of the period are founded upon the digital mediation of documentary heritage. Independently of the pandemic-driven shift of the commemorative program of events online, the DoC has presented a highly digital experience to the public. Releases of state-held digital archives have been timed to align with key anniversaries, peaking in 2016 and arguably setting a precedent for digitization as a new ritual of commemoration in this late-modern "remembrance culture."6 Examples include the National Library of Ireland's (NLI) Signatories collections, the National Archives of Ireland's (NAI) Decade of Centenaries collections, the Digital Repository of Ireland's Inspiring Ireland project, and the Houses of the Oireachtas's Dáil 100 resource. Other archival initiatives such as the second phase of the NLI's DoC contribution Towards a Republic have continued this cycle of synchronic digitizations. One newspaper article in 2018 suggested that the release of the proposed "tranches" of archives and personal papers by the NLI "may be linked to the commemoration of significant events during the remainder of the Decade of Commemorations through to 2023," recognizing a precedent set in 2016.7 Beyond 2022, a collaboration between Trinity College Dublin and the NAI that launched its Virtual Record Treasury on the centenary of the burning of the Four Courts and near the close of the official DoC timeline, represents the zenith of this archival imperative refracted through commemoration. Proceeding as "an opportunity to focus on the development of access to historical records and primary sources from the time period," digital archives have become part of the public experience of commemoration during this decade in a way we have not seen before.8 One archivist commented that the archives "have never [End Page 167] before been so prominent in the public consciousness." Horne declared that the "democratisation of the archives" was critical to the success of the 2016 commemorations.9 The "democratisation" of history is bound to the "democratisation" of the archives, and Conway is justified in observing that "if information from analogue sources is not readily available in digital form, it simply does not exist from the perspective of the vast majority of potential users."10 In this way "democratization" and "access" have been used as metonyms for the digitization of heritage archives during the commemorations in the Republic. Digitization indeed "establishes the affordances of transformative access," yet many variables such as, inter alia, copyright, internet access, long-term preservation, findability, optimization for users with disabilities, and digital literacy, dictate access to digital archives beyond the moment of digitization.11 Furthermore, where all archives are concerned, "the decision as to what 'heritage' is, and what is commissioned for digitisation … is not necessarily a part of this democratization."12 Notwithstanding continued asymmetries, the...