About the Project

Living Archives is a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and run by Malmö University. The official title of the project is Living Archives: Enhancing the role of the public archive by performing memory, open data access, and participatory design. The Living Archives project runs until 2017 and is lead by Prof. Susan Kozel, Malmö University.

Living Archives addresses the challenges facing the digitized society through (1) the phenomena of public cultural heritage archives that increasingly are being digitized, and (2) the practices of archiving that are dramatically being transformed because of networked technologies.

Researchers in the project see archives as living social resources, which implies shedding the conception that archives are dormant, disembodied narratives of a dominant culture. The project analyzes and prototypes how digital archives for cultural heritage can become social resources, how they can facilitate social change, create cultural awareness and collective collaboration. The project aims to open the process of archiving to embrace contemporary practices associated with open data, mobile media, storytelling, gaming, and performance.

The project develops tools, methods, and best practices, and it is structured through parallel and complementary research strands: Performing Memory and Open Data. Shared concerns for both strands include (1) the use of archive material, (2) mobilizing the archive by moving it onto mobile platforms, (3) planting archives in urban contexts, and (4) exploring how live data communicated by mobile devices might become instant archives.

The project is carried out by a collaborative and multidisciplinary team of researchers, contributing knowledge and methods from the fields of History, Artistic Research, Interaction Design, Computer Science and Cultural and Critical Theory. View everyone involved in the project here.

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