Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 1

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MediaNOLA on Fire / Mike F. Griffith, and Vicki A. Mayer

Introduction to MediaNOLA

<1> In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the preservation of the culture of New Orleans was a foremost topic of discussion. As an institution, Tulane had made the transition to requiring all students to complete public service courses as both upper and lower classmen. It was at the intersection of these pressures that the MediaNOLA project emerged. Our initial goal was to educate students in the local traditions of New Orleans while training them to be producers and custodians of cultural knowledge. What began as an exercise in regional research and presentation has become an archive of human action and process that is just as, or perhaps more valuable than the encyclopedic information it contains.

<2> We began the MediaNOLA project in the Spring of 2009 with the intention of having students capture both geographic and historical information on sites directly related to the production of media (publishers, music venues, recording studios, etc.). This limited notion of "media" quickly changed over the course of the next two years as more professors from very different disciplines came to add student-based research on everything local: from architecture and businesses, to oral testimonials and military history. Today, "Media" in MediaNOLA stands for the Latin "through" as more materials fit in the paradigm of regional culture.

<3> Even as the focus of MediaNOLA changed dramatically, our basic process for populating the archive has relied on the operationalization of digital research and writing processes. Our basic process for the project began by training the students in the processes and databases that would be needed to do primary research. In the meantime, we would train them in the use of MediaWiki (the open-source engine that powers Wikipedia). Finally, we helped them do the necessary sleuthing to capture the GIS data necessary to historically map the location.

<4> In the early days of this project, we were using a divided system. We had a custom MediaWiki instance that was hosted locally on Tulane's servers as well as a shared GIS environment that was built in collaboration with a similar project at the University of Texas at Austin. This split led to a fortunate duplication of information as we were capturing the histories and basic Google Maps coordinates in MediaWiki, while the higher level GIS mapping and searching was located in the companion software. In late 2011 our developer defected from open source to the commercial sector and took a good bit of the GIS work with him. It was fortunate that we had duplicated the coordinate data as much of our GIS data left with this developer.

<5> This defection gave us the opportunity to rethink our development site and the nature of the relationship between the GIS data and the media histories. We wanted to retain the feature set of the MediaWiki platform while building the GIS search directly on top of those wiki pages. One of the major advantages of MediaWiki is its ability to track versions of each page in the system. All changes are tracked by version and user. This feature is useful for seeing which student has contributed the bulk of the information, but it is also useful for tracking how the students develop their narratives. While we initially thought that we were building a repository of cultural documentation, we came to realize that we were also building a living record of our students' responses to technological pedagogy, cultural/historical research and mediated composition.

<6> Over the years of working in this environment we have developed a series of pedagogical exercises for students. One of our more successful projects is having undergraduates add to an already existing wiki in order to see how the overall narrative changes in light of new evidence. The MediaNOLA environment demands this sort of collaboration. It is unlikely that one student in one semester will be able to tell any sort of definitive story of any cultural object, place, or practice. Even if it were possible for the student to collect and collate a vast majority of the available resources, that story would still only be told from one perspective. Within MediaNOLA multiple voices lead to multiple perspectives. In the sections ahead we will examine some of the pedagogical and theoretical perspectives that define the nature of this digital space with an eye toward better understanding the nature of the digital archive and the place of human agency within it. We have framed the sections in binaristic terms so as to suggest that the archive is the product of dialectics between these opposing forces, both betwixt and between […].

Augmentation vs Stagnation

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems." [i]

<7> In July of 1945 Vannevar Bush, the Director of the Federal Office of Scientific Research and Development, published an article called "As We May Think" in The Atlantic. This article calls for a new examination of the relationship between technology and human thought. Bush had seen first-hand the amplification of humanity's physical powers through technology. In this piece he wished to focus on the avenues available for mental capacity augmentation as well. For Bush the extension of human memory through the technological archive was not only a way of enhancing discovery but also a means of developing ethical philosophy. It is fitting that his plea for a new understanding of the might of technology was published little more than a month before the detonation of the first bomb over Hiroshima.

<8> Although Bush's vision of the archive is based on analog technology, the principles that govern his idea of what he calls the "memex" are recognizable in the contemporary organization of the Internet in general and wiki environments in particular.

"It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing."[ii]

<9> Bush lays out the basic ideas behind what will become the hyperlink in new media theory. Through the construction of these links the individual would create personal paths through a pre-existing archive of knowledge that he or she could expand through personal contributions. Although individuals could copy and share their knowledge paths, each individual would retain their own personal way of navigating the archive. Bush allows his concerns about the speed and ease of access to overwhelm the collaborative role in making the archive. The focus here is on the personal act of selection weighed against the architecture of the space.

"The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they were based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene."[iii]

<10> The primary tension in Bush's work is between the power of memory and our ability to augment memory. For Bush the technological extension of memory is simply a means through which we can store and recall information that might be of later use. Bush describes enjoyment as developing the art of forgetting.

"His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."[iv]

<11> In this model the act of forgetting is supplemented through the assurance of retrieval. Even in his certainty, Bush hedges his bets at this moment. The user of his memex has "some assurance" of finding the things he has forgotten. Of course this begs the question of how one remembers what one has forgotten. The interior nature of forgetting is paired with an external mechanism for remembering. Bush ignores the problems of communication inherent in the existence of the archive outside of the individual's internal knowledge space. His augmentation will always be subject to a process of communicative translation and a threat of stagnation.

<12> Fifty years after Bush opened the modern question of the technologically augmented archive, Derrida took up the issue of stagnation in Archive Fever (1995). For Derrida the aforementioned separation between interior and exterior knowledge spaces is central to understanding the nature of the archival impulse. In this model the impulse to archive material is always predetermined by the nature of the tools available to the archivist.

"This should above all remind us that the said archival technology no longer determines, will never have determined, merely the moment of the conservational recording, but rather the very institution of the archivable event."[v]

<13> Derrida does not see memory as interchangeable with the archive for a number of reasons. First among these is that the archive exists as a medium external to the internal mechanism of memory. In its best form the archive is of the future. It is a promise of futurity.

"This is not the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come."[vi]

<14> The allure of the archive is related to the experience of a promise of the future combined with the pleasure of stasis. Derrida sees this pleasure in the static as being "indissociable from the death drive."[vii] The compulsion to forget is linked to a tendency toward self-destruction. Drawing heavily from Freud's own biography, Derrida imagines the archive as a force for compartmentalizing that which cannot be confronted mentally. In this sense, archive fever allows for a society to eschew the ethical responsibility that Bush advocated.

<15> This dichotomy between augmentation and stagnation is fundamental to digital humanities and digital preservation projects such as MediaNOLA. The fundamental assumption behind these projects is that they collect and preserve the cultural artifacts documented therein. In many ways, the MediaNOLA project is building an archive of the participants' interactions with other contemporary forms of the archive, such as blogs, Flickr, and new institutional repositories. In a recent turn to networking archives, students in several classes have digitized materials in the physical archives to replicate them in both MediaNOLA and the university digital library, and thus augment all three archives. At the same time, very few MediaNOLA entries catalogue items that do not already exist in the physical and place-based university archives. Although students take their own photos, record their own interviews, and even create art or videos, these are added to entries for events and traditions already located elsewhere. In the majority of cases, these entries are a recording of our contemporary desire to create narrative from the traces that remain in these archives.

<16> In Derrida's formulation the archive replaces the complex and spontaneously organic act of creative thought. Once authored and stored, the MediaNOLA wikis and map points do not activate memories, but repress its playful returns. Think, for example, of the restaurant photograph taken one semester now placed alongside the digitized image of a menu. Both exist now, flattened together, as parts of a story unconnected from Saturday mornings in the restaurant.

"Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originally and structural breakdown of the said memory."[viii]

<17> Derrida tells us the creation of the archive is the destruction of personal agency through the abdication of memory. The technological replacement of that memory may be augmentation but it is not anamnesis.

<18> MediaNOLA and its digital humanities kin must not be seen as a preservation of culture but rather as a contemporary map of the intersection between our understanding of technology and the materials these media make available to our research. Part of this tension can be seen in the approaches to filtering that various digital humanities projects take. This ongoing debate is related to the previously discussed promise of the future that is inherent in the archive. Perhaps we do not know what we are capturing and a directed filter is only allowing in a narrow band of content that will be worthless to the future. Of course this debate over bandwidth extends not only to the content but also to our ability to make meaningful use of the archive.

<19> Wendy Chun makes excellent use of this tension in her article, "The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory." For Chun the cultural idea of digital memory is predicated on a process of denied degeneration.

"This Degeneration, which engineers would like to divide into useful and harmful (eraseability vs signal decomposition, information versus noise) belies the promise of digital computers as permanent memory machines. If our machines' memories are more permanent, if they enable a permanence that we seem to lack, it is because they are constantly refreshed so that their ephemerality endures, so that they may store the programs that seem to drive our machines." [ix]

<20> Chun sees the process of digital memory as more dynamic than Derrida or Bush. Since digital memory is defined by this process of degeneration deferred, the duration of the content is held separate from the medium. While the information contained in older media suffered from a rather predictable, linear degeneration, a piece of content on the Internet is in a relative state of flux. The content of emerging media may not always be available or may not be available in the same place. Interestingly, the Internet as it exists now is based on a locational system. A piece of content is assigned an address that relates to its existence on a particular server at a particular IP address. Simply having the address does not guarantee the presence of the content in question.

"These pages are not quite dead, but not quite alive either; the proper commemoration requires greater effort. These gaps or this skeleton visualizes not only the fact that our constant regenerations affect what is regenerated but also how these gaps—the irreversibility of the causal programmable logic—open the web as archive to a future that would not be a simple memory upgrade of the past."[x]

<21> Chun demonstrates how the fragmented and locational nature of the Internet archive makes the process of archival collection an ongoing struggle. We are no longer fighting against the staid and known decay of a single artifact. Now the archival process demands the accounting of the accrued materials of a number of media forms from disparate sources.

<22> In the context of MediaNOLA we struggle not only with the fractured nature of the digital materials that are collected in the archive but also with the physical absence of many of the geographical sites that are catalogued. The regeneration of the site in question is dependent on the deferred degeneration of the digital memory of the Internet. The struggle then for location based digital humanities is twofold. First, we must struggle against the degeneration of the cultural space. Second, we must struggle against the degeneration of the digital content that we have created to preserve that space. Each time this digital degeneration is halted, the process alters the reconstituted memory. This conclusion makes the work of the digital humanities archive as much about tending to the coherence of digital memory as it does about the archival content.

Order vs Chaos

<23> Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.[xi]

<24> If we accept the idea that archives are in fact more about recording the contemporary ideas and processes that surround the relationship between the promise of memory and the destructive impulse of forgetting, then the nature of archival work is related directly to the study of the media that these archives both inhabit and collate. In Allan Sekula's work "The Body and The Archive" he gives us a means of conceptualizing the ways that specific media develop the narrative arcs of archival content through their pre-existing cultural meanings. Sekula begins with a discussion of the emergence of photography as simultaneously honorific (in its ability to replace the portrait among the bourgeoisie) and repressive (in its ability to classify prisoners as deviant).

"Every portrait implicitly took its place within a social and moral hierarchy. The private moment of sentimental individuation, the look at the frozen gaze-of-the-loved-one, was shadowed by two other more public look: a look up, at one's 'betters', and a look down, at one's 'inferiors'." [xii]

<25> The result of this ordering is a "shadow archive" that simultaneously creates and orders individuals within a social space. It is significant then that Sekula ties the photographic image to the emergence of police work and the establishment of the new cultural elite during the late-nineteenth century. His implication is that the archive is a tool of hegemony; its ordering systems reinforce the social order. Even archives created to resist the social order will uphold the law of social classification according to Sekula. He uses the example of Ernest Cole's book, House of Bondage, which documents the South African Apartheid's practices for classifying and organizing its subjects by race. While created as a critique of these practices, the South African police ultimately co-opt it as an index of the real system of racial ordering. This is an archive that-even though it shares a medium with the archive that it is documenting-manages to actually create an archive of the dominant archival process. Of course we still have to account for the fact that the authority and legitimacy of this second order archive is directly inherited through the older imperial impulse of the medium.

<26> In the light of these archival conceptions, we can see a usefulness to Derrida's "institution of the archivable event." So far we have seen that an archive can be a simple consolidation of a specific cultural authority or a more complex entity capable of undermining the dominant expression of that cultural authority. Deleuze and Guattari push this even further with their concept of the rhizomatic nature of the archive. For Deleuze and Guattari the multiplicity of mediated assemblages present in contemporary culture have pushed us as individuals beyond the crude classifications inherent in the archives we have discussed above.

"As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge."[xiii]

<27> If we think of the archive as an assemblage of individual interpretations generated though a series of encounters with other collections of assemblages, then the archive begins to look more dynamic than either a static record or a future promise. The promise of the archive is not the meaning it presents culturally. The promise of the archive resides in its connection to other "multiplicities". Deleuze and Guattari understand the importance of asking "what it functions with" (emphasis mine).

<28> Deleuze and Guattari establish the multiplicity of the rhizome as fluid. The meaning of such a system changes with each increase.

"A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows)."[xiv]

<29> In this model the accumulation of mediated forms and individual cultural expressions within the archive creates an environment where the meaning of the archive is constantly being remade by the expanding permutation of its constituent elements.[xv]

<30> Within the MediaNOLA archive we have a series of complimentary narratives arranged in a rhizomatic chaos. There is the accumulated research on each cultural node linked to spaces and images. These interlink differently through searches of categories, tags, or keywords. We then add the spatial narrative of the node to a larger discourse on the uses of space within the city. Other related archives are mined for historical assets (images, videos and documentation) that can be incorporated into the narrative of the node. Each node appears as a mere collection of artifacts that have been collated by a participant on the site. These nodes also contain a complimentary discourse on the nature of research as it is affected through new media.

<31> The presentation of each node in the archive is dependent upon several layers of mediation. At its base we have the relationship between the historical assets and the site we have created to synthesize them. At its heart, this is a classic issue of communicative form defined by the encoding and decoding processes enabled by the space. The participants' behavior in the space of the site is in turn influenced by the larger cultural spaces of the Internet. Students in feedback have often related their writing to making Wikipedia pages rather than an essay that they would write for a class. The participant's established practice is then filtered though the academic and pedagogical practice that we have established for site management.

<32> MediaNOLA drew its original categories from the Austin Memory Project, a now-defunct site that managed data into categories of cultural distinction as formulated by Pierre Bourdieu.[xvi] These categories, such as bookstores and coffeehouses, formed the basis for Bourdieu's analysis of the reproduction of French social classes in the late 1970s. MediaNOLA thus abides by the law of what can be said about New Orleans by fitting its contents into the places and practices said to index another social order. No wonder we found that certain categories would be hard to populate. Indeed the coffeehouse and the bookstore lack any entries. It is not that these places do not exist in regional history, but that they did not index the social order's system for discipline or distinction. What followed was archival chaos. Professors and students followed a just-in-time style of archiving by making categories based on the content rather than any overarching library logic. While civil war entries about the Old South and a series of submarines were filed under "landmarks" in the haste to have things fit in the rubric of the categories, other categories, such as "fishing" were basically made-to-order for a stray piece of wiki content. Beyond this, the tagging of articles has never been regulated, producing a cacophony of associations between the author, their classmates, and the professor. These features have required the assistance of a professional archivist to help re-order the site in accordance with classifications that might be more recognizable to experts, but also will likely supersede the authority of the students over their works.

<33> Order and chaos operate in tandem through student practices and faculty gatekeeping. What seems to order the ways that the faculty member tells one class how to order their work collides with other classes taught using another disciplinary ordering system. For example, the history student's proclivity towards "event" as the basis for order[xvii] sits uncomfortably with the communication student's investigation of types of business nonprofits in a ward of the city. The pedagogical value of the site does not come through forcing students into a narrow channel in the creation of their nodes. Each class that engages with MediaNOLA does so from a different pedagogical perspective. Faculty members who use the site do so strategically in the development of their classes, but the archive is created through the tactical engagements of the students within the space. This tactical space allows the students to create what Deleuze and Guattari call "maps" as opposed to the hollow "traces" of the static archive.

"What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real […] The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation […] A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back 'to the same'. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged 'competence'."[xviii]

<34> The nodes within the map that MediaNOLA is constructing cannot be resurrected from the accumulation of archival assets. These nodes can only be created as part of an ongoing negotiation among those participants creating the pages, the cultural practice of the tools involved, the historical archives and the current local authority surrounding the node itself. This relationship creates a dynamic archive more akin to the rhizomatic map than the static trace.

Participation vs Recitation

<35> Far from being that which unifies everything that has been said in the great confused murmur of a discourse, far from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration.[xix]

<36> The danger in putting too much faith in the revolutionary potential of a rhizomatic archive is the possibility of the archive encompassing a larger ideological role over potential forms of discourse. While Derrida positions the archive as exterior to the act of memory and expression, Foucault expands the archive as the "first law of what can be said" (Foucault 129). If the archive is all encompassing, how does a new form of expression emerge and what does that newly mediated form mean to the cultural use of the archive?

<37> For Foucault the archive is an historical a priori for the legitimation of assertion and the conditions which govern the emergence and valuation of statements.

"The archive is not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards the event of the statement, and preserves, for future memories, its status as an escapee; it is that which at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability."[xx]

<38> Foucault's archive is the space within which discourse exists. It is not a static environment whose purpose is the preservation of formerly valid statements. On this point Derrida and Foucault agree. While Derrida sees the archive as creating the "institution of the archivable event," Foucault sees the archive as enabling the statement-event at its root. For both of these theorists, it is difficult to create a critical stance from within the structure of a culturally active archive.

"The analysis of the archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness…The description of the archive deploys its possibilities (and the mastery of its possibilities) on the basis of the very discourses that have just ceased to be ours; its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say."[xxi]

<39> This perspective counts on the analysis coming from outside of the archive. What Derrida and Foucault both ignore is the impact that new forms of mediation have on remaking the content of the archive. With the new media tools now available, these formerly static archivable events have become the raw materials of emerging systems of communication. There is a shift between the material archives where our research is done, and the dynamic archive where our nodes are synthesized.

<40> Henry Jenkins sees the emergence of networked space as creating new moments of expression through the development of remix culture. By clustering into affinity groups individuals are able to create meaning through the contextualization and decontextualization of archival content.

"The new information space involves multiple and unstable forms of recontextualization. The value of any bit of information increases through social interaction. Commodities are a limited good and their exchange necessarily creates or enacts inequalities. But meaning is a shared and constantly renewable resource and its circulation can create and revitalize social ties. If old forms of expertise operated through isolated disciplines, the new collective intelligence is a patchwork woven together from many sources as members pool what they know, creating something much more powerful than the sum of its parts."[xxii]

<41> At the very least, Jenkins' formulation increases the amount of disruption possible in Foucault's archival model. Taken further, Jenkins as a media scholar references the early and radical potential of montage, in which the juxtaposition of disparate parts equals new meanings for the reader. This constant remix and recontextualization of the archival event may create a space where the operations of the archive on the validity of statements are constantly on the verge of critical exposure.

<42> In MediaNOLA we have created an affinity space for the tactical efforts of individuals who are responding to the strategic pedagogies of a variety of disciplines. What matters most in this style of archive is the conceptualization of human action as a social process. Our archive operates as a collaborative space where the tactical efforts of the participants are in constant contact with each other. In addition to the dynamic archive that is enacted through the statements of the individuals involved, the site also collects the accumulated history of these modifications to the practice of using the space. What then might start as a simple recitation of an argument that one student read in a book becomes something entirely different when other students bring in new arguments derived from other works. The result is not always a radically new reading of the past, as illustrated by a group of students in a film history class. In that case, the students mapped the current celebratory discourse associated with Hollywood film production onto early New Orleans silent filmmakers, and thus participated in ultimately reinforcing a tale of the status quo. In a sense this archive works along both axes we have seen thus far in the critical response to archives: A renewable repository of statements exists as the foundation below the dynamic space of narrative creation.

<43> In the new media era, the fundamental nature of the archive is understood as considerably less static than it has ever been. The communicative connections among individuals are dominated by digital channels. The process of archival creation has tended to follow the same path. Even when individuals appear to be working alone, their additions shape, and are in turn shaped by, the contributions of others to the space. Returning to Chun, this process of social collaboration remaking content also extends to the process of reversing the degeneration of digital memory. Chun talks about the possibility of mechanically archiving the Internet through initiatives like the Internet Wayback Machine that merely catalogue the text and links of webpages without downloading the related documents or images. Chun sees these gaps in the automated archival process as indicative of a fundamental flaw in the cultural conception of digital memory. On the other hand, her argument ignores the social importance of a group coming together to promote the physical integrity of digital archival content.[xxiii] Of course the action of collective intelligence in regenerating this content cannot help but alter the content to match the immediate social interests of the group. Entries on film, bars, and music clubs project the current popularities of such objects and spaces among college students onto the past. The collective social curation of this content not only reveals something of the original location explored but also speaks to the social context in which the restoration occurs. When examined over time these digital humanities projects are creating archives that indicate the social/cultural importance of the archived cultural spaces in the academic process that attempts to record and preserve them.

Conclusion

<44> The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a traversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. [xxiv]

<45> When we established the MediaNOLA project, our initial concern was documenting the complex relationship between the city of New Orleans and the legacy of the sites when much of its cultural heritage was created. As the project expanded to incorporate the pedagogical initiatives of other partners, the archive became a diverse entity with problems related to both the generation and consistency of content. An archive of this nature is constantly struggling with the overall flux of the Internet as a whole as well as the continual evolution of the pedagogical approach to archival process.

<46> The nature of this archive is not in the links between pieces of content but rather in the social collective that assembles and maintains these links. A digital humanities archive cannot regenerate itself without this collective participation. Just taking into account the amount of time we have spent administering this both the technological and pedagogical aspects of this project, it would seem that the reason that many of these archival initiatives fail is their dependence on one or a small group of individuals to keep their digital memory intact. For MediaNOLA the challenge has been finding a balance between the research our students are interested in doing and the day-o-day maintenance that is necessary for the health of the site. The outcome of this balancing act is a site that is always in a state of change. This flux goes beyond Chun's concept of a digital memory rewritten as part of its restoration. The fundamental nature of the site changes as new projects begin and old projects are left behind. The success of the site is that it has been flexible enough to allow students to maintain a key role in this archival process. This becomes evident as MediaNOLA bobs between the binaries of augmentation and stagnation, order and chaos, and recitation and participation.

<47> The best position a digital humanities archive can hold is the interstitial space between the cultural space of the subject and the cultural practice of archival generation. This generation is a multivalent process. At the first level, the archive is generated mediation between the individual archivist and the various media that contain the primary content of the subject. These media are processed through the contemporary cultural and academic practice of the archivist into the emerging media archive. Once this "memory" or "archival moment" has been created, it becomes subject to the process of degeneration and regeneration that Chun outlines in her work. The regenerative process in the digital humanities is driven by social collaboration and shifting cultural priorities. This continual flux is exacerbated by the ingrained temporal limits of academic work. Each new cohort of students carries new priorities and new relationships to the media that will ultimately affect the overall institutional vision of the archive. Successful digital humanities projects must hold this middle space.

<48> The archives that we are creating are not strict historical sources. Since change and regeneration is a fundamental aspect of their survival, the history of these archives presents a record of our changing relationships with new media forms as well as the nature of the relationship between the academic community and the local authority we are attempting to archive. The key here is participation. When students, academics and community members are all not only contributing to the creation of archival memory but also considering the relationship between their cultural space and the presence of emerging media, it in these moments of collaboration that the digital humanities archive becomes meaningful. Without a social presence that constantly re-encodes meaning, all we have built are dead archives to be forgotten on abandoned servers. The key to these projects is the vital representation of local authority and the continual questioning of the mediation that seeks to create these nodes.

Notes

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