The transition from analog to digital archive (or perhaps it is rather an archival addition) creates new conditions for accessing and making use of cultural heritage artifacts and collections while at the same time new constellations of digitized material, as well as new forms of digital dissemination, become available, for instance the Europeana collections, an online archive of European digital cultural heritage. In the process of digitization, it is likely that parts of analog archives that have previously been difficult for the public to access, parts that have been hidden away or even forgotten, will be exposed anew, and that stakeholders in distant parts of the world with reference to the physical archives, i.e., as is the case in point for this project, Ghana and the US Virgin Islands, will gain easier access to archivalia, photos and historical maps of interest to them. As can easily be imagined, this will pave the way for new histories and accounts from a widened cultural and geographical scope, which will surely challenge already established historiography.

With the changing accessibility, it becomes imperative to investigate how cultural heritage in the form of digitized material and/or sharing via online infrastructures can create knowledge and value on new terms. My cross-disciplinary research project, documented as work in progress through this website, engages with cultural heritage in light of this new digital media-horizon.

In the 250 years Denmark colonized present day US Virgin Islands, the islands served as a center of world trade, where people, goods, cultures and languages were exchanged and entangled. It is this historical, global and network-based context, and its trajectories into the present, that I wish to respond to, which, from a contemporary, euro-centric point of view, often ends up being narrated mainly from the perspective of the nation state.

The research project has two main objectives: First, to establish a framework for understanding colonial history as it is expressed on the basis of the digital archive through theoretical discussions and in conversation with material and artistic practices. Second, to develop an independent media archive which re-visits and complements Thorkild Hansen’s critical retracing and representation of Danish colonial history.

An underlying assumption of the research is that our concept of history is constantly renegotiated, which means that our view of the colonial era is under direct influence of the changed terms of access to historical sources and our response to the archives. We are, as Jacques Derrida argued in Mal d’archive continually haunted by the past. By the same token involvement in cultural heritage is important for the development of political discourses today, including our perception of what it means to be part of a national community.

A key research question is therefore: To what extent is the writing of history affected by the changed access to archives in widely different media environments?

By considering the colonial period as an early globalized network experience of spatial, temporal and cultural overlaps, long before the media reality we see today, unique opportunities arise for practice-led reflections about the experience of being displaced and staggered, geographically and temporally, as both a historical and contemporary living condition.