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@wragge
Created May 8, 2015 03:53
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Unremembering the forgotten -- my DH2015 abstract

#Unremembering the forgotten

Welcome to Australia in 2015 where 'remembering' is both an obligation and an opportunity. DH2015 comes just a few months after the 100th anniversary of the landing of Allied forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey -- the beginning of a failed military campaign that has long been linked to Australian nationhood. Over the next few years the remembering will roll along as centenaries of the events of World War I accumulate. More documentaries will be made, more websites built, more documents digitised, more memorials dedicated -- all to help us remember people and stories that are seen as in danger of being forgotten.

Who gets remembered and why? I'm a historian who works with digital cultural heritage collections. I'm a manager who helps maintain a national aggregation service that brings many of these collections together. I'm a hacker who wonders how I can subvert and play with their contents. In this talk I want to explore remembering from these different perspectives. As digital practitioners, how can we find and acknowledge the many lives that are neither remembered nor forgotten -- that are documented within our collections, and yet remain unrevealed? How can we work within and against descriptive structures to trace existence, resistance and oppression. How can we play with the very idea of memory to challenge the power of commemoration?

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