Networking-up the collective which recovers the town as its territory: Creation, maintenance and change of citizen digital archive activities.

Abstract

In this article, “a citizen digital archive activity” is defined as a collective practice in which local residents work on preserving and sharing local records and memories with digital technologies to recover the town as their territory. Eleven activities in various areas of Japan were analyzed with data from interviews with the members and, in some cases, participatory observations. Details of each activity, such as the history, main activities, achievements, and information technologies of the group were analyzed. There were considerable differences among activities in their histories, the characteristics of the group members, types of content they collected, and the ways they shared them with others. Using socio-technical network analysis, it was found that similar problems are handled in different ways but they still obtain equivalent results. Common factors in the successful maintenance of the activities involved strategic networking between human and non-human actors. Sometimes a technical actor that looked trivial played as important a role as a human actor in the network in facilitating or impeding the activity. We need to connect various resources formerly dispatched in local communities in making and maintaining citizen digital archives. In this sense the archives should hold a tight arrangement of human and non-human actors. In addition, the study showed that we need not only make a static network arrangement, but need to reshape it constantly as a fluid collective to maintain the activity “in action”.