Digital critical archives, copyright, and feminist praxis

Abstract

With the continued proliferation of digitized materials, critical attention to the ideologies informing the creation of digital archives remains crucial. How are digital archives made and what are their goals? How do different participants in the process work together in collaborative teams towards shared ideals? This paper outlines the methodological and political considerations that underlie the creation of a critical digital archive of historical and born-digital materials relating to 20th-century publishing history, The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). Here we outline the archival practices and critical ethos that have informed the collaborative creation of MAPP by an international team of scholars, archivists, cultural institutions, students, and copyright estate holders. We address issues of selection that arise in creating a critical digital archive; feminist critical metadata practices; and our approaches to workflow and copyright; and conclude with an example of an archival document type in which the issues of feminist critical curation and copyright collide.