Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive: Humanities, Law and British Indentureship

“迈向综合殖民档案”旨在为综合人文、法律和社会科学档案的发展提供概念证明。通过创建一个精心策划的交互式数字网站，它旨在增加公众对专业研究的参与，产生新的殖民主义跨学科奖学金，并为文化机构提供一种方法来构建专业收藏，以增加公众对收藏的兴趣和使用。该项目与公共档案馆和画廊合作，策划了伦敦大学和康奈尔大学图书馆系统的各种数字和实物馆藏，旨在证明，通过重叠和数字化整合契约时期的馆藏，这些馆藏通常不会被一起阅读或观看，比如地图、法规、法院判决、土地登记、船舶日志、契约合同、小说、音乐、语言学研究、口述历史，诗歌、照片和食谱——该项目可以提供一个可访问的、引人入胜的档案，建立更大的公众对契约历史的兴趣和参与。这种综合、跨学科和跨机构的档案主要是数字化的，以最大限度地提高其可访问性。该项目网站将作为档案和馆藏整合的原型，未来可以进一步发展。这种类型的档案整合的时机至关重要，因为尽管契约研究正在增长，但公众对这个时代的兴趣对于保存和记录具有时效性的资源至关重要，这些资源包括日益恶化的档案记录、消失的口述历史以及流散的文化和语言实践。对那个时代的兴趣分散在一系列方面，档案整合巩固了大量相互依存的记录和学术作品，否则这些记录和学术作品将分布在不同的收藏中，甚至分布在不同的国家。有了这个概念验证，在下一阶段，我们将理想地做类似的工作，整合那些拥有那个时代主要档案材料的主要机构的精选馆藏，比如大英图书馆、英国国家档案馆、国会图书馆和牙买加国家档案馆。该项目的主要成果是一个公共网站，以“综合殖民档案”的方式来策划和展示来自不同学科的精选藏品。该网站作为公共资源，传播项目数据和项目的综合档案模型的概念验证。其他产出包括在赠款期结束时举行一次学术研讨会，审查网站的方法和后期版本，在启动公共网站时举行一次展览，以及发表一篇同行评议的文章，描述创建综合殖民地档案所涉及的过程和方法。

'Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive' aims to provide proof-of-concept for the development of an integrated humanities, law and social science archive. By creating a carefully curated, interactive digital website, it aims to increase public engagement with specialist research, generate new interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism, and provide a method for cultural institutions to frame specialist collections to increase public interest and use of the collections. This project curates various digital and physical holdings of the University of London and Cornell University library systems, in collaboration with public archives and galleries, and aims to demonstrate that, by overlapping and digitally integrating holdings on the indentureship period that would not typically be read or viewed alongside one another--such as maps, statutes, court judgments, land registers, ship logs, indenture contracts, novels, music, studies in linguistics, oral histories, poetry, photographs and recipes--the project can provide an accessible and engaging archive that establishes greater public interest and engagement in the history of indentureship. This type of integrated, cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional archive is meant to be primarily digital, to maximise its accessibility. The project website will serve as a prototype for the integration of records and holdings that can be taken further developed in the future. The timing for this type of archival integration is critical because, although indentureship research is growing, public interest in the era is critical for the preservation and documentation of time-sensitive resources, including deteriorating archival records, and vanishing oral histories and diasporic cultural and linguistic practices. Interest in the era is dispersed across a range of aspects, and archival integration consolidates a host of interdependent records and scholarly works that would otherwise be distributed across various collections and indeed various countries. With this proof-of-concept, in a next phase, we would ideally do similar work to integrate selected holdings of major institutions that hold primary archival material on the era, such as the British Library, the British National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Jamaican National Archives. The main output of the project is a public website featuring the 'integrated colonial archive' approach to curating and displaying selected holdings from across disciplines. The website serves as a public resource, the dissemination of the project data and the project's proof-of-concept of the integrated archive model. Additional outputs include an academic symposium towards the end of the grant period to examine the method and late-stage version of the website, an exhibition to accompany the launch of the public website, and a peer-reviewed article to describe the process and methodologies involved in creating the integrated colonial archive.