Technologies of memory and archival regimes: War diaries before and after the connective turn

该奖学金将通过对国防部、白厅和国家档案馆（TNA）这两个档案站点的比较研究，开创数字化变革对文化记忆实践和英国陆军部队作战报告（“战争日记”）的“官方”记录的影响的跨学科理解。军事单位通过保存战争日记来记录他们在战区（积极战斗）的活动。战争日记是官方记录，它(i)捕捉信息，供军队日后用于改进训练和战术，（ii）建立一个单位活动的全面记录，以便将来进行历史研究。CMU的主要工作包括：改进作战记录保存（即收集、组织和存档现役战争日记）；开发和维护简报文件，以支持当前的业务；与财政部律师和其他索赔人员合作，并为公众查询提供文件。TNA是英国政府的官方档案。它有一千多年的历史。国家档案馆的工作人员为政府部门和公共部门提供信息管理方面的详细指导，并就历史档案的保护提供建议。这项工作开创了文化记忆研究的方法，将记忆视为文化和社会实践，将人们导向过去的可能版本，从而使他们与正在进行的个人，制度和政治问题相关。在获得前所未有的访问权后，这种方法将应用于位于伦敦白厅国防部的英国陆军企业记忆单元（CMU）的第一个民族志。这至关重要地使该项目能够独特地询问新战争生态（公共档案，TNA）和相对隐藏的军事组织知识生产和管理（MOD）之间的联系和分离。该研究将研究来自前线的高移动数字图像和记录的出现如何对在维护单位战争日记的一个多世纪的背景下构建的军队组织记忆提出前所未有的挑战，以及这种转变对军队，档案工作者，历史学家和公众的战争知识形式的变化意味着什么。这种合作关系的推动力是21世纪西方领导的伊拉克和阿富汗战争被嵌入到“连接转向”中（Hoskins 2010, 2011）。这是数字/数字化信息的规模、数量和复杂性的大规模增加，形成了一个新的知识基础——一个“信息基础设施”（Bowker和Star 2000），通过它，战争被计划、战斗、历史化和（去）合法化。在这一时期，政府的电子记录保存系统已经使以前的纸质系统黯然失色，这“伴随着记录保存实践和使用记录保存来实现审计文化的显着恶化”（Moss 2012: 860）。具体来说，最近的伊拉克和阿富汗战争标志着国防部组织记忆系统从纸质到数字的演变。虽然该机构在2001年开始使用电脑，但它仍然使用纸质系统，即打印工作并将其放入纸质文件中。相比之下，它今天要管理的伊拉克军事行动的3亿份数字文件。

This fellowship will pioneer interdisciplinary understanding of the impact of digital change on the cultural memory practices and the 'official' record of the British Army's unit operational reports ('war diaries') through comparative research over two archival sites: the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall and The National Archives (TNA). Military units document and record their activities in theatre (active combat) by keeping war diaries. War diaries are official records that (i) capture information to be used at a later time by the military to improve training and tactics, and (ii) establish a comprehensive record of a unit's activities to enable future historical research. The CMU's key work includes: improving operational record keeping (i.e. collecting, organising, and archiving active war diaries); developing and maintaining briefing documents to support current operations; working with treasury solicitors and others in compensation claims, and providing documents for public inquiries. TNA is the UK government's official archive. It contains over 1,000 years of history. Staff at the National Archives give detailed guidance to government departments and the public sector on information management and advise others about the care of historical archives. This work pioneers a a cultural memory studies' approach which sees memory as cultural and social practices which orient persons to possible versions of the past in such a way as to make them relevant to ongoing personal, institutional and political concerns. This approach will be applied to the first ever ethnography of the British Army's Corporate Memory Unit (CMU) in the MOD, Whitehall, London after securing unprecedented access. This crucially enables the project to uniquely interrogate the connections and disconnections across and between the often publicly accessible features of the new war ecology (public archives, TNA) and the relatively hidden military organizational knowledge production and management (MOD).This fellowship will examine how the advent of highly mobile digital images and recordings from the frontline presents an unprecedented challenge to the organizational memory of the Army constructed in the context of over a century of maintaining unit war diaries, and what this transformation could mean for changes in the forms of knowledge about war, for the military, archivists, historians and publics.The impetus for this fellowship is the 21st century Western-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being embedded in the 'connective turn' (Hoskins 2010, 2011). This is the massively increased scale, volume and complexity of digital/digitized information that shape a new knowledge base - an 'information infrastructure ' (Bowker and Star 2000) through which wars are planned, fought, historicised, and (de)legitimised. In this period, Government electronic record keeping systems have eclipsed previous paper-based systems, which 'has been accompanied both by a marked deterioration in record keeping practices and the use of record keeping to enable an audit culture' (Moss 2012: 860). Specifically, the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars mark the evolution of the MOD organizational memory system from paper to digital. Although the organization was using computers in 2001, it was still operating a paper system, i.e. printing out work and placing in paper files. This compares with the 300 million digital files from operations in Iraq it has to manage today.