Digital Humanities for Communicative and Cultural Memory: A Case for a Digital Humanities Repository at Universities in Rural Settings

Abstract

Cultural memory is tied to material objectivations. Thus, cultural memory is consciously established and ceremonialized (Assmann, 2011). While communicative memory "is tied to the temporal dimension of everyday life" (Erll, 2011a, p. 53), cultural memory creates a mnemonic canon that is passed down through generations using various media as a mode of transmission of events, figures of importance, paradigms, and events. These media are then maintained, interpreted, and evaluated by trained professionals. However, between the time remembered in the framework of the communicative memory and that remembered in the cultural memory, there is a shifting “floating gap” that moves along with the passage of time (Erll, 2010, p. 311). This paper examines the role of digital humanities in preserving information that is communicative memory but may become cultural memory and explores different avenues for digital humanities to be used as archives in the modern university classroom.