PART II ][ Chapter 12

Unremembering the Forgotten

Tim Sherratt

The annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations arrived in Australia in 2015, but this was not the first time Australia had welcomed some of the world’s leading thinkers to its shores.[1] Just more than a hundred years earlier, in 1914, the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Australia. In earlier years, the association had journeyed to Canada and to South Africa, but this was its first tour of Australia (Robertson; Love). One senior Australian scientist heralded its arrival as “a great event in the history of Imperial unity” (Masson, 5).

More than 300 scientists made the trip, including such notables as nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford and pioneering geneticist William Bateson. The eminent Australian geologist Edgeworth David described the association’s visit as “an epoch making event.” He expected Australian researchers to be “strengthened and confirmed” in their work, reaffirmed through the “inspiration which comes alone from personal contact with master minds” (xcii).

The 1914 meeting was also an occasion to celebrate the ideals of science. War had been declared while the scientists were at sea, but events proceeded nonetheless, with delegates barnstorming across the country from Adelaide to Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. The spirit of proceedings was summed up in Melbourne where the presentation of an honorary degree to the German geologist Johannes Walter was greeted with a “perfect storm of applause.” “Truly science knows not distinction between belligerent and belligerent,” noted one newspaper.[2] Australia’s governor-general, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, welcomed the scientists in August 1914 with the observation that the looming dangers of war had at least “enabled them to realize that all men of science were brothers.”[3]

And of course, they were mostly men. If you would like to explore the data, you can grab a digitized copy of the report of the meeting from the Internet Archive and run a script over the list of members, grouping them by title—Miss, Mrs., and Lady (Report of the Eighty-Fourth Meeting of the British Association).[4] Figure 12.1 shows what you get. You can do the same for the people who joined the association at one of the Australian venues (see Figure 12.2). This analysis, which took me about ten minutes to perform, might not show anything unexpected, but it does demonstrate that with a digitized text and a few lines of Python you can ask a question and get an almost instant answer.

What the official report does not say is that despite these proclamations of scientific brotherhood, not all German scientists were welcome in wartime Australia. Those who extended their stay beyond the meeting dates fell under suspicion. Two of them, Fritz Graebner and Peter Pringsheim, were identified as potential spies and interned; they remained imprisoned for the remainder of the war.[5] The press, which had previously fawned over the traveling savants, now railed against these “scientists in disguise” whose “supreme act of treachery” was undoubtedly part of a German plot to capture Australia.[6] The Minister of Defense noted that the case emphasized the “real and pressing nature” of the wartime emergency. Honorary degrees awarded to two other German scientists by the University of Adelaide were expunged from the record.[7]

If any of this seems familiar, it may be because legislation introduced in recent years to combat the so-called war on terror has added new limits to our freedom of speech and movement. This time around, we are all under suspicion.

The German scientists were interned alongside many thousands of others. Most had no charges brought against them. Many were naturalized British subjects or born in Australia of German descent: Australia was their home. That did not stop the government from repatriating many of them to Germany at war’s end (Fischer).

On their arrival, visitors for the British Association meeting had been supplied with specially prepared handbooks that described conditions in Australia. At a time when violence against Indigenous people was still common along the frontiers of settlement, the Commonwealth Handbook informed visitors that Australian Aboriginals “represent the most backward race extant” (Spencer).

Australia was big, but its population was small. The Commonwealth Handbook noted the challenges of maintaining “control of so large a territory by a mere handful of people,” pointing to the significance of the “White Australia” policy in avoiding the “difficulties” of “heterogeneous” populations (Knibbs). Chris Watson, who had served as Australia’s first Labour prime minister a decade earlier, expanded on this theme in the New South Wales Handbook. Concerns about the financial impact of “coloured” labor, he explained, had been fused with an “abhorrence of racial admixture” to create “practically a unanimous demand for a ‘White Australia.’” When the Australian colonies came together to form a nation in 1901, it was assumed that that nation would be “white.” In the first term of the new Commonwealth Parliament, the Immigration Restriction Act was passed to give legislative force to these racist ambitions. The White Australia Policy remained in force until the 1960s. For Watson, “White Australia” was both an ideal and an obligation, an opportunity and a threat. He observed,

The aboriginal natives are numerically a negligible quantity, so there is every opportunity for the building up of a great white democracy if the community can maintain possession against the natural desire of the brown and yellow races to participate in the good things to be found in the Commonwealth. That the Asiatic will for ever tamely submit to be excluded from a country which, while presenting golden opportunities, is yet comparatively unpeopled, can hardly be expected. Therefore Australians are realising that to maintain their ideals they must fill their waste spaces and prepare for effective defence. (134)

A hundred years later, however, Australia remembers 1914 not because it exposed the origins of its institutionalized racism, but because it marked the beginning of a war that has come to be strongly associated with ideas of Australian nationhood. The DH2015 conference landed in Australia in the midst of the “Anzac Centenary,” the multiyear commemoration of Australia’s involvement in World War I. The official website notes that the centenary “is a milestone of special significance to all Australians.”[8] How special? According to the Honest History site, Australia spent more than a half-billion dollars on commemorative activities.[9] That pays for a lot of remembering.

Amid the traveling road shows, the memorials, the exhibitions, and the rolling anniversaries were of course many worthy digital projects. Some of these provide new access to war-related collections; others gather community content and memories. These projects result in important new historical resources. But who are we remembering, and why? As a historian and hacker, as a maker of tools and a scraper of sites, I want to poke around for a while within the complexities of memory.

Memory

There is more to Australian history than war. Recent decades have brought attempts to remember more difficult pasts. Historian Peter Read coined the phrase “stolen generations” to draw attention to the devastating effects of official policies that resulted in the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families as late as the 1970s. The damaging experiences of children in institutional care, the “forgotten Australians,” have also been opened to scrutiny (Dow and Phillips). These policies have brought official apologies from the Commonwealth government. More recently, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has exposed widespread horrors.[10]

In each case, we have learned, to our shame, of continuing failures to protect children, the most vulnerable members of Australian society. Often these investigations are cast as attempts to bring to the surface forgotten aspects of our history. But to those who suffered through these damaging events, who have continued to live with their consequences, they have never been far from memory.

Nor have they been entirely lost to the historical record. One of the responses to these inquiries has been to discover, marshal, and deploy existing archival resources. The National Archives of Australia created an exhibition based on the experiences of some of the stolen generation. It also developed a new name index of official records to help Indigenous people reconnect with families fragmented under the government’s brutal policies.[11] The eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne drew on its experience in documenting a wide variety of archival collections to create Find & Connect, a web resource that assembles information about institutional care in Australia and assists care leavers in recovering their own stories.[12] Official records have been supplemented by oral history programs and other collecting initiatives to ensure that these memories are secure.[13]

Such histories are “forgotten” not because they are unremembered or undocumented, but because they sit uncomfortably alongside more widely promulgated visions of Australia’s past. As researchers on the Find & Connect project noted, the stories of those who suffered through institutional care “did not ‘fit in’ with the narratives in the public domain. Their memories were ‘outside discourse’” (Swain, Sheedy, and O’Neill). Remembering the forgotten is not only a matter of recall or rediscovery but also a battle over the boundaries of what matters.

Libraries, archives, and museums are often referred to as memory institutions. Rhetorically this can be a useful way of positioning cultural institutions in relation to structures of governance and assessments of public value. The idea of losing our memory, whether as a society or an individual, is frightening. But there are contradictions here. We frequently talk about memory in terms of storage: the ability of our technologies to tuck away useful pieces of information for retrieval later. There is the “M” in RAM and ROM, the fields in our database, our backups in the cloud. Memory is an accumulation of key/value pairs. Each time we query a particular key, we expect to get the same value back. But memory, as we experience it, is something quite different. It is fragmentary, uncertain, and shaped by context. The process of recall is unpredictable and sometimes disturbing: memories are often triggered involuntarily. Within a society, memories are contested and contradictory. Who controls the keys?

Access

Both in my work at Trove, the National Library of Australia’s online discovery service, and my own research practice, I have used the word “access” a lot. But the more I use it, the more I suspect it really does not mean very much. What does it mean that we now distinguish between “open” and “closed” access?

We tend to think of “access” as the way we get to stuff. It is the pathway along which we can explore our cultural collections. But as Mitchell Whitelaw argues, one of our primary means of access, the common or garden-variety search box, constrains our view of the resources beyond. Search provides not an open door, but a grumpy “Yes, what?”

These sort of constraints do not stand in the way of access; they construct it. Through legislation, technology, and professional practice, through the metadata we create and the interfaces we build, limits are created around what we can see and what we can do. Access is a process of control rather than liberation.

In 1952, in another notable act of “imperial unity,” Britain exploded an atomic bomb off the coast of Western Australia. An additional eleven atomic tests were carried out in Australia, most at a mainland testing site called Maralinga in South Australia. The British atomic tests introduced me, as a young research student in 1984, to both the gloriously rich collections of the National Archives of Australia and to the contradictions of access (Sherratt, “A Political Inconvenience”).

Under the Australian Archives Act, most government records are opened to the public after twenty years (this was reduced from thirty years in 2010).[14] However, before they are released, they undergo examination to see whether they contain material that is exempted from public access; for example, any secret intelligence business that could endanger our national security. The access process can therefore result in records that are “closed” or “open with exception.”

What does “closed” access look like to the researcher? To find out, I harvested details of all the files in the National Archives’ online database that have the access status “closed” (Sherratt, “Closed Access”).[15] While you cannot view the contents of the files, the metadata includes the reasons why they remain restricted (see Figure 12.3). If you group the records by reason, you can see that the most common grounds for restriction is Section 33(1)(g) of the Archives Act, which seeks to prevent the “unreasonable disclosure of information relating to the personal affairs of any person.” Coming second is the rather less obvious category of “withheld pending advice.” These are files that have gone back to the government agencies that created or controlled them to check that they really can be released. So these files are actually partway through the process. Using the contents dates of the files, we can see how old they are. Section 33(1)(a) of the Archives Act exempts records from public scrutiny if they might “cause damage to the security, defense or international relations of the Commonwealth” (see Figure 12.4). Most of the records closed on these grounds are more than fifty years old, with a peak in 1956. Figure 12.5 is a word cloud of the titles of the closed files from 1956. I am sure that we all feel a lot safer knowing all those Cold War secrets are still being protected.

Back in 1984, I asked for some of those secret files to be opened so I could write my honors thesis on the role of Australian scientists in the British atomic tests. A number of the files I was interested in went off to agencies for advice, and some even made their way to the British High Commission. Being young, optimistic, and on a deadline, I wrote to the British High Commissioner asking if anything could be done to speed up the process of reviewing the files.

I received a very polite reply explaining that the British authorities were obligated under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to make sure that they did not unleash any atomic bomb secrets on the world. This was hilariously and tragically ironic, as the argument of my thesis was that the British government withheld information from their Australian hosts to curry favor with the United States. There was no way that atomic bomb plans would be in Australian government files.

Access is political. Archivist Cassie Findlay has contrasted the Australian government’s processes for the release of records with the creation and use of the WikiLeaks Cablegate archive. She argues that the “hyper-dissemination” model of WikiLeaks, which involves the sharing of large volumes of material across multiple platforms, creates a “pluralised archive” that “exists beyond spatial and temporal boundaries, transcends state and economic controls, and encourages and incorporates people’s participation and comment.”[16] Instead of gatekeepers and reading rooms, there are hackers and torrents—opening the workings of business and government to scrutiny.

Meanwhile, traditional forms of access, such as the release of decades-old files, are often celebrated as if they are a gift to a grateful nation. As Findlay notes, the release of Cabinet documents by the National Archives of Australia is a yearly ritual in which stories of thirty-year-old political maneuvering are mixed with the comforts of nostalgia. But with each release, more files are also closed and withheld from public access. The workings of a bureaucratic process developed to control the release of information are recast as an opportunity for publicity. Invested with the cultural power of the secret and the political weight of national security, access itself becomes mysterious and magical. We are left to ponder such artifacts as “Named country [imposed title, original title wholly exempt].”[17]

At the same time, governments are producing more and more “open data,” offering the promise of greater transparency and new fuel for the engines of innovation. But for all its benefits, open data is not really open. It only exists because decisions have been made about what is valuable to record and to keep: structures have been defined, categories have been closed. Just like files in the National Archives, data has achieved its “openness” through processes of description and control. As Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star remind us, the definition, elaboration, and enforcement of categories lie at the heart of bureaucracy and the infrastructure of the state. There is no threshold to be crossed from darkness to light; access is not a magic gateway to be opened to hearty applause and self-congratulation. Data is not just a product of government but is also implicated in the workings of power.

By 1914, Chris Watson’s vision of a White Australia was well established as a system of bureaucratic surveillance and control. The Commonwealth Handbook benignly noted that “an immigrant may be required to pass a dictation test before being admitted into the Commonwealth.” It added that “in general practice this test is not imposed upon persons of European race” (Knibbs). The dictation test was a mechanism of exclusion. Any intending immigrant deemed not to be “white” would be subjected to it, and they would fail. But there were already many people born or resident in Australia of Asian descent. If they wanted to travel overseas, they were forced to carry official documents to protect them from the application of the dictation test; otherwise they might not be allowed to return home. Many thousands of these documents are now preserved in the National Archives of Australia. With portrait photographs and inky-black handprints, they are visually compelling and disturbing documents. They need to be seen.

A few years ago, Kate Bagnall and I harvested thousands of these documents from the National Archives website, ran them through a facial detection script, and created the Real Face of White Australia. It is a scrolling wall of faces, displaying the portraits of thousands of people who were not supposed to be part of a “white” Australia. This was part of our ongoing attempts to use the bureaucratic remnants of the White Australia Policy to reconstruct the lives of those who lived within its grasp. But in the way it was created and received, it is also an example of the complications of access.

In the past I have tended to gloss over the hardest part of this project: harvesting those 12,000 images (Sherratt, “Real Face of White Australia”). This was only possible because I had spent a lot of time, over a number of years, wrestling with RecordSearch, the National Archives online database. It was in 2008 that I wrote my first Zotero translator to extract structured data from RecordSearch. The translator was one of those eureka moments. Although I had been developing web applications for a long time, I had not really thought of the web as a source to be mined, manipulated, and transformed. I could take what was delivered in my browser and change it.

Thanks to Bill Turkel and The Programming Historian, I taught myself enough Python to be dangerous and was soon creating screen scrapers for a variety of sites—taking their HTML and turning it into data (Turkel and MacEachern). I was no longer bound to a particular interface. The meaning of access had changed.

But screen scrapers are a pain. Sites change and scrapers break. I do not know how many hours I have spent inspecting RecordSearch response headers, trying to figure out where my requests were going. I have given up several times, but have always gone back, because there is always more to do.[18]

Along with the enthusiasm for open data, there is perhaps a tendency to overlook the opening of data: the way that hackers, tinkerers, journalists, activists, and others have been stretching the limits of access by finding new ways of extracting information from official sources. The various projects of the Open Australia Foundation are a great example: it has even established its own public scraping framework, called Morph.io, to share both the code and the data that have been liberated from websites and PDFs.[19]

Archivists Wendy Duff and Verne Harris have talked about records “as always in the process of being made,” not locked in the past but “opening out of the future.” Findlay similarly notes that the Cablegate archive “is still forming.” She argues for models of participation and access around archives that unfold “more directly from the affairs that they document.” The act of opening records, archives, and sources is contingent and contextual. It creates a connection between inside and outside, past and present, us and them. What we do with that connection is up to us.

What would have happened, for example, if instead of hearing about “prohibited immigrants,” instead of seeing “wanted” posters of escaped Chinese seamen, Australians in 1914 had seen something like our wall of faces?[20] What would happen now if instead of hearing about “illegal maritime arrivals” (IMAs) we were exposed to the stories of those who arrive in Australia in search of asylum?[21]

Access will never be open. Every CSV is an expression of power, every API is an argument. While I would gladly take back the time I have spent wresting data from HTML, I recognize the value of the struggle. The bureaucratic structures of the White Australia Policy live on in the descriptive hierarchies of the National Archives. To build our wall of faces we had to dismantle these structures—to drill down through series, items, documents, and images until we found the people inside. I feel differently about the records because of that. Access can never simply be given; at some level it has to be taken.

Interventions

In 1987 I ended up outside the gates of Pine Gap, a U.S. intelligence facility near Alice Springs, dressed as a kangaroo. Having finished my honors thesis on the British atomic tests, I could not ignore the parallels between the bombs and the bases. I even organized a conference titled “From Maralinga to Pine Gap: The Historical Fallout.” I remember pulling over on the road to Alice Springs because there was one point where you could glimpse the top of one of the white domes that protected Pine Gap’s receivers. It was a thrilling moment.

Now you can just type “Pine Gap” into Google Maps, and there it is. It is still secret, it is still gathering unknown quantities of electronic intelligence, but last time I checked, it also had twenty-one reviews and an average rating of 3.6 stars. “Worst customer service ever,” notes one of the comments, in a stream of ironic humor and conspiracy theories.

Digital tools enable us to see things differently: to demystify secrets and to expose patterns and trends locked up in tables, statistics, or cultural collections. “Mapping Police Violence,” for example, displays your chances of being killed by police in the United States based on your location.[22] It also presents the photos and details of more than one hundred unarmed black people killed by police in 2015.

But if access is itself defined through restriction, there can be no standard formula for opening connections to the past. Simply building a beautiful array of thumbnail images will not grant new insights into the lives and experiences documented by our cultural heritage collections. We have to work harder to puncture these interfaces and the descriptive systems they represent. We have to use the tools at our disposal to create new points of intersection and collision.

Twitter bots, for example, can play around with our ideas of context and significance. I have created a few myself that automatically tweet content from Trove, and I am interested in what happens when we mobilize cultural collections and let them loose in the places where people already congregate.[23] Steve Lubar argues that “the randomness of the museumbot calls attention to the choices that we take for granted.” Bots can challenge the sense of control and authority that adhere to our collection databases.

But bots can do more. Mark Sample’s important essay on “bots of conviction” explores the possibilities for protest and intervention. He describes protest bots as “tactical media” creating “messy moments that destabilize narratives, perspectives, and events.” Duff and Harris warn archivists of the dangers of the story in disguising the exercise of power, in stealing from individuals what they need to construct their own narratives—“space, confusion, [and] a sense of meaninglessness.” Against the brutal logic of the state, a bot’s algorithmic nonsense can help us see differently, feel differently.

Caleb McDaniel’s bot @Every3Minutes is an example of how powerful these interventions can be.[24] Working from estimates of the volume of the slave trade in the American South, it tweets a reminder every three minutes—a person was just traded, a child was just bought—often with links to historical sources. Mark Sample notes, “It is in the aggregate that a protest bot’s tweets attain power,” and it is through simple, unyielding repetition that @Every3Minutes reaches us. As Alex Madrigal has written, “To follow this bot is to agree to reweave the horrors of slavery into the fabric of your life.”

Twitter bots can interrupt our social media meanderings with pinpoints of surprise, conflict, and meaning. And yet they are lightweight, almost disposable, in their development and implementation. No committees were formed, no grants were obtained—they are quick and creative: hacks in the best sense of the word. Bots are an example of how digital skills and tools allow us to try things, to build and play, without any expectation of significance or impact. We can experiment with the parameters of access.

In 2012 Kate Bagnall and I received an email from Mayu Kanamori, an artist researching the life of an early Japanese Australian photographer. She described her reaction to the Real Face of White Australia: “When I scrolled down the Faces section of your website, browsing through the faces, tears welled up, and I couldn’t stop crying as if some sort of flood gates had been removed.” We knew that that the documents and the images were powerful, but displaying the faces on that seemingly endless scrolling wall did something more than we were expecting: they confront, they challenge, they demand a response.

Jenny Edkins, a researcher in international politics, has been exploring the particular politics of faces. She suggests that alongside our attempts to “read” portrait photographs we also respond in a more visceral fashion, provoking responses such as “guilt, obligation, and reciprocity” (46). She argues that the connections we make through photos of faces, like the “messy moments” of protest bots, can disrupt the “linear narrative temporality” on which sovereign power depends. On our wall, the faces force their way through layers of bureaucracy and archival control to meet us with their gaze. We are connected through time, not with history, not with the past, but with people. And that has implications.

I have also tried extracting faces, and eyes within those faces, from photos I harvested via Trove’s digitized newspapers. Eyes on the Past presents a random selection of eyes, slowly blinking on and off. Clicking on an eye reveals the full face and the source of the image. Where the Real Face of White Australia overwhelms with scale and meaning, Eyes on the Past is minimal and mysterious. It emphasizes absence and the fragility of our connection with the past, even while it provides a new way of exploring digitized newspapers. Some have found it beautiful; others thought it was just creepy.[25] Tweet a photo of yourself to @FaceDepot, and a bot will select a face at random from my collection of newspaper images and superimpose that face over yours, tweeting you back the result and a link to the original article (Sherratt, “Vintage Face Depot”). It sounds stupid, and it probably is. But the potential is there to mess around with the barriers that put some people on the other side of this wall we call the past—to explore what Devon Elliot suggested on Twitter was an “uncanny temporal valley.”

The Australian historian Greg Dening has argued, “Nothing can be returned to the past. Not life to its dead. Not justice to its victimised. But we take something from the past with our hindsighted clarity. That which we take we can return. We disempower the people of the past when we rob them of their present moments” (204).

There is no open access to the past. There is no key we can enter to recall a life. I create these projects not because I want to contribute to some form of national memory, but because I want to unsettle what it means to remember: to go beyond the listing of names and the cataloging of files to develop modes of access that are confusing, challenging, inspiring, uncomfortable, and sometimes creepy.

Among my experiments are a couple of simple user scripts.[26] They sit in your browser and change the behavior of Trove and RecordSearch. Instead of pulling faces out of documents, they insert them back into your search results. Instead of just seeing lists of files, you catch a glimpse of the people inside. Like the faces on our wall, the people bubble to the surface. They are not merely findable: they are present.

Building

Despite the apparent enthusiasm for the visit of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1914, there was in Australia a lingering suspicion of scientists as “impractical dreamers,” as mere theorists unwilling to address the nation’s most urgent needs. In debates over the application of knowledge to Australian development, the scientist commonly struggled against the supposed virtues of the “practical man” (Sherratt, “Atomic Wonderland”).

I imagine that my grandfather Henry Sherratt was a practical man. He was a brass molder with a workshop in Brunswick, a suburb of Melbourne. His father and brother, both brass workers, lived and labored nearby. I have a small brass ashtray that Henry made.

Henry’s name is not among those who joined the British Association in Melbourne, though perhaps he attended one of the “Public or Citizens Lectures” that, until the 1911 meeting, had been known as “Lectures for the Operative Classes.” Neither is Henry’s name among those who journeyed to the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. He is not one of those honored by the Anzac Centenary for having “served our country and worn our nation’s uniform.” And yet he went to war.

Henry Sherratt was among a select group of Australian tradesmen who traveled to Britain in 1916 to help meet the desperate need for skilled workers in munitions factories.[27] He worked as a foreman brass molder in Scotland, before having an accident in which he “strained his heart” carrying a ladle of molten iron. He never really recovered, and as his income suffered, so did his family at home. Henry finally returned to Australia in 1919 and was offered £50 compensation with no admission of liability. He died in 1955. I never knew him.

Whom do we remember, and why?

The Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics reported that 159 people died as a result of industrial accidents in 1914. But these were only the accidents that had been reported under the provisions of state legislation. There must have been more. Where is their memorial? What about mothers who died in childbirth or the victims of domestic violence? How do we remember them?

In the week that the British Association met in Melbourne, newspapers tell us that David Phillips, an engine driver, was fatally injured at Flinders Street Station.[28] I am thinking about how we might use Trove’s digitized newspapers to collect the stories of those who went off to work, but never returned. What might we learn about economic history, unionism, and industrial legislation—about the value we place on an individual life? As I have often said in regard to our work on the White Australia records—it just seems too important not to try.

As I was writing this, I was also keeping an eye on my harvesting scripts, pulling down more images from the National Archives of Australia. For the original wall of faces, I downloaded about 12,000 images from one series; I now have more than 150,000 images from about twenty series.[29] I also stopped at various times to play around with code—to look at the gender balance at the British Association, to investigate “closed” files in the National Archives, to create a public Face API for anyone to use. The code and apps are all out there now for you to play with or improve.[30]

Writing, making, thinking, playing, sharing: it all happens together. I am a maker like my grandfather. While he poured metal, I cut code. I do it because I want to find ways to connect with people like him, ordinary people living their lives. Those connections will always be fleeting and fragile, lacking the clarity of commemoration, but, I hope, bearing some of the meaning and complexity of memory.

It is a task that needs to be both playful and political, that revels in slipperiness of access, and that evades the certainties of control. It is not about making things, but trying to make a difference.

Notes

Bibliography