Dr Saskia Huc-Hepher has created a new model for inclusive, community-themed archives that is already being replicated in the UK and internationally.
Minority language communities add a great deal to a city’s culture and much of this is reflected in online activity. However, such web content often has a relatively short lifespan, due to the transient nature of both migration and websites. Given this, the online presence of these communities risks permanent erasure if not preserved.
Dr Saskia Huc-Hepher’s pioneering, internationally acclaimed web archiving project, the London French Special Collection has recorded almost 150 such web artefacts, reflecting and unifying French Londoners’ rich cultural contribution to the city.
This work has informed the French Embassy’s digital communication practice, inspired a growing number of archiving projects that follow its model, and is broadening the lens of both Digital Humanities and Modern Languages teaching.
Visit the London French Special Collection at the UKWA website.
The world’s first diasporic collection in a national web archive
Launched in 2014, the London French Special Collection (LFSC) was the world’s first migrant/diaspora-based web archive, offering a unique insight into this diverse and vibrant community, and creating a prototype for inclusive community-themed archives that can be adopted, adapted and upscaled.
Inviting community members to nominate sites directly, the LFSC reaches eclectic corners of London’s French community other approaches could not. For Dr Naomi Wells, curator of the British Library’s Latin America UK community archive, such crowdsourcing bridges the gap between the “institutional” and the “grassroots”. It enables the archive to capture, and recognise the cultural value of everything from amateur theatre companies, NGOs, and regional associations to medical practitioners, schools, and the Huguenot Society.
It really provokes very interesting reflections on what makes a community.
- Dr Naomi Wells, curator of the British Library’s Latin America UK community web-archive collection
As the creator of a cooking blog recorded by the LFSC puts it: “The diversity of sites archived gives an interesting picture of what the community in London is about”. Further, though the blog is no longer active, the LFSC still brings fresh traffic to the site.
In this way, the LFSC eternalises something ephemeral – giving future generations a sense of the French Londoners’ cultural-linguistic legacy across time.
Working with the French Consulate
The French Consulate was among those who recognised the LFSC’s value. Describing it as “une première dans le monde” (a world first), the Vice Consul for France in the UK said the archive helped him to gauge the temperature of London’s French community on the ground.
This appreciation of the LFSC resulted in Huc-Hepher being invited to present her community-building archive practice at a meeting with the Communication Officer of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development to the French Consulate in London, with the aim of improving communication with the French community in the UK.
The Consulate subsequently incorporated the LFSC into its digital communication provision to better cater for expatriate citizens’ needs. A bulletin detailing the LFSC project was published on the French Consulate’s public-facing website, in March 2015, and circulated in an eNewsletter to over 100,000 recipients, with a direct hyperlink to the collection.
This led to the highest number of page views then on record for the UK Web Archive (UKWA), the most prestigious internet archive in the UK, in which the LFSC appears.
Revolutionising community-focused web archiving
Along with expanding the UKWA’s user base, Dr Huc-Hepher’s work on the LFSC has helped the British Library-based archive to achieve a key aspect of its mission statement, to “reflect the rich diversity of lives and interests throughout the UK”.
This has occurred through both Huc-Hepher’s own pioneering archival project and other similar collections, both nationally and internationally, inspired by Huc-Hepher’s work. In addition to the aforementioned Latin America UK collection, Russia in the UK and East and Southeast Asians in the UK collections have now been published.
Dr Wells, the curator of the former, “was directed by the British Library” to Huc-Hepher’s work as an example of best-practice “in terms of very specific community web curation”.
The careful curation that Saskia has done is absolutely a model. It informs my thoughts about who we need to involve in research projects, and that you need to look at co-creating with the people who are producing these materials.
– Jane Winters, Professor of Digital Humanities and Pro-Dean for Libraries at the School of Advanced Study.
Winters gives the example of the Royal Library in the Netherlands’ use of the LFSC model for the creation of a Dutch-Chinese community archive: “Saskia was pretty much there at the beginning; hers was the first kind of project which was doing that, and that model has really spread out”.
Interfacing Modern Languages and Digital Humanities
Already being trialled at three secondary schools, the LFSC is helping to decolonise digital humanities and reboot modern languages with a new multilingual, multi-cultural worldview.
“Digital research tends to be incredibly Anglophone”, Professor Winters says. “So what Saskia is doing, considering language-switching and people using languages other than English online, is really significant to get introduced and to have people think about”.
Paul Spence, lead of the Digital Mediations strand of the AHRC funded Language Acts and Worldmaking programme, of which Westminster is a partner, also highlights how “Huc-Hepher’s web archive is a significant contribution to broader efforts to reshape Modern Languages as a discipline in light of new media landscapes and affordances”.
Dr Huc-Hepher’s advancement of Digital Humanities is also seen in her work on the Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities (BUDDAH) project. The methodology she developed for navigating the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset – an archive containing snapshots of all UK-domain websites collected between 1996 and 2013 – informed the developers of the UKWA’s Shine interface (search tools and dashboard) of the potential needs of Humanities’ researchers and, in turn, has enabled researchers to better navigate the big data and reap more meaningful results.
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