This site has been designed to inspire and enable interactive, experiential readings of the written remains of London’s East Enders stored in public and private physical archives. The East End Digital Library houses records that have been transformed into digital objects, data, and data visualizations.
We might wonder, why create digital archives in the first place? What do we gain by transforming material pages or stone fragments into digital objects? And how can a digital archive be used to help us understand the content collected on the site? This project is created to demonstrate some of the ways that digital archives productively weave together objects and stories otherwise siloed by time and space. In so doing, they reflect and forge new interpretive possibilities. I’ve created this project not just to display rare or hard-to-access print materials, but to put digital objects into dialogue with one another. Through this process, I hope to enable users and creators of material on this site to understand the East End anew.
While many scholars see a sharp distinction between physical records and digital surrogates, The East End Digital Library makes the case for using digital surrogates as raw materials for the creation of original engagement with records from the past. This project blends separable archives (The Lyon Archive and the Polack Archive) to suggest that boundaries are essential features of the way archives narrate stories and create new knowledge through their transgression of containment systems.
