<p>This dissertation, entitled “Digital Youth: How Social Media are Archiving, Engaging and Capturing the Lives of Young People,” examines how children and youth experience networked sociality in a historic moment that places growing economic value on the content users generate online. By conceptualizing the digital archive, I have laid out a comprehensive framework that accounts for the following issues: i) economic concerns, foregrounded in how user-generated content has become an integral source of surplus value for the networked economy; ii) privacy concerns, which relate to the privacy agreements to which young people must consent when they join social networks, to questions around the rearticulation of private and public spheres online, and finally to the growing importance placed on the computational power of algorithms required to process big data; iii) the extended and intensified sociality engendered by networked affective spaces which produce new ways for young people to engage with their peers and produce subjectivities; and, iv) the political possibilities circulating both discursively and as acts of civic engagement. In addition, given that more ubiquitous access does not necessarily equip young users to understand the myriad challenges accompanying a profoundly networked and mediated existence, I argue that more pedagogical techniques and practices are required. This dissertation concludes by outlining why educators need to integrate data literacy as opposed to media literacy in the classroom. By foregrounding the prevalent role that social networks play and will continue to play in the lives of young people I argue that educators and parents have a responsibility to not only help children and youth appreciate how their immaterial labour is being cultivated, but equally to provide them with valuable skills that will not only facilitate new forms of sociality but civic engagement.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation considers the impact mobile media technologies have on the production and consumption of memory narratives and cultural memory discourses in Canada. Although this analysis pays specific attention to concepts of memory, heritage, and public history in its exploration of site-specific digital narratives, it is set within a larger theoretical framework that considers the relationship between mobile technology and place, and how the mobile phone in particular can foster both a sense of place and placelessness. This larger framework also includes issues of co-presence, networked identity, play, affect, and the phenomenological relationship between the individual and the mobile device. This is then considered alongside memory narratives (both on the national and quotidian levels) at specifically sanctioned sites of national commemoration (monuments, historic sites) and also in everyday urban spaces. To this end, this dissertation covers a wide range of augmented reality apps and forms of digital storytelling including locative media narratives, site-specific digital performances, social media and crowdsourced heritage archives, and urban mobile gaming and playful mapping. Despite common criticism that mobile phones only serve to distract us from our surrounding environment, I argue that mobile technology can generate deeper, more affective attachments to places by reformulating ways of perceiving and moving through them. They do this by insisting that place is more than just its material properties, but rather is composed of a fluctuating relationship between materiality, time, and affect. Following this framework, I also emphasize how mobile technology shifts the traditional mission of the archive to preserve and protect the past to something more playful, more affective, and more preoccupied with the circulation of the past in the present. Included in this analysis are crowdsourced archives created on social media platforms which, I argue, are particularly well suited to capturing the dynamic qualities of memory and living heritage practices. A contributing factor in this is the mobile phone’s position as a site of intimacy and co-presence, which situates it in a long history of communication technologies that employ rhetorical and technological strategies of co-presence, immediacy, and intimacy. Chapter one examines the role that locative media narratives play at official sites of memory in Canada’s capital region from app-based historical tours to more playful narrative encounters, through the lens of the archive and the repertoire. Chapter two then considers the digital site-specific performance piece, LANDLINE, to unpack how mobile media foster everyday place memories in urban spaces through the mobile phone’s position as a site of intimacy for geographically distant, but virtually co-present, individuals. Chapter three analyzes my own experimental method, Maplibs, which follows a mobile game structure to encourage participants to engage in acts of playful placemaking and collaborative storytelling in order to highlight an alternative process of engaging with place that carries the past forward in meaningful ways. And finally, chapter four analyzes the social media group “Lost Ottawa” to explore how collaborative memory communities mobilize through social media platforms like Facebook and create new forms of participatory heritage. In all of this, place is understood as a dynamic assemblage of stories and memories that the mobile phone, through its ubiquitous impact on social practices, plays a key role in shaping.

Personal digital records are one of the most underrepresented areas of archival theory and practice. Documentary forms created by private persons have long been victim of a poverty of professional attention, and much of the literature on the appraisal and preservation of records has tended to focus on those generated by government and other organizational entities. And strategies developed for the archival management of digital records have similarly placed strong emphasis on business functions or corporate transactions as the primary unit of analysis. This scholastic deficit has severely impaired the ability of the archivist to comprehend and effectively meet the many challenges of archiving personal records in the digital age. This thesis demonstrates how investigations of the original context of creation and use of records in contemporary personal computing environments are integral to the development of comprehensive strategies for the capture and preservation of personal digital archives. It is within these digital domains that archivists come to see cultures of personal recordkeeping, private appraisal decisions based on unique designations of value, and the complexities of both online and offline personal digital preservation strategies. A keen understanding of how individuals create and preserve their digital records across time and space should be of the utmost importance to archivists for, if nothing else, these pre-custodial activities are the principal sites of archival provenance. Chapter one discusses past and present responses to both paper-based and electronic personal archives. The discussion begins with the definition of the personal record as essentially non-archival by early leading archival theorists and how these definitions, though first advanced in the early to mid-twentieth century, continue to find resonance in contemporary archival ideas and institutional mandates. This chapter then illustrates how ideas predicated on the management of electronic government records, and metadata standards developed for formalized electronic recordkeeping systems, are not easily transposed to personal domains. Chapter two takes a critical look at the often oversimplified personal digital archiving environment to expose the many nuances in the context of creation and use of records by individuals in the digital era. Chapter three explores a number of emerging approaches to the professional archiving of personal digital records and reveals how the proper management of these materials requires multiple hardware and software applications, concise acquisition strategies and preservation methodologies, and diligent front-end work to ensure personal digital records cross the threshold of archival repositories. The thesis concludes with a summary of the main arguments and collates the best ideas, approaches, and technologies reviewed throughout to propose a hypothetical strategy for archiving personal digital records in the present. This thesis argues that significantly more work with records creators earlier in the record creation process must be done when archiving personal digital records because more proactive measures are required to capture and preserve these materials than was previously the case with paper-based or analog documentary forms.

Personal digital records are one of the most underrepresented areas of archival theory and practice. Documentary forms created by private persons have long been victim of a poverty of professional attention, and much of the literature on the appraisal and preservation of records has tended to focus on those generated by government and other organizational entities. And strategies developed for the archival management of digital records have similarly placed strong emphasis on business functions or corporate transactions as the primary unit of analysis. This scholastic deficit has severely impaired the ability of the archivist to comprehend and effectively meet the many challenges of archiving personal records in the digital age. This thesis demonstrates how investigations of the original context of creation and use of records in contemporary personal computing environments are integral to the development of comprehensive strategies for the capture and preservation of personal digital archives. It is within these digital domains that archivists come to see cultures of personal recordkeeping, private appraisal decisions based on unique designations of value, and the complexities of both online and offline personal digital preservation strategies. A keen understanding of how individuals create and preserve their digital records across time and space should be of the utmost importance to archivists for, if nothing else, these pre-custodial activities are the principal sites of archival provenance. Chapter one discusses past and present responses to both paper-based and electronic personal archives. The discussion begins with the definition of the personal record as essentially non-archival by early leading archival theorists and how these definitions, though first advanced in the early to mid-twentieth century, continue to find resonance in contemporary archival ideas and institutional mandates. This chapter then illustrates how ideas predicated on the management of electronic government records, and metadata standards developed for formalized electronic recordkeeping systems, are not easily transposed to personal domains. Chapter two takes a critical look at the often oversimplified personal digital archiving environment to expose the many nuances in the context of creation and use of records by individuals in the digital era. Chapter three explores a number of emerging approaches to the professional archiving of personal digital records and reveals how the proper management of these materials requires multiple hardware and software applications, concise acquisition strategies and preservation methodologies, and diligent front-end work to ensure personal digital records cross the threshold of archival repositories. The thesis concludes with a summary of the main arguments and collates the best ideas, approaches, and technologies reviewed throughout to propose a hypothetical strategy for archiving personal digital records in the present. This thesis argues that significantly more work with records creators earlier in the record creation process must be done when archiving personal digital records because more proactive measures are required to capture and preserve these materials than was previously the case with paper-based or analog documentary forms.

Storytelling presented in digital archives can provide indigenous communities with a voice needed to tell stories and thus enhance the society’s understanding for that community. The objective was to evaluate a digital archive prototype from a perspective of rendering Sami stories and storytelling. This was done by collecting data with the method Research through Design where a prototype was designed and demonstrated in two steps to the indigenous people of Scandinavia known as the Sami people. The findings suggest that the prototype can render Sami storytelling to some extent but that digital archives, in regard to indigenous cultures, must be designed with sensitive ethicalities in mind. These digital archives must also be designed so that immersive stories can be rendered whilst also providing the indigenous people the right to be prosumers in order to provide them the empowerment to own their own culture. These issues and future research are discussed in the paper.

Digital libraries and archives are major portals to rich sources of information. They undertake large-scale digitization to enhance their digital collections and offer users valuable text data. When it comes to handwritten documents, usually these are only provided as digitized images and not accompanied by their transcriptions. Text in non-machine-readable format restricts contemporary scholars to conduct research, especially by employing digital humanities approaches, such as distant reading and data mining. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate Transkribus platform as a linguistic tool mainly developed for producing automatic transcriptions of handwritten documents. The results are correlated with the findings of a questionnaire distributed to libraries and archives across Europe to expand our knowledge on the policy they follow regarding manuscripts and transcription provision. A model for a specific writing style in Latin language is trained and the accuracy on various Latin handwritten pages is tested. Finally, the tool’s validation is discussed, as well as to what extent it meets the general needs of the cultural heritage institutions and of humanities scholars.

This master thesis aims to analyse the data curation situation and the decision-making processes of the archivists at the Swedish Peace Archives. With the theories in data curation and methodology in analysing both accessible web content and interviews, this thesis hopes to shed light on the institutional perspective in managing digital archives. By studying and analysing the empirical materials from the online archive websites and the database, the data curation theories are applied to locate the archive practices at different levels. The method in collecting qualitative data from interviews with the archivists gives insight into archive works and digitisation processes in the digital archives today.  The results show the complexity in data management from digitisation to curation, and digital archives as an information-intensive digital environment has caused the merge of humanities and archives scholarship. This shows the limitation in the data-centric digital humanities frameworks when discussing archive management and technical interoperability. A further study with more focus on individual institutions with their unique workflows, stakeholders, and material types in mind is therefore suggested.

This research examines the history of a small Florida agricultural community over the course of the twentieth century from a rhetorical perspective in order to understand the technological and communicative transitions that governed the development of American agricultural production. By examining archival and oral histories, this research will add to our understandings of how written and oral communications temper the relationships and social situations of an agricultural community, including the knowledge-making and technological adaptation resulting from communications within the community and with outside institutions and entities. Agricultural villages are not isolated entities, but rather sites of multiple rhetorical situations, and farmers do not farm alone, but inside an ecosystem of networked knowledges, practices, and traditions. Thus, the history of a singular farming community may serve as a rhetorical microcosm of modern American agriculture's evolution over the course of the twentieth century, and provide some mindfulness concerning the social, technological, and natural ecologies that act and interact within modern farming communities. This dissertation will use rhetorical genre theory and ideas of local literacies to examine the written and oral discourses that run through these ecologies for the purpose of tracing the relationships between the sponsors of agricultural ideas and technologies and the local farmers who interpreted, employed, and modified them. In addition, this project purports to add to digital history-making research through the construction of an historical archival website to which community members can add their voices. The Samsula Historical Archive creates an online nexus where community members can document, organize, and preserve the history of the community, offering a portal supporting multiple narratives and perspectives. Each family has its own stories and perspectives on historical happenings; by bringing these together in one databased location, the layers and interconnections will become clearer and perhaps stimulate further memories and insights. A discussion of the rhetorical choices faced in constructing such an artifact may also help future researchers embarking on such a project.

文學是語言文字的藝術，更是人類文化薈萃的結晶。目前現有的台灣作家數位典藏計畫如雨後春筍般蓬勃發展，但形式、內容差異大，尚未建立台灣作家數位典藏的模式。本研究旨在藉由對台灣作家數位典藏研究，建構台灣作家數位典藏模式，俾使進行文學數位化的同時，可對文學資料的外觀、背景資料、內容、甚至參照的部分，能夠完整的蒐集和呈現，不僅重現文學原有的樣貌，更豐富作品的意義與價值。 本研究為了解目前台灣作家與其作品文物已被數位化的情形，以廣義之台灣文學與數位典藏，採網路調查大量蒐羅台灣文學較具代表性之相關數位典藏網站，並透過個案研究建構出台灣作家之數位典藏模式。最後獲致研究結論如下：(1)台灣作家數位典藏具有時代意義；(2)台灣文學與作家的數位典藏建置呈現多元的成果；(3)活躍於1920~1960年代的多位重要作家尚未進行數位典藏；(4)目前台灣作家數位典藏成果以本省與客家籍作家居多；(5)目前台灣作家與作品數位典藏的數位化物件；(6)台灣作家數位典藏之模式建構；(7)多數作家典藏網站缺乏文學知識背景之人力；(8)物件式導向的metadata不適用於作家數位典藏；(9)作家生平脈絡以年表、照片呈現，缺乏超連結功能；(10)面臨年代久遠及無從得知著作權人的困難；(11)數位典藏網站面臨計畫結束後缺乏經費支持與更新維護的機制；(12)目前缺乏台灣作家入口網的設計。 本研究最後針對台灣作家數位典藏的發展提出以下建議：(1)進行本研究模式優先選擇台灣重要作家進行數位典藏；(2)對於不同族群的台灣作家均應積極數位典藏；(3)台灣作家數位典藏需由文學領域學者及數位典藏專家共同合作；(4)妥善規劃網站內容的更新維護機制；(5)發展與使用者的雙向互動機制；(6)增強連結功能以及加值利用的設計；(7)建置「台灣作家入口網站」。 / Literature is the art of language and the performance of human cultures. Nowadays, more and more digital archives programs of Taiwanese writers have been developed, but forms and contents are greatly different from each other. The purpose of this research is constructing the model of digital archives of Taiwanese writers, so that collected and displayed the information of the appearance of literature, context, content, reference perfectly when proceeding the digital of literature not only to reproduce the original appearance of literature, but also enrich its meaning and value. In order to understand the situation of the digital archives of Taiwanese writers, the research collects a large number of Taiwanese literature digital archives websites by the internet investigate, and constructs a model of the digital archives of Taiwanese writers through case study. The research findings are as follow: (1) The digital archives of Taiwanese writers is historically significant ;(2) The digital archives of Taiwanese writers build a diverse achievement ;(3) Many 1920-1960s writers have not been the outcome of digital archives; (4) the overcome with Taiwanese and Hakka writers is a large part of the digital archives of Taiwanese writers; (5) to construct the model of digital archives of Taiwanese writers; (6) the lack of professional scholars of literature in the majority of Taiwan literature websites ;(7) It does not apply to digital archives of writers by object-oriented metadata ;(8) It displays writer's life context by chronology and photographs, lack of hyperlinks function ;(9) Facing no way of knowing the copyright holders ;(10) Lack of financial support and the maintenance and update mechanism after the end of programs ;(11) Lack of a portal site for Taiwanese writers. Based on the final results of this research, several suggestions for the development of digital archives of Taiwanese writers are as follow: (1) Preferred to choose the important writers to digital archives by the model from this research ;(2) Writers in all communities should be digital archived well ;(3) It should cooperate scholars between the domain of literature and digital archives ;(4) Plan the site mechanism of maintenance and updating well ;(5) Develop the user interaction mechanism ;(6) Enhance the use of link functions and the design of value-added ;(7) Build the "Taiwanese writers portal."

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has been a force on Canadian airwaves for nearly a century. Within that timeframe, kilometres of textual records and thousands of hours of audiovisual recordings have been produced. Those records are evidence of the CBC’s role in mirroring and developing Canada’s national consciousness. Yet, the CBC’s records are scattered throughout Canada in multiple archival institutions. This thesis analyzes the development of these archives, with special attention to the only repository the CBC links to on its “Resources and Archives” webpage: The CBC Digital Archives. With consideration of the challenges and opportunities presented by digital culture, this thesis aims to uncover the role of the CBC Digital Archives within CBC’s archival landscape and its wider broadcasting policies and mandate. / May 2017