Open Sourcing the Colonial Archive – A Digital Montage of the History of Fernando Pó and the Bight of Biafra

Abstract

Abstract The archival sources gathered for my PhD research have all been posted to a blog, www.opensourceguinea.org . Among other things, the sources trace the migrants and laborers in and around the plantation island of Fernando Pó, moving through numerous empires and societies in Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon for most of the twentieth century. Having sources “speak for themselves” to the “public” and even “amongst themselves” contributes not only to an expansionary information commons, but also to a methodological reorganization and pluralization. When a multiplicity of sources are displayed and interlinked as hypertext, the static conceptual lenses of traditional social and cultural history dissolve.

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