Re/mediating the archive: building Alternative Toronto

Abstract

Alternative Toronto is a pilot digital humanities project that is building a collaborative archive and historical map of the city’s radical, countercultural and trans*/feminist/queer communities of the 1980s. This essay discusses the project’s origins as well as its methodological and epistemological foundations. Alternative Toronto is rooted in twin frustrations: with approaches to Canadian history that ignore its radical edges as well as its feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ struggles; and with U.S.- and U.K.-centric radical histories that fail to consider movements beyond their borders. To counter these tendencies, the project adopts – and adapts – the spirit of Britain’s History Workshop movement, which created community-based spaces for collaborative historical inquiry that were open to scholars, independent historians and community members alike. By doing so, it asks how digital tools and a dialogic approach to copyright can be used to democratize the archive as both a site and a process, in keeping with the non-hierarchical principles of its subject. It also hopes that by remediating the audiocassettes, videotapes and print materials that were lost in the transition from analogue to digital formats, the site will encourage contributors and visitors to engage in the radical mediation of Toronto’s recent past.

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