Paper short abstract:

Digital open data sites have problematic epistemologies and ontologies. This paper critically examines the provenance of an archives of migration and its oral histories as a medium for accessing historical migrants’ subjectivities, proposes ways of narrating vibrant yet precise tales of experience.

Paper long abstract:

The 2020 pandemic year shut researchers out of archival collections as it heightened their awareness to the potential of digital open data sites and their personal digital collections for research. A corpus of oral histories collected half a century ago and opened to the public through digitization reveals the potential of such archives. The Ellis Island Oral History (EIOH) collection discursively constructs the migration from Europe to America a century ago while it documents the experience of historical transatlantic migrants. This paper relies on conceptualizations of “post-memory” to consider a historical artifact that captures a particular structure of feeling at the center of the popular politics of memory in the United States alongside documenting the experiences of cohorts of mostly white immigrants. Multiple sites of construction and re-mediation of the archives are the points of creation as a social memory technology. Building on prior historical ethnographic analyses of this corpus (cf. Dalbello 2019; Dalbello & McGowan 2020), this paper highlights the constraints of pre-elicited oral histories but also their potential in migration historiographies. Thematizing the discourses of the body, kinship, illness, and contagion of the past captured in digitally mediated life histories, studied during the pandemic year, allows for a layer of auto-ethnographic encounter with the archives. This research is supported by the Rutgers Research Council Grant 2020-2021.