Living Archives: Creating Digital Materials to Revitalize Family and Community Stories

This project aims to draw from exceptionally rich archives to produce an interactive e-book and a podcast series telling a community’s history. The available documents include recorded interviews, historical photographs, field notes, political documents, life stories, and various cultural works documenting several decades of social, geographical and familial transformations.

The project’s main objective is to make these materials accessible via engaging and detailed narratives—namely in the form of a multimedia e-book and a documentary podcast—while upholding research ethics, relationships with knowledge keepers and rights associated with the archives.

Students’ work will contribute directly to:

• highlighting often-underrepresented community knowledge;
• developing new scientific and public education tools;
• the production of content for general readers and listeners without sacrificing academic rigour.

This project is part of a collaborative, decolonial and community-focused research initiative. 

The project will take several complementary approaches:

1. Qualitative analysis of the archives
   • Thematic analysis of textual and audio documents
   • Organizing, categorizing and describing digital materials
   • Identifying the themes, historical issues and narrative through lines
2. Narrative and oral history research methods
   • Selecting and contextualizing archived stories
   • Developing a narrative framework for the e-book
   • Selecting audio clips for the podcast
3. Digital access methods
   • Compiling an e-book (EPUB format or on a website) including text, photographs, audio clips, maps and timelines
   • Preparing 3–5 podcast episodes: synopsis, scripts, rough edit
4. Ethical and relational approach
   • Upholding archival protocols (rights, consent, use restrictions)
   • Reflecting on how community voices are represented and the responsibilities of researchers 

During this project, students will:

• develop skills in archival analysis and qualitative methods;
• strengthen their scientific writing and science communication skills;
• learn how to use digital production tools (for audio and e-book formats);
• structure a project involving multimedia research;
• deepen their understanding of ethical issues related to community archive use;
• organize research data and complex databases.

These skills will be applicable to graduate work as well as careers in research, documentary production, communications and heritage.