Conceptualizing the Sociocultural Structures of Digital Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Foto zoekt familie

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UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

Conceptualizing the

Socio-cultural Structures of

Digital Cultural Heritage

A Case Study of Foto zoekt familie

Tessa de Keijser

Ma Thesis: New Media and Digital Culture

Supervisor: Anat Ben-David

Second Reader: Niels van Doorn

27 June 2014

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Introduction

Fig. 1. Front (left) and backside (right) of the promotional sticker that featured on the Go-Tan packages. Source: <http://avro.nl/cultuur/Kunst/detail/8292509>

"Is this your Grandmother?”1_{was the question that numerous shoppers were}

confronted with, when strolling down the aisles of Dutch supermarkets in search of Indonesian chips called emping in the early months of 2013. The question was framed by an old black and white photograph of two young girls in a tropical setting, the oldest of the two looking directly into to the camera, seemingly demanding an answer from the consumer that picked up one of the Go-Tan packages she was on.

The question was not asked by a genealogist trying to reconstruct his family tree. Instead, the photograph was part of a campaign for a project called Foto zoekt

familie [photograph in search of family]. Foto zoekt familie is an initiative developed

by the Dutch Tropenmuseum. With the help of the Dutch crowd funding platform Voordekunst.nl, €13.150 was raised to help digitalize 335 family albums out of institute’s collection, all of which were left in Indonesia during the years 1945-1949. In this period, Indonesia's struggle for independence from their colonial oppressors reached a climax, causing thousands of Indonesians of Dutch or mixed descent to flee

1_{"Is dit jouw oma?" was the original text in Dutch. This and all subsequent translations from Dutch to}

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their homes, leaving much of their possessions (including family pictures) behind. Through the website www.fotozoektfamilie.nl, these albums are made accessible again with the help of users that can create a profile and help tag the family photos, in order to eventually return the physical albums to their original owners. In addition,

Foto zoekt familie and copies of the digital photographs also circulate on other

Indo-sites,2_{one notable project being the blog series on the website Indisch 3.0 called Foto}

zoekt verhaal, in which (fictional) accounts of the stories behind these photographs

are written.

The fact that these photographs are now digitized and made available on a website especially created for this purpose, is in line with other new media projects that over the past decade have aimed to open up archival content related to historical events by using new media technologies. These projects contain the archival contents of institutions that deal with cultural heritage, such as museums and libraries. Previously hidden in archives where access was limited, these contents are now more and more made public through advanced scanning technologies and websites especially created to hold these documents. Moreover, these websites like Foto zoekt

familie, instead of being mere showcases for archival material, are increasingly

becoming a platform of their own, where users can interact with the documents, add tags or help classify them.

In line with these developments, scholars across disciplines have tried to capture the proliferation of such digital projects, yet have not come to a consensus about how to define their scope and field of research. In the archival discipline, archives open to the public by means of digital technologies are often called “archives 2.0" (Theimer) or "participatory archives," which are quite general terms, while recent studies that link the architectural field with new media projects do connect the digital to a specific kind of object by referring to "new heritage" (Kalay, Kvan and Affleck). However, just like the additive "2.0," the word "new" still creates an implicit opposition to a heritage that is then necessarily seen as "old" and is perhaps even harder to define. Avoiding such temporal constructions while keeping the specific nature of the objects in mind, Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine therefore speak of a "digital cultural heritage." In their anthology on this subject, they write that their

2_{In this thesis, I will use the term “Indisch” to refer to anyone “connected to the Dutch East Indies}

through family ties, birth or a long stay that shaped identity” [“iedereen die met Nederlands-Indïe verbonden is door familiebanden, geboorte of een identiteitsbepalend langdurig verblijf”], as Pamela Pattynama has written in Indische Letteren (“‘Laat mij voor één keer schaamteloos terugverlangen’”).

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book aims to "critically analyze and theorize on themes of museums and heritage in

relation to 'digital culture'" (Cameron and Kenderdine 1, my emphasis).

Indeed, the fact that there are a multitude of disciplines that try to perform research on and with these projects and that they are doing so by using their own terms, points to the fact that there are many different origins and aims of projects that deal with archival material online. This thesis seeks to contribute to the study of initiatives that deal with museums and heritage in a digital form by analyzing the origin, developments and goals of one such a digital cultural heritage project: Foto

zoekt familie, a project initiated by a museum dealing with cultural heritage, and that

focuses on the problematic legacy of the Dutch East Indies in the Netherlands. By doing so, I hope to advance our knowledge of the underlying structures of digital cultural heritage.

The space in which Foto zoekt familie operates is one of contestation, as over the last few years the history of the Dutch East Indies has received considerable attention in the Dutch public debate. It is most notably photographs of this period that keep surfacing, showing explicit images of bodies and military personnel. Such images are often perceived as evidence of the military actions (referred to as the "police actions") undertaken by the Dutch government when their colony was dismantling in the late 1940's and are made to serve the claim that the Dutch colonial history is a suppressed or forgotten one, while at the same time this history is highly visible by the constant debates exactly about its perceived suppression. A paradoxical situation in which the legacy of the Dutch East Indies is negotiated is thus at work in Dutch society.

Foto zoekt familie can on the one hand be seen along the same lines of other

documents that keep coming to the fore about the Dutch East Indies, as it consists of images that are presented as being about the police actions as well. However, there are three things that set this project apart: the nature of the events depicted in the photographs, its new media form, and its unclear goal.

To elaborate on the first aspect: unlike other photographs, the images in Foto

zoekt familie do not explicitly attest to colonial violence. As these are albums that are

lost during the police actions, the photos within the covers of these albums do not attest to these gruesome events. Instead, the albums presented on the website are family albums, and therefore mostly display joyful events such as birthdays and

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weddings. A question that this raises is how Foto zoekt familie is still presented as a digital heritage project about the police actions?

The second aspect that sets this project apart from other documents of the Indies is its medium specificity. Why are these images made available online? Is this just something to enhance the outreach of this project and to increase the change that these albums are returned to the people depicted in the photographs? If so, then why is this specific website the chosen format? If the albums were found during and shortly after the police actions of 1945-1949, the pictures in the albums are all taken before this date. This would mean that the people depicted in the photographs are all at least 65 years old, and new media technologies and the web are not something usually associated with older generations. As I have mentioned in the beginning of this introduction, one of the promotional stickers of Foto zoekt familie appeals to a generation that could have had a grandmother that lived in the Indies and appears one of the photos. Foto zoekt familie thus opens up question about the medium specificity of digital cultural heritage and the audiences such a project envisions and creates.

Thirdly, as the images of this project are not presented by the Tropenmuseum as direct evidence of any abuse of power by the Dutch, Foto zoekt familie has not (yet) lead to public discussions, nor has it made a frequent appearance in mainstream news. As such, Foto zoekt familie seemingly does not affect discussions about reviewing the history of the Dutch East Indies, or its status as a legacy that is to be remembered in Dutch society. This is remarkable, as it brings me to wonder what the aim of such a digital project could be then - a question that thus far remains under researched in the literature on digital cultural heritage. Theoretical work done on digital cultural heritage often focuses on the accessibility and the outreach of such projects. However, Foto zoekt familie not only prompts me to question how this project is created (the technical aspects), but also why (the socio-cultural implications). What are the (implicit) aims of this digital cultural heritage project and how does Foto zoekt familie have an effect on the legacy of the Indies, if it can effect this framework of remembrance at all?

In short, the central question that guides this research is: how can the socio-cultural structures of digital heritage projects be conceptualized? I will limit myself to the specific heritage of the Dutch East Indies in the Netherlands only, motivated by the fact that Foto zoekt familie functions in a contested space of remembrance, and as

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such raises questions that otherwise remain unasked in other digital cultural heritage projects that deal with events in the past that have a clearer consensus about why and how they should be remembered. As such, Foto zoekt familie is an excellent case study to analyze the origin, aims and possible outcomes of creating a cultural heritage projects in an online form.

The overall structure of my thesis takes the form of four main chapters. As my research aims to advance our understanding of the conceptualization of digital cultural heritage, I employ a conceptual approach, rather than an empirical one. As I mentioned before, images of the Dutch East Indies that come to the fore in the Netherlands are often perceived as a portal to the past, or even as evidence that colonial violence indeed took place. However, these pictures did not come out of nowhere: they were stored somewhere or were part of an archive and are made meaningful only from the perspective of the present. In my first chapter, therefore, I trace one of the lineages of digital cultural heritage back to a broader conceptual framework of archival studies and the way meaning is created in and with archival records according to the principle of "provenance," that places the author as a central subject. In this literature review I will highlight how this process of giving meaning has changed in light of debates in literature studies and philosophy about the concept of "meaning," building up to the way the advent of new media technologies has again changed the way the role of the archive in the process of meaning making is perceived, especially when it comes to narratives of the nation and the possibilities for minority groups such as postcolonial subjects to form their own historical narrative.

One such a postcolonial narrative is that of the Dutch East Indies. Yet, the legacy of the Dutch East Indies is a remarkable one, as it almost as much referred to as a suppressed legacy in the Netherlands as it is up for debate within that same society. Chapter two investigates this paradoxical situation in order to establish a framework of remembrance in which Foto zoekt familie operates. This chapter starts with a brief historical overview of the Dutch East Indies as a colony and the military actions that came after, followed by an analysis of the way this period in time is remembered (or forgotten) in Dutch society today. In this part I will combine the work Paul Bijl has done to describe the structures of remembrance of the Indies in the Netherlands, where he builds on Ann Laura Stoler's concept of "colonial aphasia," with ideas French philosopher George Didi-Huberman has developed regarding

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Holocaust photography. In addition, Marianne Hirsch's term of "postmemory" functions as a key concept to understand the multigenerational aspect of commemorating the Dutch East Indies.

Following these two theoretical frameworks are two chapters that center around Foto zoekt familie as a case study. The third chapter is an overview of the key aspects of this project, including its history and the main features of the website, such as the web section that contain the album pages and the user profiles. Furthermore, in this chapter I will perform a close-reading of some of the promotional strategies and statements made by the Tropenmuseum itself concerning the age group and nationality of the website visitors and contributors.

The fourth chapter presents an analysis of these features of Foto zoekt familie in light of the theoretical frameworks outlined in chapter one and two. I will first examine how the elements of the website and the presentation of the project, as mentioned in chapter three, establish a specific historical context in which the images of Foto zoekt familie gain meaning. Subsequently, I will argue that the search for narratives and the act of storytelling play a central role in Foto zoekt familie and the reason this project is created. As a closing argument I will go into the possibility of seeing the Foto zoekt familie project as a platform where meaning is not necessary the main objective, but instead actively works to delay meaning. Finally, the conclusion gives a brief summary and critique of the findings in light of digital cultural heritage.

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1. Theoretical Framework on the Archive

To look at digital cultural heritage and the problems that the Foto zoekt familie project addresses, it is first important to trace back the lineage of digital cultural heritage to the object and the practices of archives and the meaning that is created out of archival records. Therefore, in this chapter I address the conception of the archive and the classification methods used for archival objects, highlighting the changed status of "meaning" in the archive.

If archives are places where objects are stored that are meant to be meaningful for present or future studies, how is material stored and retrieved in and from the archive? How does the notion of "meaning" change in light of poststructuralist and postmodern debates on texts and narratives? And, finally, how are these archival developments present in the research done on digital cultural heritage?

1.1 Traditional Classification Methods: the Principle of Provenance

An archive can only function if the objects within it can be of use to the people approaching that archive – otherwise it would just be a seemingly random collection of objects that would never be disclosed. If an archive is to be useful, that is, function as a site where cultural heritage is made both “accessible and meaningful for contemporary and future users” (Noordegraaf 1), objects within that archive need to be stored and subsequently be able to be retrieved in a systematic manner (Featherstone 591).

In order to do so archival materials (whether they are in written form or otherwise) need to become archival documents, or records, with various degrees of detailed descriptions added to them. Descriptions such as date of arrival, author and measurements of the document are added to the text. This so-called metadata describes the document on an item-level, which allows the document to be retrieved more easily (Noordegraaf 1-2; Cameron and Robinson 166). It is at this level that texts stop being texts and instead become "documents" or "records" which allow meaning to be created from them – both by the institution that collected the documents and by the user that comes to that institution (Beard 225). As Noordegraaf states: "These metadata are crucial for retrieval and for determining the

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conclusion: the description of the document dictates what the document will be used for and what meaning will be inscribed to and with it.

Metadata thus form the basis for the process of meaning making, yet how does one correctly determine the description of a document so that this "exact nature and meaning" can come to the fore? To make sure that the archive is not only a site of preservation but also of research and continuation, archivists have since long adhered to the principle of provenance to organize their material (Noordegraaf 1; Cook, "What is Past is Prologue" 21). Provenance, according to the Society of American Archivists, refers to "information regarding the origins, custody, and ownership of an item or collection" ("Provenance"). It makes sure that archival records with the same origins are kept together, and thus kept separate from records with different authors. Although the term "author" remains ambiguous in the description given by the Society, it does not solely refer here to the writer of a written text or maker of a photograph, for instance. Instead, it can be seen here as an umbrella term for the creator of the document, which can be an institution as much as it can be a person. Perhaps the term "administration," used by Terry Cook in his extensive overview of archival practices would therefore be better suited here ("What is Past is Prologue" 21). Cook also speaks of the "administrative context" that is created by the practice of provenance ("What is Past is Prologue" 21).

In short: being one of the essential principles that archives are constructed around, provenance places the original creator of a document as the central figure for determining the meaning of that document. Subsequently, it sees the "administrative body" as the context in which meaning is produced from the archive.

1.2 Poststructuralism: Multiple Meanings of a Text

The process of archival description along the principles of provenance as detailed above made sure that the intention with which the document was created (again, either by the maker of the document or by the body incorporating it into a collection) was also the objective context in which that document should be made meaningful. Over the course of the last couple of decades, however, both the aim of the archive to produce a "reliable record of the past" (Noordegraaf 1) and the objective methods that would be needed to do so have been the topic of debate.

The first argument, that objective methods to describe a record cannot exist, is closely linked to (post)structuralist and postmodernists critique on text

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and text’s ability to generate a singular meaning. It is firstly in the field of literary criticism that such arguments where developed, as literary texts where often read along the lines of the author’s biography. For a scholar like Roland Barthes, one of the main representatives of French structuralism in the 1960’s, language consisted of a structure (of signs and signifiers) that made meaning possible. Barthes, along with other theorists as Ferdinand de Saussure (who’s language structure Barthes draws on) called for the analysis of texts for their structure or form, as well as their content, which in such a structuralist view would be inseparable to begin with, as in this view structure allows for meaning to be created (Barthes 2-4; Bertens 45).

Poststructuralism further problematizes the ability of language, and by extension texts, to ever convey an objective version of reality. Instead, Poststructuralism gives way for a conception of truth as a construction – in all cases (Bertens 92). This leads thinkers like Jacques Derrida to assert that the meaning of a text is never there, but is always in some sense delayed or deferred, as it is in a constant process of being constructed under different circumstances. Following this line of thinking, interpretation of a text can never be more than a representation of a static point in this dynamic process of meaning making; it can

certainly not be absolute and unchanging.

This focus on the structure of text and the inevitable deferral of meaning that this criticism brings forth, has had an effect on archival theory in a number of ways. As a broader result of poststructuralist and postmodernist theory, scholars have argued that not only the objects in the archive should be the object of study, but that also the form of the archive and the way these document were presented should be taken into consideration, subsequently opening up the study of the archive to more disciplines than just archival science (Stoler 92). As Jane Anderson describes, the "archival turn" that this resulted in led scholars across the disciplines to "reflect upon the archives themselves as sites of interpretation and meaning making" (Anderson 1).

Specifically, the "archival turn" that Anderson refers to has led to a reconsideration of the nature of archival metadata, which was thus far based on the preset model of reflecting the original intention of the record’s maker, author or "administrative body." In recent years, it is the objectiveness of such descriptions that has been the subject of debate. Heather MacNeil, for instance, argues that far from

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being transparent mediators, archivists themselves play an active role in determining the meaning of objects (45). Building on this, the entire institution of the archive is now more and more being considered as an "active – and potentially competing – agent in the creation of meaning," instead of an innocent medium that passively allows for meaning to occur (Duff, Monks-Leeson and Galey 71).

Along the same lines Arjun Appadurai takes this argument one step farther by demonstrating that the previous archival "ideology of the trace," that is the idea that archives depend on (accidental and objective) traces of a past, is untenable. "The very preciousness of the archive, indeed it’s moral authority, stems from the purity of the accidents that produced its traces," he writes (16). Yet, with the (postmodern) deconstruction of the possibility for an objective, uncontaminated trace in mind (i.e. an archival document that is an exact representation of past events), Appadurai avers that "we should begin to see all documentation as intervention, and all archiving as part of some sort of collective project," thus putting forward the idea that all archiving is done with a specific purpose in mind (16). He goes on to state that "[r]ather than being the tomb of the trace, the archive is more frequently the product of the anticipation of collective memory. Thus the archive is itself an aspiration rather than a recollection" (16). As such, the archive should not be seen as a whole, as a static closed of space, but rather as a hope or desire, as a way to actively form a collective memory.

1.3 Postmodernism: Complicating the Role of Archives in National Narratives

Appadurai’s writings on the archive as trying to express and thereby establish a common past point to another key influence on the way the archive has come

to be conceptualized: that of postmodern declarations on grand historical narratives. The construction of these narratives is intrinsically connected with the rise of

the nation state. As in the 18th_{and 19}th_{century nation-states came into being,}

governments simultaneously tried to form and memorialize there power through the archive, which became a "repository" of national history and memory from that time on (Featherstone 592). Truth in this period was empirical truth and the archive was the place where such evidence was stored (MacNeil 37; Monks-Leeson 41). In this light, archives where seen as sites where an unmediated version of past events could be localized and put to use to form a single narrative of the nation. The archive, in

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this sense, was treated as a place where archival records lay in wait until historians came to reconstruct the true meaning of events into a neatly organized, singular narrative of the past (Featherstone 592). As Featherstone proclaims, "The archives along with museums, libraries, public monuments and memorials became instruments for the forging of the nation into the people, into an 'imagined community'" (592). Based on the work of Benedict Anderson, Featherstone argues that through the practice of the archive the nation state was legitimized and its citizens where drawn together.

I want to elaborate here on the relation between history and narrative. A key figure in this analysis is French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, as he points out that we should stop thinking of history as being a linear process from past to present and history writing (historiography) as a representation thereof. Instead, he argues that historiography works through tracing lineages that function like layers of events through time. What events are included in the telling and thus making up of this history depends on historically and culturally specific circumstances. In sum: histories are written from the perspective of the present, which means that firstly history and historiography are intrinsically connected, and secondly that they are neither universal nor unchanging. This is not something that can be changed and eventual objectiveness is not Foucault’s goal here, but awareness of this process needs to be in place.

The view on history and historiography as a subjective process has consequences for the archive as a storehouse of knowledge from which historians create grand narratives. Indeed, the postmodern subject has no faith in such overarching narratives anymore, argues Jean Francois Lyotard in his famous work "La Condition Postmoderne" [The Postmodern Condition] in the late 1970’s. Instead, postmodernism should be characterized as the era that brings forth the "end of grand narratives."

However, this does not mean that history is now only treated as something indescribable or that any history(writing) is as good as the next one - a danger known as relativism where it is feared that in postmodernism "anything goes," meaning if there is no objectivism and everything is a construction, everything is similarly "true" or "logical." As historian Hayden White has argued, history is always made out of narratives that impose order on events that are not necessarily structured. Historiography present the past in the form a story, incorporating literary techniques

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such as plots, aesthetics and even morality (5-27). In the same way as Foucault, White pleads for the awareness of this process, rather than arguing that we should abandon thinking or writing (about) history altogether.

But how does one show such an awareness? What does it look like? How can it be made productive?

Mindful of the subjectivity of narratives that these theorists demonstrate, postmodernity becomes the period in which historical narratives are not just rejected, but also rewritten. It is archives that become the site where such power struggles are fought out.

On the one hand, it becomes apparent that archives and principle of provenance can be made to serve the ruling class, as the ones in power determine what is included in the archive and what story is made out of these objects. On the other hand, the realization that there is not one objective narrative can help bring to the fore histories of minorities using archives, and especially minorities that were subjected to colonist regimes.

Adding new documents to those of the colonial ruler, highlighting other documents from the colonial archives and/or giving interpretations of documents that differ from what the metadata in these often neatly structured colonial archives would suggest are results of this postmodern shift in the use and perception of archives. Marlene Manoff addresses this explicitly when she writes that "[i]f the establishment and consolidation of the empire was built on the accumulation of information about the people and places under colonial rule, one of the strategies adopted by postcolonial subjects has been to reinterpret and recontextualize the information and thus call into question the colonial version of events" (16, my

emphasis). Archives in this way can be a place to contest colonial power3_.

1.4 Recent Developments: From Static Archives to Archive as Process As I have argued, poststructuralist and postmodernist debates affect the process of meaning making in the archive that is traditionally based on the principle of provenance and "contextual meaningfulness," as the singularity and objectiveness of

3_{However, it should be said that this practice in itself has led to some criticism, as replacing a}

dominant vision with another “totalizing interpretation” is still holding on to the idea that only interpretation is right (Cook, "Fashionable Nonsense" 17).

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a context has been up for discussion, as has any ultimate meaning derived from this process by extend.

In response to these tumultuous changes in the use and conceptualization of the archive, theorist have sought to see the archive not as the result of the collecting of documents but rather as a dynamic "process," speaking of archiving rather than the archive, emphasizing the verb rather than the noun (Duff, Monks-Leeson and Galey 70; Noordegraaf 3). "Meaning" in the archive could here be seen as existing of a multitude of layers that work together. "[E]ach body of records is, effectively, a shared, constructed product consisting of the amassed ‘social and technical processes of the records’ inscription, transmission, contextualization, and interpretation which account for its existence, characteristics, and continuing history’," writes Emily Monks-Leeson in line with Tom Nesmith’s line of thinking (Leeson 44). Similarly, Duff, Monks-Leeson and Galey state that "The meanings of archival records are… not fixed by the acts and interventions that give rise to them; rather, records have multiple meaning that change and are molded and constructed by the ongoing actions of archivists, archival institutions, and researchers" (72).

However, some structures are still in place and recent archival theorists have argued that if an impartial and objective truth is seen as an unobtainable goal, and text is always open to multiple interpretations, the difference between metadata that describes the document and any other interpretation made with archival records that is partly still in place now, should be dissolved (Cameron and Robinson 166). There is no such thing as purely "descriptive tools," this group argues (Duff and Harris 266-267) in the same way that Cook warns us that replacing one dominant version of events by another is a danger that should be avoided when so called repressed histories are given a voice ("Fashionable Nonsense" 17). Instead, different versions of events should be able to exist alongside each other. "Meaning" in this sense is here not treated as the end result. Instead, the focus in these recent developments lies on the process of how meaning comes to be.

1.5 Digital cultural heritage: New Possibilities for Old Records

What are the implications of these archival shifts in relation to new media technologies? I would like to propose that digital cultural heritage projects can be

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seen in dialogue with at least three aspects of the archival shifts I have described in the previous paragraphs of this chapter.

Digital cultural heritage interacts firstly with the idea that archives, and the archivists that work with them, can no longer be seen as simple mediators of the objective meaning of a document. Secondly, digital cultural heritage projects emphasizes the possibility of connecting plural meanings to one object. Thirdly, limited accessibility of archives leads to a hegemonic narrative led by the ruling class (e.g. colonial oppressor), which calls for an opening up of these archives to repressed histories. In response, digital cultural heritage projects work on the premise of being open to a broader public by allowing for a reconfiguration of archival descriptions, therefore being open to more (and sometimes: competing) meanings generated from the same archival records. By doing so, digital cultural heritage projects are set up to reflect on archives as a process in which there is room for minority perspectives to be regained. I consider these three developments as intrinsically connected in many digital cultural heritage projects and see these forces as the framework in which my case study will be placed.

Archival materials were traditionally selected by governments. The classification systems they used focused on the individual body, on making subjects that they could regulate. A side product of this was that archives were only accessible for governmental people, not for regular citizens. Even Featherstone, in discussing the use of classification systems to the functioning of the archive, writes that different versions of classification that are used by the

archivists needs to be in place to "yield up significant material to the researcher"

(593, my emphasis). These are apparently the two roles that exist in an analogue archive: one person determines the description of the object, the other one wants to use that object. To Featherstone, these roles still belong to the archivist and to the researcher, but what other roles are constructed through the use of digital technologies?

What is certain is that the user of the archive is no longer limited to historians. Access to archives was previously reserved for professional researchers who were given access to archival documents based on their status or membership to a certain privileged group (members of the ruling class, for instance). In the last few years, however, the archive increasingly opened its doors to amateur users who found their own way to the archive, mostly to document

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their family history (Yakel 76). This development calls for a reconfiguration of the relation between archivists and users. Previously, archivists where trained to guide professionals in finding information, whereas now archival staff needs to take on the role of "mediator" between the archival objects and the person searching for information (Casey and Savastinuk 2006; Huvila 2008). "While many archivist where trained to place more value on the work of historians and other scholarly researchers, archivists today increasingly recognize the importance of serving genealogists, family historians, and others seeking knowledge about the past for personal fulfillment," concludes Kate Theimer in her anthology on archives in the Web 2.0 era (255). It therefore comes as no surprise that David S. Ferriero, in the preface to Theimer’s anthology, emphasizes that "capturing the voice of our user" is the main purpose of their book, which implies an assertive user (ix).

The emergence of new media technologies further calls into question this rigid division between archivists and users, having implications for the authority of the archivist as well. Starting with the classification systems: previously, the state could be seen as the biggest classifying authority with professional archivists on staff who were trained to preserve historical documents. These archivists were also the only entry point to their archives (Palmer and Stevenson 3). With the rise of new media technologies that allowed for more interaction with archival material however, users gain the ability to adjust, perhaps even subvert, such hierarchical orders of classification. The interactive web and "Archive 2.0" as the authors in Theimer’s anthology call it, "has been characterized as a development that emphasizes openness, sharing, and collaboration and at the same time ‘de-privileges’ archival authority," argue Palmer and Stevenson in their discussion of the effect of web technologies on the use of archives (1-2).

Noordegraaf states that "the aim of archival work is to safeguard this

documentary heritage and make it accessible and meaningful for contemporary users" (1, my emphasis). It is with the aim of enhancing the accessibility of their collection that new media forms can be used here. Firstly, this can take on the form of using new media techniques that do not involve human interactions, such as the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs to make the content of documents more accessible. More visible, however, are the projects that work with subscribed users that help disclose archival records. Projects such as

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VeleHanden, constructed by the municipal archive in Amsterdam, revolves

around transcribing old handwritten documents into readable and transferable digital text. Other projects allow subscribed user to review digital copies of archival records and add tags to them.

These digital cultural heritage projects that work through crowd sourcing help to further undermine a strict boundary between archivists as meaning makers and users as receivers of that subjective meaning. They open up archival contents and their metadata to the eyes of the many and the language of the crowd, thus potentially affecting the context in which meaning is created from the document.

1.6 Digital cultural heritage: Postcolonial Narratives

Tied to these developments is the problematic case of postcolonial or migrant voices. Featherstone pays attention to the specifics of the colonial archive, and especially the use of the archive after colonization has come to an end. He states that for formerly colonized subjects, trying to establish a national memory through the archive is a difficult process, as those archives were often relocated to the motherland. Thus, he concludes, "Archives of less powerful groups or nations can be moved and re-established within the territory of the powerful, who can also muster the archivists and scholars who operate with their own dominant classifications and value hierarchies to produce their own official history" (592). Relocation of the archive can be beneficial in some cases, as survival of the documents would be more secured in the mother country than in a country that is falling apart and is trying to rebuild itself. Nevertheless, Featherstone points out that relocation easily leads to "the ceding of control over access and cataloguing, which along with the financial constraints on research in a foreign country, can lead the archive to slip away from the originating collectivity," making it harder for so-called counter-histories to emerge that would oppose dominant (e.g. colonial) versions of the past (592-593).

With such (post)colonial heritage made digital, these records can be made accessible from other countries – provided there would not be a digital divide. While Featherstone still seems to be on the fence about it, Appadurai sees electronic media as a great source of empowerment, returning agency to those subjects that it was taken from. "[T]he electronic archive becomes a doubly

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valuable space for migrants, for, in this space, some of the indignity of being minor or contemptible in the new society can be compensated, and the vulnerability of the migrant narrative can be protected in the relative safety of cyberspace" (Appadurai 23). Thus, the digital archive also functions as a

socio-cultural tool that has the possibility to bring forth a more democratic

representation of past events, especially when this is related to narratives of national identity.

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2. Dutch Colonial Heritage: Photographs Between Icons

and Documents

One of those colonial histories that uses archives to re-examine established versions of history, is that of the Dutch East Indies. I would like to begin this chapter by giving a short overview of the history of Dutch colonialism in the Indies and Indonesia’s struggle for independence, which led to military actions taken by the Dutch government ("police actions") in 1945-1949. This period of decolonization is still strongly present in Dutch debates on colonial legacy. Yet it is also this part of Dutch history that others have claimed to be a blind spot of Dutch remembrance culture. In this chapter I will examine how it is that a history of which documents keep coming to the fore can still be talked about as a forgotten history. What is it that makes this period in time so much debated, yet at the same time so difficult to process, and what role do archival records in the form of photographs play in this process?

2.1 The Dutch East Indies: the Colony and Police Actions

The Dutch East Indies was the name of the Dutch colony that from 1816-19494_was

located in what is now known as the Republic of Indonesia. Dutch interest in this area dates back to the late sixteenth century when the Dutch East India Company [VOC] was created to form trade agreements between Europe and the Indonesian archipelago. When in the beginning of the nineteenth century this company began to fall apart due to financial problems, the Dutch state maintained their contacts and expended their stronghold on the Indonesian islands, eventually turning them into a colony.

Although it is certainly still a topic of research, my focus here is not so much on this first part of the history of Dutch colonial practices in the Indonesian Islands. Instead, much of the friction that I will address in this chapter and the following ones, stems from the period in time when the Dutch state started losing control of the colony during, and in the wake of, the Second World War. From 1942-1945 the Dutch East Indies were occupied by the Japanese, an occupation that did not go without force. It is this period that the infamous Japanese camps [Jappenkampen] stem from, in which many people of Dutch and mixed descent were interned, without much of

4_{Account of the end date varies. The Republic of Indonesia declared itself as an independent republic}

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their possessions. Furthermore, not only did the Dutch have to battle Japanese forces - who did eventually capitulate in 1945 - they also had to face Indonesian nationalist groups who were able to form amidst the Japanese process of breaking down the colonial structure that the Dutch had held up for so long. As such, the events of the Second World War led to a serious downfall of Dutch colonial rule in the Indies. Not willing to give up the colony that easily, Dutch officials organized a series of events known as the police actions [politionele acties] in a final attempt to gain control of the islands again after the Second World War had ended. The actions did not only take on the form of political interventions but consisted of major acts of

violence as well.5

2.2 A History Remembered to be Forgotten

To this day, the police actions remain highly contested events in Dutch society and beyond. Claims for reparation damages, for instance, are still being made and reviewed. Following a number of high profile cases in which the Dutch state offered a compensation as well an official apology for the relatives of Indonesian men executed during the police actions in the town of Rawagede, a group of women known as the "widows of Sulawesi" tried to get a financial compensation and an official apology for the execution of their Indonesian men as well. Their husbands were allegedly executed by Dutch forces in the late 1940’s during the police actions. In December of 2013, however, it became clear that any efforts made by the Dutch government to provide compensation where seen as inadequate and that the widows would proceed to go to trial – despite of their age. Closure in this form is still something the widows are striving for.

Not only is Dutch colonialism a subject of state affairs, a significant body of literature and other cultural products has also been produced about the Dutch East Indies. Indo-writers such as Hella Haase and Rudy Kousbroek write about their life in the Indies as well as in the Netherlands, while authors such as Marion Bloem and Hans Goedkoop represent the second- and third generation Dutch citizens with ties to the colony. A prominent theme in the works of these later generations is a search for identity in relation to a family history that starts in the Dutch East Indies and follows the lines of working through the assimilation of the family members in the

5_{For the purposes of my focus on the aftermath of colonial history, my account of the history of the}

Dutch East Indies itself is rather short. For a more detailed version please see the work of Gouda and Poeze.

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Netherlands and the trauma’s they had to face (De Mul; Pattynama, "Cultural Memory"; Pattynama, "(Un)happy Endings").

It is even suggested that these second- and third generations of Dutch Indonesians experience what Holocaust scholar Marianne Hirsch has termed "postmemory." Postmemory is coined by Hirsch in her book Family Frames in 1997 to describe the difficult relationship that children of Holocaust victims have to memories their parents of their experiences in the war. These children are often raised surrounded with traces of the events of the war. According to Hirsch, this can affect them to such an extent that the memories and experiences of their parents almost seem to be part of their own experience (Family Frames 22). Almost, Hirsch argues, and that is why the connection this later generation has to the Holocaust is so problematic: they can never claim to have witnessed these atrocities themselves and yet these events are part of their own identity by means of their upbringing. As a result, a term like "second-order memory" does not do justice in Hirsch's opinion. Instead, she prefers to speak of a "postmemory" that

describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up… [but] were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. (The Generation of

Postmemory 5)

Postmemory does not represent a direct link to past events, but as Hirsch argues, "memory itself" is just as constructed, especially when it comes to traumatic memories of the Holocaust, that are often said to defy representation (Family

Frames 22). She expands on this by stating that postmemory is thus "to be shaped,

however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension" (The Generation of Postmemory 5). Although Hirsch constructed her theory of postmemory in relation to the Holocaust, the idea of a belated sense of memory can to some extend be seen as a theme in the

works of later generations Dutch Indonesians.6

In short, the Dutch East Indies therefore never seem that far away. Yet, despite the discussions listed above, simultaneously and seemingly contradictory there is a

6_{For a more detailed analysis of postmemory in literary works of second generation Indo writers}

please see Pamela Pattynama's “(Un)happy Endings: Nostalgia in Postimperial and Postmemory Dutch Films.”

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firm discourse in place that states the history of the Dutch East Indies is a forgotten history that receives little attention in Dutch society (Ooijen and Raaijmakers 468-470). A recent example of this line of argumentation is the open letter that the Dutch Institution for Military History (NIMH), the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) wrote to the Dutch parliament. In the letter, these institutions pleaded for more (financial) means to conduct research into the role of the Dutch forces during the police actions (Ede Botje and Hoek).

Writing about this paradoxical situation in both the Netherlands and Indonesia, Dutch scholar Paul Bijl comes to the realization that people talk about this colonial history as a largely veiled period in time, yet all seem to remember that this is the case, that is, all indicate that it is indeed a history being forgotten. "In a kind of Orwellian doublethink, these Dutch and Indonesian citizens seem to be able to hold two contradictory beliefs in their mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them; that is to say that they know and do not know about their countries colonial past," Bijl writes the state of remembering and forgetting in relation to this field work in Atjeh (442).

2.3 Photographs Between Icons and Documents

How can the history of the Dutch East Indies be seen as a forgotten one, while it is at the same time written about and highly debated? An important way through which the legacy of the Dutch East Indies is shaped in the Netherlands seems to be through visual documents. Although I am aware that documents of the Dutch East Indies take on many forms, I want to direct my attention here at photographs taken during this colonial period, as I will demonstrate that it is with these photographic images that the friction between remembering and forgetting becomes most visible.

Taking the Atjeh War as a case study, Bijl argues that the difficulty in deciding what to with the legacy of the Dutch East Indies, lies not in the fact that it is forgotten, but in the problem that comes from the desire to decide if it is forgotten or remembered. Specifically for the Netherlands and the way the colonial past of the Indies is talked about here, this takes on the form of a binary way of thinking: either we need to look for facts that need only be "unmasked" to discover the real truth about colonialism, a truth can easily be integrated in Dutch society, or we look for a

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group of people to blame that have supposedly intentionally hidden the true nature of this legacy, which Bijl calls the "intentionalist model of cultural memory" (443).

The binary oppositions that Bijl sees at work in positioning the legacy of the Dutch East Indies in the Netherlands shows some strong similarities with theories on the legacy of the Holocaust, most notably with the work of French philosopher George Didi-Huberman. In his work Images in Spite of All, Didi-Huberman discusses four photographs taken in Auschwitz by members of the sonderkommando, a group of prisoners that was responsible for disposing of the corpses of their fellow inmates.

These photographs would seem to be an extraordinary piece of information. Being at the other end of the gas chambers and having to deal with dead bodies every day, these group of people had one of the most gruesome positions in relation to the atrocities in Auschwitz. The photographs that Didi-Huberman analyzes are made with a make-shift camera by a few of these men, smuggled out of the camp and developed elsewhere. Although a significant number of testimonials and written documents are available of prisoners of the camps, actual photographs were mostly made by the Nazi’s themselves, depicting carefully orchestrated scenes that were used as propaganda for their own cause.

Images made my camp members themselves, showing naked bodies and a death pit, would certainly be a unique document, one would think. Nevertheless, the images that figure in Images Despite of All are not widely known.

Trying to understand this paradoxical situation, Didi-Huberman comes to the conclusion that it is because of their uniqueness that these photographs cannot be processed. A photograph is often perceived as an objective representation of past events and is thus seen as evidence (Barthes 78). Yet, a discourse used in the context of the Holocaust is that the atrocities of the concentration camps are so horrible they cannot be represented; they are "unrepresentable" (Nancy 28). As such, we cannot process the photographs made by the sonderkommando as they show us something else than what we have learned. They cannot fully be seen as evidence, as there is supposed to be no document that can adequately represent these atrocities (Didi-Huberman 32-33).

There are thus two forces at work here that seem to contradict each other. On the one hand there is the desire to inscribe the photographs with meaning and to treat them as objective evidence, which Didi-Huberman calls the desire to make them "icons of horror" (34, emphasis in original). Yet, this can never be fulfilled, and thus

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on the other hand the photos are subjected to a movement away from meaning-making and away from the circumstances in which they were made, being at risk of being reduced to a mere "document" of horror, an image of an event (Didi-Huberman 33-34).

2.4 The Dutch East Indies and Photographical Evidence

It is the same logic of giving meaning and denying meaning at the same time that I see in the reception of images of the Dutch East Indies as well. The claims made by NIMH, KITLV and NIOD that stated that the Netherlands needs to spend more time and money to investigate their own colonial history, were made during a time when yet another document of the police actions was made public. In July 2012, Dutch national newspaper brought the story of two photographs found in an album of a now deceased veteran of the war in the Indies (Nicholasen). Neatly pasted between images of Indonesian women and soldiers posing appeared two photographs next to each other on the top of one of the album’s pages. The left photograph depicted a line of men seen on their backs as they are standing knee deep in a ditch, a cloud of dust forming near their heads (figure 1). The right photograph presumably shows that same ditch, this time with a number of dead bodies lying in it. One soldier is posing at the far end of the photograph at the top of the ditch and one can be seen kneeling down to inspect the bodies (figure 2).

As I have demonstrated in my previous chapter, the discourse around archives and national memory treats the archive as a site where documents lie in wait until a professional eye, such as that of the historian, comes to transform the documents into evidence. As such, a notion of the archive is established where documents can be

discovered or unveiled and true meaning is reconstructed. The same discourse seems

to be in place for the two photographs of the Dutch East Indies. The veteran that owned the album and that can thus be said to be its author, was named "Jacobus R"

in the news stories (Nicholasen).7_{He had already passed away in 2010 and as he had}

no living relatives left the album was thrown in a dumpster, where it was somehow found by an employee of the municipal archive. Subsequently, the album lay in wait for two years before the photographs were discovered – or so the story goes.

7_{By this mode of abbreviation he was also almost already framed as a criminal, regardless of the fact}

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26 Fig. 2. First photograph out of the album Fig. 3. Second photograph out of the album of Jacobus R. as published in De Volkskrant of Jacobus R. as published in De Volkskrant (Nicholasen). (Nicholasen).

The discovery, publication and subsequent discussion of these images show some strong similarities with Didi-Huberman’s theory on Holocaust photography. Almost immediately after the publication of the 2012 photographs in de Volkskrant, debates arose about the meaning of these images and the importance for further research into Dutch colonial history. On the one hand, the photographs were treated as documents that presented the final piece of undeniable evidence that the Dutch committed war crimes during the police actions. In this way, the photographs are made into "icons" that hold all the evidence of what happened during the police actions in them.

Yet, as Bijl also points out, photographs and other documents depicting colonial atrocities committed by the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies had been taken in the early 1900’s already, as the Dutch expanded their empire in the Indonesian islands. And not only that, instead of waiting in some archive to be discovered, these photographs were actually made available to the public as early as 1901 (Bijl 446). The same can be said for the events of the police actions, where "reports… had

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already come out during the conflict itself, while several media had published on them, and parliament debated the issue" (ibid.).

Specifically, the claim that the 2012 photographs where the first photographs of actual dead bodies to be published is incorrect. As a response to the stories that framed the photographs as evidence, others replied that images of this nature already appeared in books such as Westerling’s Oorlog in 1999 (van Dongen). In line if this, historian Cees Fasseur has declared that we should treat these images as "complimentary evidence" of a history that can already be approached through oral testimonies and other archival documents (Jong and Van den Berg).

Consequently, the discourse around these photographs as presenting the final piece of evidence could not be maintained and the images are torn between the "iconic" and "documentary" status that Didi-Huberman described. As a result, barely two years later in 2014 the dialogue that seemed to be opened with the publication of the photographs in de Volkskrant seems to have largely disappeared into the background again in terms of their visibility in Dutch public debates.

2.5 "Memorability" and the Possibility to Remember

How, then, can we speak about the legacy of the Dutch East Indies without falling subject to this dynamic? In an effort to analyze the complexity of the legacy of the Dutch East Indies and to counter the binary opposition of remembering versus forgetting, Bijl coins the concept of "memorability." With this term he wishes to take into account "the degree to which a past is memorable, easy to remember" (444). Memorability for Bijl thus becomes a way to investigate a form of gradation in remembering and forgetting, instead of determining if a history has become subjected to either the one or the other (forgotten or remembered).

Memorability is also a concept that allows us to analyze the framework in which documents of the Dutch East Indies keep being discussed. In her work on the colonial history of France, Ann Laura Stoler analyzes the complex interactions between memory and forgetting that seem to occur in relation to the French colonial past. Instead of seeing the difficulty in processing these events as a deliberate attempt to conceal facts, and thus hide or "forget" this history, she introduces the notion of "colonial aphasia." In a much quoted passage, Stoler writes that

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In aphasia, an occlusion of knowledge is the issue. It is not a matter of ignorance or absence. Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things. Aphasia in its many forms describes a difficulty retrieving both conceptual and lexical vocabularies and, most important, a difficulty comprehending what is spoken. (125)

Stoler makes clear here that an apparent absence of instances where the colonial past is clearly remembered does not automatically mean that that history is actively being erased from memory. Instead, she argues that it is the lack of a clear form or an available language, which she labels here as "the conceptual and lexical vocabularies," in which such memories can take shape and be expressed. Building on this idea, Bijl argues that for the Dutch East Indies specifically, there not only seems to be a lack of language that causes problems for a memorable past, but that the "conditions for expressing a certain vocabulary" also seem to be missing (450, my emphasis). Not only is there no language to build memories, there is also no room in which to do so. "The Dutch situation is of this kind," he writes, "it is not one of conspiracy but of an absence of certain frames of semantization" (450, my emphasis).

Remembrance for Bijl is thus not only in need of a common language, it also needs a platform where memories are able to form and where they are able to be expressed. However, it remains unclear how such a framework should look, and to what effect it should be put into place. I my next two chapters, I will examine the role of digital cultural heritage projects in creating such a framework.

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3. Travelling Images: Description of Foto Zoekt Familie

In relation to the Dutch East Indies, there have been a number of developments that aim to open up the debate about the police actions, yet as I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, these initiatives or events tend to be subjected to the binary logic of the “iconic” and “documentary” status of the object. How then, does one create such a “frame of semantization” that Paul Bijl talks about (450)? How would such a frame look like, and can it ever really come into being?

In the following two chapters, I would like to investigate these questions by looking into a specific case study: that of Foto zoekt Familie. I will start with an overview of the project and its functions in this third chapter. I will do so by first providing some background on the project and the way these albums came to the Netherlands, followed by a description of the way Foto zoekt familie as a project was created and promoted, highlighting their own promotional strategies in their press statements and three aspects of the Foto zoekt familie website itself: the elements on the homepage, the way the albums are presented on the website and images are made, and the creation of a community of users. For this last point, I will also refer to other websites that deal with second- or third generation Dutch Indonesians.

Subsequently, in the fourth chapter, I will analyze the workings of Foto zoekt

familie as a digital cultural heritage project that connects the developments in the

concepts of provenance and the author with that of the shifting frameworks in remembering the Dutch East Indies.

3.1 Background of Foto zoekt familie: 1945-2012

Foto zoekt familie relates back to the period of the Second World War in the Dutch

East Indies and especially the police actions that came after. When a large part of the colony’s inhabitants of Dutch or mixed descent was interred in Japanese camps and/or had to move to the Netherlands during the Dutch actions to stop the process of decolonization, they were forced to leave much of their possessions behind.

Among those possessions were family photographs, some of them neatly pasted into family albums. It is these albums that were safeguarded by military personnel and members of the Red Cross who came across the deserted belongings and collected them. Not knowing what to do with the albums, they were sent to the Netherlands and subsequently to the Tropenmuseum. The Tropenmuseum is now a

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museum that focuses on collecting artifact of the tropics as a whole. It is part of the larger Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen [Royal Tropical Institute]. Tropical institute that has the same geographical research area and aims to enhance knowledge about this part of the world. However, at the time the albums were

collected,8_{the Tropenmuseum was still part of the Colonial Institute and hence called}

the Colonial Museum (Tropenmuseum, Foto zoekt familie: help het Tropenmuseum). Both the museum and the institution at this time were funded by the Dutch government and focused on collecting and displaying Dutch Colonial artifacts, and so it would seem like an appropriate place to gather such documents of life in the Indies.

What happened next with the albums is only alluded to in official press statements made by the Tropenmuseum. Through open days where visitors could browse through the albums, the Tropenmuseum tried to return the photographs to their original owners. However, about a third of the album owners could not be located (Tropenmuseum, Foto zoekt familie: help het Tropenmuseum) and it is unclear what other efforts were made to return the albums or to make them part of the museum’s collection, nor for what period of time the museum attempted to do so.

Ultimately in 2012, the Tropenmuseum, in collaboration with the KIT Information and Library Services (KIT ILS) created a digital project called Foto zoekt

Familie in order to (re)start the search for the “rightful owners” of the albums (a term

I will later come back to). These albums, that have been in the museum's archive for over six decades, are suddenly presented as a significant part of the collection again. In the following paragraphs I will examine how this link between the past that these albums relate to and the present day in which they are reviewed, is created. How is this connection articulated and shaped by the Tropenmuseum and Foto zoekt

familie?

3.2 Crowd Funding and Promotion

As mentioned, the Tropenmuseum is part of the larger Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen. In the last few years however, this institution suffered from quite severe cutbacks and was almost forced to close, now only surviving by fusing with other

museums and institutions.9_{As a consequence, the Tropenmuseum was not in a}

8_{Exact dates that indicate the timeframe in which the album were received by the museum are not}

mentioned.

9_{These cutbacks are part of larger cuts in the Dutch cultural sector, especially in museums and}

Conceptualizing the Sociocultural Structures of Digital Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Foto zoekt familie

UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM