What role do digital infrastructures play in the construction of a nation’s history? Cultural heritage database systems are essential tools for institutions undertaking rapid-response and contemporary collecting, enabling the preservation of born-digital and digital surrogate materials, and their quick dissemination to the public. The prominence of the database system in rapid-response collecting endows it with a curatorial imperative that ought to draw attention to its peculiarities as a medium: its particular temporalities, the legacies it takes up of prior systems of categorisation, and its translation of the affective dimensions of curation into material forms.
This paper, to be given in long format at DH 2024, examines the collecting that occurred in the wake of Ireland’s 2018 referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, using the construction of collections databases as a lens for understanding how this recent period of Irish history is currently being narrativized. Through a new materialist ethnographic analysis of one of two databases in which the referendum is being collected on behalf of national institutions – those of the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) and the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) – I offer an account of the database as a media infrastructure that acts politically in relation to its holdings, forcing decolonial feminist histories into contact with harmful legacies of categorisation and producing a collection that is always already complicated by its own mediation.
The Eighth Amendment equated the life of a pregnant person to that of the unborn child in the eyes of the law, thereby making abortion illegal in almost all circumstances. The passage of the referendum to repeal the Eighth was the result of sustained grassroots feminist campaigning since the amendment was first introduced in 1982, crystallising around a number of prominent cases of marginalised women being endangered by the state’s denial of abortion services – among them the cases of Ms. X, Ms. Y, and Savita Halappanavar, who died in a Galway hospital in 2012 after being denied an abortion. A national mass feminist protest movement followed, and the Eighth was repealed by a two-thirds majority, allowing abortion legislation in Ireland to become a parliamentary – rather than constitutional – issue.
Collecting began on behalf of Ireland’s national memory institutions in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, led by archival and cultural heritage academics and practitioners who had been active in the campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote. In the five years since the vote, these collecting efforts have stabilised into two main resources: the small collection of objects held at the National Museum of Ireland, and the outputs of the Digital Repository of Ireland’s Archiving Reproductive Health project, which digitised and made available collections from activist organisations and members of the public. Collections housed at the DRI include campaign materials from the coalition of activist groups that made up the official ‘Yes’ campaign under the moniker ‘Together for Yes’, oral history interviews with campaign organisers, doctors, and disabled campaigners, and archived posts from the ‘In Her Shoes’ Facebook page, a collection of stories submitted by women who had travelled from Ireland to the UK to obtain abortion services, which became a key affective element of the campaign. These collecting efforts have become crucial for how Ireland’s memory institutions narrate the recent history of the Eighth Amendment; they also exemplify a tension between collecting staff who self-identify as feminists, and often as activists, and the institutions they represent, which have a remit, explicit or otherwise, to remain politically neutral and to be accountable to the Irish people.
The site where this tension plays out is the database. Analysing the DRI’s database as a narrative and discursive tool within the context of this collection is critical for understanding how that collection is being constructed, as well as how technological infrastructures increasingly mediate collective memory and produce historiographical material. Part of my argument is that database knowledge is essential to museum knowledge, and that methods for rendering the database knowable and subject to humanities-based analysis are critical to understanding museum subjectivity. In this paper, I use a novel methodology – database ethnography – which uses elements from the infrastructure ethnography of Susan Leigh Star, alongside the posthumanism of Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, to produce a critical, situated, and material analysis of how the database acts in relation to the data objects it contains. Over a period of months, I immersed myself in the world of the DRI’s database, interfacing with its curators and designers, but mostly doing ethnographic research within the database itself: following individual records to identify connections and relations that were permitted and occluded, using GitHub to dig into the traces of previous iterations of the open data infrastructure, and tracing the narrative of the Eighth Amendment that is constructed and supported by it.
This paper addresses two key questions raised by this research, whose answers I derive from the database’s self-conception and self-presentation. The first of these is whether the repeal of the Eighth Amendment represented a genuine and significant cultural rupture within Irish society. This idea has been suggested and disputed by Irish feminists writing during and since the referendum campaign, including NMI curator Brenda Malone, who couches her rapid-response collecting policy in terms of a significant rupture between the old Ireland characterised by Church-State partnership in governance and a new Ireland accountable to an emerging class of progressive-minded citizens (Malone, 2020), and Linda Connolly, who instead situates the mass feminist demonstration that preceded the referendum within a longer history of Irish women’s activism (Connolly, 2020). The idea of a rupture is also reflected in intersectional feminist critique of the movement for repeal, including work by Chakravarty, Feldman, and Penney, who argue that the referendum campaign’s transformative potential was circumscribed by its exclusion of working class and racialised bodies and knowledges (Chakravarty et. al., 2020).
The second question this paper takes up is precisely to do with these exclusions. The Archiving Reproductive Health project is one that is self-consciously and purposefully feminist; early documents relating to the project demonstrate concern that marginalised voices were being left out of the archive, and the project has engaged with organisations like Migrants and Ethnic Minorities for Reproductive Justice (MERJ), who have been publicly critical of how the referendum campaign was run. I take up Françoise Vergès’ framework of decolonial feminism – a multidimensional feminism that allies itself first and foremost with class struggle and the struggles of racialised people (Vergès, 2021) – in order to situate the database in relation to these debates, asking what sort of feminism is available within this digital infrastructure, and whose history is permitted to be constructed there.
These two questions form the context in which the database infrastructure was built, and in which it is now evaluated. During a moment of transition from rapid-response collecting to a bona fide national collection on the subject of the Eighth Amendment, the specifics of the database have the power to disrupt, or to remain continuous with, previous collection infrastructures. My portrait of the database-as-assemblage gives an account of how this can occur, encompassing the social construction of the database infrastructure, the distinctions between discursive and infrastructural feminisms, and the particular temporality applied to a collection by the digital – as distinct from the temporalities of history and of struggle that are already present. I also understand the database as a point of contact wherein the difficult aspects of the collection’s archaeology are mediated. This comes to life in the case of the ‘In Her Shoes’ collection, which contains personal accounts originally posted on Facebook and now translated into the DRI infrastructure – a perfect storm of remediation that encompasses big tech, feminist revolt, and the occasionally difficult imbrication of national memory organisations with collections whose material opposes Irish State policy.
In this paper I position remediation as a form of reinvention, insisting that comprehensive media ethnographic work is crucial in the context of an increased reliance on digital media as historiographic tools. My analysis of how and for whom the new database infrastructure works also provides the basis for a renewed sense of responsibility and accountability around digital collecting as it becomes more central to the narration of histories both national and personal.