Civic Community Archiving with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography: Double Binds and Design Challenges

Community archives serve an array of purposes and types of communities (fan clubs, scientists in particular disciplines, ethnic neighborhoods). We discuss here civic community archives; civic archives, like “civic science,” have expressly progressive political aims, question established order, and contribute to inclusive knowledge production and prosperity. Designing civic archives involves many types of analysis and poses many design challenges. In this paper, we share an analytic framework developed to guide the design of civic community archives, drawing on both cultural theory and our experience designing archives for different kinds of communities, with different purposes, within larger ethnographic projects. We question how to characterize “the community” in community archive projects, and the stakeholders in such projects. We ask what should be recollected in community archives and for what purposes. We also ask how, by design, community archives can connect diverse users, analog and digital components (including human and technological), and complicated pasts to creative futures. Throughout, we call out the double-binds of civic community archiving, delineating risks and possible pathologies as well as generative potential. We approach the work as cultural anthropologists and ethnographers involved in building the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography ( https://github.com/PECE-project/pece-distro ), open source digital infrastructure for sharing and collaborative analysis of ethnographic data.