Memory and Identity

This is a week of anniversaries - as well as celebrating the 4,000th unique visit to the blog earlier in the week, this is our 100th post. I wonder how many of them you remember (as you'll see from the screen shot below the blog used to look quite different)? Those of you who aren't familiar with ARMMS or CAIS will have created and recreated your own view of our department while reading through our posts. Even those of you who know us well will have had your perceptions of 'us' altered by the blogs, and these will continue to change each time you remember what you have read.



This interplay between memory and identity, and the impact on these of archives and records, is the theme of our Royal Society of Edinburgh Arts and Humanities Network Project. This is the second RSE award that we have received and we were delighted that the current funding enabled us to extend the research generated by the Investigating the Archive Project. Caroline Brown attended a Research Awards Reception at the RSE last week where she gave a poster presentation about the Memory and Identity project. In addition Pat Whatley has been asked to speak about the Network Award at an RSE Research Awards in Arts & Humanities Information Evening in October.

Over the next few months we'll be returning to this theme regularly and we'd welcome any comments that you have. Our conference in December is a culmination of a series of workshops and lectures relating to Memory and Identity and will look particularly at the following areas:
- Value, Appraisal and Theories of Identity and Memory
- The Impact of Description on the Archival Record
- The Act of Display and Interpretation in the Creation of Memory
- Records and Truth: the Creation of Community and National Identities
- Everyone their Own Archivist – an Eternal Verity or a Digital Virtue?
- Activating the Archive: A Site for Creative Exploration
- Beyond the Written Word: Recording Memory and Identity
- The Making of History: Archives and the Historian

Watch out for more blog posts on these and other issues soon.