Capturing, Collaborating and Curating: A Community-Led Approach to Contemporary Born-Digital Literary Archives

In 2013, Matthew Kirschenbaum advocated for increased collaboration between archivists and digital humanities specialists to address the complex challenge of managing the born-digital archives of writers. In 2019, as part of an interdisciplinary research group at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Paul Gooding, Jos Smith, and Justine Mann called for the addition of the literary scholar and the writer, to enable future curation and the development of digital interfaces that take account of emerging digital research methods in literature and approaches to genetic criticism. The British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) at UEA now works with emerging and recently established writers to better understand how the creative process unfolds in a digital environment and the implications and opportunities for future archiving and literary scholarship. This chapter draws on findings from a Mellon Foundation funded project (2022–2023), “New Ways of Collecting, Collaborating and Curating: Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive,” which took a community (poet) led approach to the building of a collection of contemporary poetry archives from writers currently underrepresented in British and Irish literature, placing the writer at the heart of considerations around the nature of the archive and its curation and interpretation. The chapter discusses the findings and questions the implications and opportunities of such approaches