Post on 23-Jan-2023
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque
Institutional Diaspora in North America1
Pedro J. Oiarzabal, University of Deusto (Bilbao, Spain); Jon Bilbao Research Fellow
on the Basque Diaspora, University of Nevada, Reno, (U.S.)
Abstract
The framework of the chapter lies in the understanding that the movement of people —
particularly migrants such as the Basques — and the increasing significance of
communication in our quotidian lives – which facilitates the exchange of ideas,
information, and knowledge — are two main manifestations of today’s globality. The
Internet is the supraterritorial communication per excellence that involves a new kind of
social and placeless geography, called cyberspace. This digital space is the new home
for many migrants, diasporans, and for their social, cultural, economic, religious and
political organizations. If ethnic populations today communicate and create content
online, how can this data be efficiently preserved and disseminated? Could we afford
taking the risk of loss of digital heritage created by minorities, migrants and the society
at large? In this context, how can technology help us to collect, preserve and make our
memory, our identity, our history and past accessible to the public? How reliable is this
digital memory to preserve our history, in this case our ethnic groups and migrants’
histories?
How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain if that
chip would double the capacity of your short-term memory? . . . Although our memories
are sometimes spectacular . . . our memory capacities are often disappointing . . . All
this becomes even more poignant when you compare our memories to those of the
average laptop . . . Much of the difference lies in the basic organization of memory.
Computers organize everything they store according to physical or logical locations,
with each bit stored in a specific place according to some sort of master map, but we
have no idea where anything in our brains is stored. We retrieve information not by
knowing where it is but by using cues or clues that hint at what we are looking for.2
Our memories are more complicated than a standard computer: they are, indeed,
unreliable, selective, unstable, imperfect, and limited.3 However, all our experiences
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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rely on memory. Memory is fundamental for everything that we do and wish to do. In
fact, much of what we are as individuals and communities is due to memory (see for
example Bastian, in this volume). Gary Marcus argues that “our problem has never been
how much information we could store in our memories; it’s always been in getting that
information back out — which is precisely where taking a clue from computer memory
could help.”4 Our ability to retrieve specific fragments of memory is flawed, allowing
for mixing old and recent ones, thereby allowing for constant reinterpretation of the
past.5 Not surprisingly, research shows that “The Internet has become a primary form of
external or transactive memory [recollections that are external to us but we know how to
access], where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”6 That is to say, we
increasingly rely on external artificial memory for menial and repetitive tasks such as
keeping up with anniversaries, tasks, meetings and telephone numbers, and on the web
search engines for retrieving information. Conclusively, Nicholas Carr argues that the
Internet is affecting the way we remember and memorize.7 It is also affecting the way
that we conduct research, work, play, communicate, express ourselves, socialize,
network, and so on.8
The framework of the chapter lies in the understanding that the movement of people —
particularly migrants such as the Basques — and the increasing significance of
communication in our quotidian lives – which facilitates the exchange of ideas,
information, and knowledge — are two main manifestations of today’s globality. The
fusion of both manifestations defines a new social space across the planet that provides
instantaneous and simultaneous connection among people throughout the world. In this
context, the Internet is the supraterritorial communication per excellence that involves a
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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new kind of social and placeless geography, called cyberspace.9 This digital space is the
new home for many migrants, diasporans, and for their social, cultural, economic,
religious and political organizations.10
If ethnic populations today communicate and create content online, how can this data be
efficiently preserved and disseminated? Could we afford taking the risk of loss of digital
heritage created by minorities, migrants and the society at large? Could we imagine
ourselves without memory? We would find ourselves without a past, without identity,
immersed in a nightmarish void.11
In this context, how can technology help us to
collect, preserve and make our memory, our identity, our history and past accessible to
the public? How reliable is this digital memory to preserve our history, in this case our
ethnic groups and migrants’ histories?
Digital Archiving: Ephemerality and Permanence
According to the Internet World Stats there were over 2.4 billion Internet users –or
34.3% of the world’s population—as of June 2012.12
The International Communication
Union estimates 2.7 billion Internet users or almost 40% of the world’s population in
2013.13
Particularly in the case of North America, it is estimated that over 78% of its
population are Internet users, the highest percentage in the world. In other words, the
Internet users in North America represent over 11% of the total of world users with only
5% of the world’s population.14
In a very short period of time, the Internet has become an unparalleled and critical hub
of information and knowledge distribution. According to Alexa’s index on web traffic,
the U.S.-based private companies, Facebook, Google, and YouTube, were the three
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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most “popular” (i.e., most visited worldwide) hosting sites and platforms on the Internet
as of May 2013.15
With 1.11 billion monthly active users on average in March 2013,
4.75 billion daily content items are shared on average on Facebook as of May 2013.16
Meanwhile, Google receives 1 billion searches per day “from people around the world
in 181 countries and 146 languages” as of May 2013.17
Also, more than 1 billion unique
users visit YouTube each month, and over 103,600 hours of video are uploaded to the
leading video-sharing site everyday as of May 2013.18
If we look into other extremely
popular global social network sites, the picture of digital data growth becomes more
complex. For instance, with 200 million Twitter users, people send 400 million tweets
on average per day as of March 2013.19
Finally, 40 million photos are uploaded to
Instagram — a photo-sharing site with 100 million monthly active users — per day as
of May 2013.20
That is to say, Internet users upload massive amounts of data every minute of every day
across the globe, constructing a networked memory made up of texts, images, videos,
and audios (see below for more information on the concept of “Big Data”). Migrants,
their descendants and their community institutions have also become a significant part
of this constantly constructed and shared electronic social and cultural space, called
cyberspace; though, it is extremely difficult to calculate the migrants’ cyberspace digital
size.21
Consequently, cyberspace has become an endless (theoretically) repository of our past
and present lives. In this sense, the Internet is a useful tool for collecting, digitizing,
archiving, preserving and disseminating individual and collective migrant history, with
particular emphasis on oral histories. Nowadays, the process of digital archiving is not
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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only about digitizing, for example, historical documents — by-products of our human
activity — to store for preservation and dissemination, but, as I argue, it is also about
preserving the migrant culture that is currently being created online.
In this regard, a number of different international bodies, from the International Council
on Archives (ICA), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) to the Internet Archive, have developed a wide range of
initiatives for preserving our tangible and intangible heritage. ICA, established in 1948,
is a non-governmental organization with members in nearly 200 countries, “dedicated to
the effective management of records and the preservation, care and use of the world’s
archival heritage through its representation of records and archive professionals across
the globe.”22
It works in close cooperation with other organizations, including
UNESCO, which developed the “Memory of the World Programme,” with the mission
of facilitating the preservation of the world’s documentary heritage; assisting with its
universal accessibility; and increasing awareness of its significance around the world.
Back in 2003, UNESCO adopted the “Charter on the Preservation of the Digital
Heritage,” “considering that the disappearance of heritage in whatever form constitutes
an impoverishment of the heritage of all nations”. Furthermore, Article 1 states that
digital heritage “consists of unique resources of human knowledge and expression. It
embraces cultural, educational, scientific and administrative resources, as well as
technical, legal, medical and other kinds of information created digitally, or converted
into digital form from existing analogue resources. Where resources are ‘born digital’,
there is no other format but the digital object.”23
Among the measures required to
achieve its goal of preserving digital heritage, UNESCO maintains that “Minorities may
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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speak to majorities, the individual to a global audience,” while stressing the importance
of assuring “over time representation of all peoples, nations, cultures and languages”
(Article 9).24
Finally, among other specific initiatives, the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization,
aims at “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital
form.” Since its creation in 1996, it has managed to store over 200 billion web pages.25
At national, regional, and local levels, community-based associations, academic
institutions, and historians, among many other type of organizations and professionals,
have been keen to preserve the written and oral testimonies of individuals worldwide
due to their historical value (see Costa et al. in this volume). The web, defined by its
global reach, is nowadays one of the largest distributive media to ensure that oral
histories are made available to the public more easily.26
Accessibility to the web is fast
and widespread. Web text can be found anywhere and can be simultaneously read by
different people at different places and times. In the digital media age, archiving — and
its relation to the oral history process — takes on a new meaning.27
Ephemeral Life on the Internet
As we have seen, massive amounts of data are generated every minute as a result of
digital hyperactivity, creating, very quickly, thousands and thousands of different
collections of data sets (e.g., text, audio, and visual files, metadata, web pages, and
social media feeds), which experts define as “Big Data.” In 2012 “[m]ore than three
exabytes of new data [were] created each day.”28
As of 2013, the Internet Archive’s web
collection contains over two petabytes of data compressed or over 240 billion web
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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pages.29
According to Cisco’s forecast for 2012–2017, the annual global Internet
Protocol traffic (i.e., the flow of data around the world) will pass the zettabyte threshold
by the end of 2016.30
Although it is extremely difficult to grasp the volume of data that
can be stored in one of those units of digital information, it is estimated that all human
speech, if digitized, could take up to 42 zettabytes (42,000 exabytes).31
However, all this digital data, if not securely stored, is constantly threatened by its own
ephemerality — a key intrinsic principle of the web.32
This implies relentless change.
Like our human memory is shaped by the selective processes of remembering and
forgetting, the web content goes back and forth between forgetting — for example when
pages and sites are taken down — and the imperfection of “remembering” — the
shortcomings of personal and institutional archiving. That is to say, there is a give and
take between digital removal and archiving — two technical aspects of the web —,
which are related to the ephemerality and permanence of digital memory respectively.33
Benjamin Keele argues that “The Internet has not defeated time, and information like
everything, gets old, decays, and dies, even online. Quite the opposite of permanent, the
Web cannot be self-preserving.”34
A number of studies provide evidence that the
permanence or persistence of content on the web is, indeed, ephemeral.35
Keele
concludes, “At best, the average lifespan of content is a matter of months or, in rare
cases, years — certainly not forever.”36
Consequently, it is imperative to protect and maintain the culture that is produced,
individually or collectively, in cyberspace. What can be done to preserve our migration
and diaspora digital heritage and legacy? How can we decide what information should
be protected and preserved? Who should be in charge of creating digital archives to
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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store the diverse cultural and linguistic aspects that constitute our online-based cultures?
Who would own this digitally created culture? These are open questions that need
further investigation and debate.37
Overall, what are the implications of this reality for
archival institutions?
In the following pages I will address the intrinsic relation between diasporas and
technologies by focusing on the case of the Basque diasporic communities in North
America. Technologies, I argue, are portrayed as an antidote for the existing disjuncture
or dislocation resulting from spatial and temporal distance between diasporas and
homelands. At the same time, cyberspace as the constructed social field for global
relations becomes the new plaza for many migrants and their transnational
organizations.
Technological Diasporas: From Arborglyphs to the Internet
Arborglyphs, tree carvings or lertxun marrak (in the Basque language), have been part
of the American West landscape since the massive influx of Basque migrants from the
mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.38
. The majority of the young
Basque men from France and Spain who came to America worked in the sheep industry
as sheepherders and camp tenders.39
Their jobs required them to work in the mountains
all over the West for extended periods of time and demanded physical and mental
strength. They carved names, dates, human and animal figures, phrases, poems, and
warnings for other sheepherders on the bark of thousands and thousands of aspen trees,
thereby leaving records of the Basque historical presence in the most remote areas
across most of the U.S. Western States. The tree carvings are not only expressions of
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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identity and artistic ability, but they are also a basic information and communication
system, which desperately attempted to break down the barriers of the physical and
mental isolation imposed on their creators. Like the digital data, the tree carvings are
also ephemeral and, consequently, threatened.40
As the tree carvings show, our desire for being social is at the core of the development
of a variety of tools and resources that help us stay in contact with each other. There is
an intrinsic need to connect. That is to say, we all have the need to express ourselves
and to establish communication with each other, especially when facing acute isolation,
as in the case of many pre-Information Age migrants and diasporans, such as the
Basques.41
If anything, a diaspora like that of the Basques is defined by its physical distance and
temporal separation from the homeland. In the specific context of Basque history, this is
marked by the cross-border and transnational mobility of its people, which is
exemplified by early maritime entrepreneurship in Europe, Atlantic trade between the
New and Old worlds, cod and whale hunting in Newfoundland, and labor migration
throughout the world.42
Most diasporas are many years — and sometimes many
generations — removed from the original homeland. For many, knowledge of the
homeland is at best second-hand, the product of familial memories or occasional written
or telephone contact with relatives in the homeland.
Until recent advances in the technologies of travel and long-distance communication,
direct contact with the country of origin seldom occurred after emigration. I argue that
diasporas are psychological or emotional communities, interconnected between
themselves and the country of origin. Therefore, diasporic identity is a psychological or
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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emotional state somewhere between a sense of being and a sense of belonging, in which
memory and remembering are key elements in the reproduction of a homeland by
means of imagination, as a collective image created in and for the present.43
Undoubtedly, the issue of communication and contact and the role that information and
communication can play on narrowing the aforementioned physical, temporal and even
emotional asynchronous gap between the Basque diaspora — with an institutional
presence in 27 countries as of May 2013 — and the homeland is of stark significance.44
Diasporas have copiously used and are still using old and new forms of so-called
distance shrinking communication technologies, from mail, telegraph, ships, trains, cars,
radio, telephone, television, fax, and airplane, to the Internet and particularly the web
since the early 1990s. The Internet, as a global communication system networking
computers and people, has significantly provided the ability for groups such as
diasporas to connect with, maintain, create, and recreate social ties and networks to both
their homelands and co-diaspora communities. In addition, it has provided them with
the ability to represent and express their identities and to preserve their cultures.
The Basque Digital Diaspora in North America
The Basques abroad are an extreme minority in quantitative terms (e.g., the 2010 U.S.
Census indicates that there are slightly over 59,500 self-defined Basques) compared to
other diasporas (e.g., the 2010 U.S. Census reports the existence of 48 million self-
defined German and 34.6 million self-defined Irish). Nevertheless, they have been able
to organize themselves, individually and institutionally, throughout the world, for
centuries, as well as in cyberspace in the last two decades.
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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In consequence, not surprisingly, the first solid attempts to establish a presence on the
Internet by Basques, individually or collectively, took place in the diaspora. By 1992,
the Internet became generally available to the public, and in 1994 the first Basque
website, www.buber.net, was created in the diaspora by a Basque-American, Blas
Uberuaga.45
In the 1990s, there were only a few Basque diaspora associations online in
four countries — the first being the Venezuelan Association of Friends of the Basque
Country (AVAEH in its Spanish acronym);46
established in 1996. By 2009, nearly 64
percent of Basque diaspora institutions (135 out of 211) in twenty countries in America,
Asia, Europe, and Oceania have established a presence in cyberspace. They created
official websites that represented their institutions online to advance their goals.47
At the same time, some diaspora associations have multiplied their online presence by
combining different online platforms (websites, blogs, and social network sites).
Consequently, the institutional or associative Basque diaspora worldwide has organized
itself in 157 online platforms in 2009, compared to just a handful a few years prior.
Within this ever-changing webscape — a landscape made up by free-standing websites
— ecosystem, one of the newest sites in the Unites States was established by the Basque
Club of Rhode Island in 2011.48
Against this backdrop, Basques associations worldwide
have also profusely “inhabited” other digital landscapes such as the blogosphere and the
networkscape. For instance, as of June 2013, 143 Basque diaspora organizations from
twenty countries have established formal presences on Facebook, the largest network on
the web.49
During my research on the intersection between migration studies and Internet studies,
some new Basque diaspora institutional websites were established, some were renewed,
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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others were under construction, some had not been updated for years, and a small
number disappeared and never emerged again. This reminds us, once again, of the
importance — and the challenge — of archiving a “moving target” such as the culture
that migrant groups have created online. For example, during the fall of 2006, the
federation of North American Basque Organizations’ (NABO; established in 1973) site
was renewed as it merged with its Basque language’s sister site (www.euskara.us) under
a new domain (www.nabasque.org). On October 20, 2006, NABO hosted a meeting, in
Reno (Nevada), of North American Basque clubs from Vancouver, Montreal, and
Mexico City in order to explore the willingness of their Canadian and Mexican
counterparts in joining NABO. Simultaneously, NABO acquired a new website domain
in order to be more inclusive and acceptable for Basque institutions from Canada and
Mexico. The new domain name, nabasque.org — short for “North American Basques”
— replaced the following domains: nabo.us, basqueclubs.com, and euskara.us.
The Zazpiak Bat-Vancouver Basque club and the Euskaldunak, l’Association des
Basques du Québec finally joined NABO in September 2008 and April 2009
respectively. For the first time in the diaspora, NABO proposed a redefinition of Basque
identity by emphasizing its transnational character over a country-based identity. This
shows the increasingly close interaction between physical and digital spaces, which
opens up the discussion on issues such as international law regarding data protection
and copyright. As of June 2013, thirty of the forty-four associations that form NABO
were online.
In Mexico, in October 2002 an innovative initiative was born. That was the creation of a
mailing list named “Vascosmexico.com” (Basques in Mexico;
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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vascosmexico@vascosmexico.com.mx), which, in July 2004, gave birth to the
homonymous website (www.vascosmexico.com). Both the mailing list and the site were
not the online representation of any existing physical association. They were born out in
cyberspace as a virtual meeting point for Basques in Mexico. In April 2007,
“Vascosmexico.com” established itself as a formal association in the city of Querétaro
with the goal of disseminating and supporting cultural, social and economic exchange
among the members of the Basque community in Mexico, the diaspora and the
homeland. As of this writing, the mailing list had over 400 members throughout the
world, and the site had over 2,000 registered members, with a photographic archive of
over 20,000 images. This amateur digital archive is probably one of the largest in the
diaspora, which indicates the role that Basque associations and individuals can play in
preserving their historical memory.
Looking Ahead: Towards the Preservation of Migrants’ Digital Heritage
The widespread diffusion of digital technologies has brought social transformations
affecting most aspects of our daily life.50
In a background of constantly evolving
technology and its impact on society, we are forced to rethink our understanding of
culture as being created, consumed and distributed in both physical and digital realms.
Understanding the complex reality of the projection of migrant communities and
diasporas such as of the Basque into cyberspace is the first step to learn about their
cultural and linguistic heritage and the interconnection of both social spheres as well as
the best ways to preserve such heritage in proper digital repositories. Migrants’ cultures
across the globe, are, and will exponentially be, generated and disseminated online.
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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More migrants, more communities and more institutions are now more connected than
ever, but there are many challenges to meet as they increasingly rely on digital
technologies to reproduce and represent their cultural heritage. For instance, they might
not be aware of issues involving technology, such as its ephemeral character, which
could endanger the preservation of the multimedia content uploaded to their online
platforms.
The increasing interaction between cultures and technologies poses growing challenges
for archivists, researchers, academics, policy makers, copyright specialists, and heritage
and information technology professionals, among others.51
It also calls for cooperation
and partnership among different stakeholders — community-based migrant
associations, public and private institutions — to design, implement and secure digital
repositories.
To conclude and to begin, a good starting point to readdress this need could be to
embrace UNESCO’s “Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage,” regarding
ethnic minorities and migrants’ heritage in order to counteract the threat of loss of their
digital heritage to posterity. Article 3 states, “The threat to the economic, social,
intellectual and cultural potential of the heritage — the building blocks of the future —
has not been fully grasped,” while Article 4 argues that “Unless the prevailing threats
are addressed, the loss of the digital heritage will be rapid and inevitable. . . Awareness-
raising and advocacy is urgent, alerting policy-makers and sensitizing the general public
to both the potential of the digital media and the practicalities of preservation.”52
The web is a form of media for cultural preservation and transmission for the twenty-
first century just as the ethnic minorities, migrants and diasporas’ institutional
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
15
newspapers, newsletters, and radio programs were in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. In this sense, this culture created — horizontally and non-hierarchically —
and disseminated online also needs to be preserved for posterity, just as previous forms
of communication have been. There is an urgent need to select, collect, preserve and
disseminate the footprints of our digital age, with particular emphasis on the often
irreplaceable and long-term historical value of the data created by minorities and
migrants online.
1 I would like to thank Andoni Alonso at the Complutense University, Madrid and Ulf-
Dietrich Reips, affiliated with IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, and the
University of Deusto, Bilbao for reviewing previous drafts of this chapter. I also
acknowledge the advice of Lorena Fernández, Director of Digital Identity at the
University of Deusto, regarding the concepts of “Big Data” and “digital memory.” 2 Gary Marcus, “Total Recall,” The New York Times, April 13, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13wwln-essay-t.html?_r=0. Emphasis in
original. Except where otherwise noted, the online references were retrieved in June
2013. 3 Robert A. Bjork, “On the Symbiosis of Remembering, Forgetting, and Learning,” in
Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A.
Bjork, eds. Aaron S. Benjamin (New York: Psychology Press, 2011). 4 Marcus, “Total Recall.” Emphasis in original.
5 Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2008). 6 Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, “Google Effects on Memory:
Cognitive Consequences of having Information at Our Fingertips,” Science 333, no.
6043 (2011): 776. 7 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the Way We Think, Read
and Remember (London: Atlantic Books, 2010). 8 Caroline Haythornthwaite, “Introduction: the Internet in Everyday Life,” American
Behavioral Scientist 45, no. 3 (2001): 363–82; Caroline Haythornthwaite, “Online
Knowledge Crowds and Communities,” in Knowledge Communities, eds. Javier
Echeverria, Andoni Alonso and Pedro J. Oiarzabal, Conference Series 6 (Reno: Center
for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2011); Antonio Lafuente, Andoni
Alonso, and Joaquín Rodríguez. ¡Todos Sabios! Ciencia Ciudadana y Conocimiento
Expandido (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2013); Ulf-Dietrich Reips, “How Internet-
mediated Research changes Science,” in Psychological Aspects of Cyberspace: Theory,
Research, Applications, ed. A. Barak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
16
Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite, eds., The Internet in Everyday Life
(Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003).
Having said that, we need to take into account the issue of the so-called digital divide in
relation to the penetration, accessibility and use of the aforementioned technologies by
developing countries (e.g., in Africa only 16% of the people are using the Internet,
compared with 75% in Europe), the elderly and women (e.g., in the world 37% of all
women are online, compared with 41% of all men). In this sense, the impact of the
Internet is clearly uneven and asymmetric. See International Communication Union,
“The World in 2013: ICT Facts and Figures,” (Geneva: ICT Data and Statistics
Division, Telecommunication Development Bureau, International Communication
Union, 2013); Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert, eds., The Digital Divide:
The Internet and Social Inequality in International Perspective (London: Routledge,
2013). 9 Jan Aart Scholte, “Defining Globalization,” CLM. Economía 10 (2010): 15–63.
10 Andoni Alonso and Pedro J. Oiarzabal, Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity,
Politics and Community (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010); Dana Diminescu
and Dominique Pasquier, eds., “Les Migrants Connectés: TIC, Mobilités et Migrations,”
Special Issue, Réseaux 28, no. 159 (2010): 1–273; Karim H. Karim, ed. The Media of
Diaspora: Mapping the Globe (London: Routledge, 2003); Mihaela Nedelcu, Le
Migrant Online: Nouveaux Modèles Migratoires à l’ère du Numérique (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2009); Pedro J. Oiarzabal and Ulf-Dietrich Reips, eds., “Migration and
the Internet: Social Networking and Diasporas [special issue],” Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies 38, no. 9 (2012): 1333–1490; Pedro J. Oiarzabal, “Diaspora Basques
and Online Social Networks: An Analysis of Users of Basque Institutional Diaspora
Groups on Facebook,” Journal of Ethnicity and Migration Studies 38, no. 9 (2012):
1469–85; Wilhide and Jumale, in this volume. 11
Tomás Maldonado, Memoria y Conocimiento. Sobre los Destinos del Saber en la
Perspectiva Digital (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2007). 12
Internet World Stats, “World Internet Users. Statistics Usage and World Population
Stats,” (2012) http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm 13
International Communication Union. 14
Internet World Stats. 15
Alexa, “Top Sites” (2013), http://www.alexa.com/topsites 16
Facebook, “Key Facts: Statistics” (2013), newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts; “Facebook’s
Growth in the Past Year” (2013), www.facebook.com/facebook 17
Google, “Facts about Google and Competition” (2013),
http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html 18
YouTube, “Statistics” (2013), http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html 19
Twitter, “Celebrating #Twitter7” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl-FpuehWGA 20
Instagram, “Instagram Press Center: Instagram in Statistics., instagram.com/press/# 21
On the nexus of the Internet and diasporas see the “e-Diasporas Atlas” project by the
Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Information and Communication
Technologies and Migrations program (http://www.e-diasporas.fr).
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
17
22
International Council on Archives, “About ICA: An Introduction to Our
Organization” (2013), http://www.ica.org/102/about-ica/an-introduction-to-our-
organization.html 23
UNESCO, “Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage,” 32nd Session of the
General Conference of UNESCO, 17 October 2003, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=17721&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. Emphasis in
original. 24
Ibid. 25
The Internet Archive, “Internet Archive Projects: Wayback Machine” (2013),
http://archive.org/web/web.php. See also the “WebArchive” project of the Computer
Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, which aims at storing
the history and the evolution of the Web (http://webarchive.cs.ucla.edu). 26
Reagan L. Grimsley and Susan C. Wynne, “Creating Access to Oral Histories in
Academic Libraries,” College & Undergraduate Libraries 16, no. 4 (2009): 278–99;
Samuel Gustman, Dagobert Soergel, Douglas Oard, William Byrne, Michael Picheny,
Bhuvana Ramabhadran, and Douglas Greenberg, “Supporting Access to Large Digital
Oral History Archives,” Association for Computing Machinery (2002): 18–27. 27
Steve Cohen, “Shifting Questions: New Paradigms for Oral History in a Digital
World,” The Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 154–67; Jack Dougherty and
Candace Simpson, “Who Owns Oral History? A Creative Commons Solution,” in Oral
History in the Digital Age, ed. Doug Boyd, Steve Cohen, Brad Rakerd, and Dean
Rehberger (Washington, DC: Institute of Library and Museum Services, 2012);
Mecklenburg and Hazelton, in this volume; Ng, in this volume; Troy Reeves, “No one
Wants the Maintenance Crew Named After Them, or Preparing Material to Deposit in
the Digital Age,” in Oral History in the Digital Age, op.cit. For further information on
the oral history methodology in the new media age see the “Oral History in the Digital
Age Project” at http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu. Regarding examples of digital archives on
Basque migrants and their descendants’ oral histories in the Unites States see
“Oroitzapenak” (Memories) Project (www.basque.unr.edu/oralhistory/index.htm). It
resulted from collaborative efforts between Basque diaspora community-based
associations (the Basque Club of Reno, Nevada and the Basque Museum and Cultural
Center of Boise, Idaho), the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada,
Reno, and the Basque Autonomous Community government of Spain. See also the
Ontario Basque Club’s (Oregon) “Sustraiak” (Roots) Project
(www.ontariobasqueclub.dantzariak.net/sustraiak.htm) and the Basques in Mexico
Association’s photographic archive (www.vascosmexico.com). See Pedro J. Oiarzabal,
“Cartography of the Basque Diaspora Online: Preserving Migrants’ Digital Culture,”
Association of European Migration Institutions Journal 9 (2011): 22–29. 28
Brian Gentile, “Top 5 Myths about Big Data” (2012),
http://mashable.com/2012/06/19/big-data-myths. One byte refers to the basic unit of
digital information. One petabyte is one quadrillion bytes. One exabyte is one
quintillion bytes, and one zettabyte is one sextillion bytes. 29
The Internet Archive. 30
Cisco, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update,
2012–17,” White Paper (2013),
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
18
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white
_paper_c11-520862.pdf 31
Mark Liberman, “Zettascale Linguistics” (2003),
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000087.html 32
Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of
the Millennium (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999). 33
The ethical, legal, and technical debate on the so-called right to be forgotten online,
which indicates some permanence of data — defined as searchable digital records, trails
or footprints — on the web, goes beyond the goal of this chapter. The “right to be
forgotten,” or the “right to delete,” refers to the right of privacy of individuals regarding
confidential and personal information posted online (e.g. Adam Joinson, Carina Paine,
Tom Buchanan, and Ulf-Dietrich Reips, “Watching me, Watching you: Privacy
Attitudes and Reactions to Identity Card Implementation Scenarios in the United
Kingdom,” Journal of Information Science 32, no. 4 (2006): 334–43), which often
clashes with the rights of freedom of speech and information. Where does the limit
between those rights lie? Are search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo!) or big repositories
of personal data (e.g., Facebook) obliged to erase truthful but sensitive or compromising
information of individuals? Is Google, for example, responsible for the links generated
or the people who publish the content? Related to this issue is the emerging
phenomenon of the “physical life” being survived by the “digital life,” and the removal
of defunct online profiles. See Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of
Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Rolf H.
Weber, “The Right to be Forgotten: More than a Pandora’s Box?” JIPITEC 2, no. 2
2011), http://www.jipitec.eu/issues/jipitec-2-2-2011/3084/jipitec%202%20-%20a%20-
%20weber.pdf; Viviane Reding, “The EU Data Protection Reform 2012: Making
Europe the Standard Setter for Modern Data Protection Rules in the Digital Age,”
Innovation Conference Digital, Life, Design (Munich, 22 January 2012),
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/12/26&format=PDF
; Jeffrey Rosen “The Right to be Forgotten,” Stanford Law Review 64, no. 88 (2012):
88-92; Pedro J. Oiarzabal, “Life 2.0 after (Offline) Death,” Basque Identity 2.0. (2010),
http://www.blogseitb.us/basqueidentity20/2010/05/06/life_2-0/ 34
Benjamin Keele, “Accounting for Informatics in the ‘Right to be Forgotten’ Debate,”
VoxPopuLII, Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School (2012),
http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/tag/content-permanence/ 35
Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse, Mark Najork, and Janet Wiener, “A Large-Scale
Study of the Evolution of Web Pages,” Software Practice and Experience 34, no. 2
(2004): 213–37; Alexandros Ntoulas, Junghoo Cho, and Christopher Olston, “What’s
New on the Web? The Evolution of the Web from a Search Engine Perspective,”
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on World Wide Web, Association for
Computing Machinery (2004), 1-12, http://oak.cs.ucla.edu/~cho/papers/cho-new.pdf 36
Keele. 37
Oiarzabal, “Cartography of the Basque Diaspora Online.” 38
Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, Speaking through the Aspens: Basque Tree Carvings in
California and Nevada (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000).
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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39
The Basque Country is a region situated at the Spanish–French border of the western
Pyrenees, similar in size to Rhode Island. The historical Basque territories are currently
divided into three main political administrative areas — the Basque Autonomous
Community and the Foral Community of Navarre in Spain; and three Basque provinces
in France — with a total combined population of nearly 3 million people. 40
Andoni Alonso and Iñaki Arzoz, Basque Cyberculture: From Digital Euskadi to
CyberEuskalherria (Reno: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno,
2003); Pedro J. Oiarzabal, Gardeners of Identity: Basques in the San Francisco Bay
Area, Basque Diaspora and Migration Studies Series 4 (Reno: Center for Basque
Studies, University of Nevada, Reno. Second Edition, 2009); Pedro J. Oiarzabal,
“Basque Diaspora Digital Nationalism: Designing “Banal” Identity, in Diasporas in the
New Media Age: Identity, Politics and Community, ed. Andoni Alonso and Pedro J.
Oiarzabal (Reno, Nevada: University Nevada Press, 2009). 41
Andoni Alonso and Pedro J. Oiarzabal, Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity,
Politics and Community (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010). 42
William A. Douglass and Jon Bilbao, Amerikanuak: Basques in the New World
(Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 1975); Aparicio Molina, Fernando and
Pedro J. Oiarzabal, “Basque-Atlantic Shores: Ethnicity, the Nation-state, and the
Diaspora in Europe and America (1808–1898),” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 4
(2009): 698–715. The oldest known written document in the history of Canada and the
United States, dating back to 1563, is the last will of a Basque fisherman who died in
Newfoundland. 43
Pedro J. Oiarzabal, The Basque Diaspora Webscape: Identity, Nation, and Homeland,
1990s–2010s, Basque Diaspora and Migration Studies Series 7 (Reno: Center for
Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2013). 44
Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia,
Cuba, El Salvador, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto
Rico, Spain, Switzerland, the Dominican Republic, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the
United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela. It is estimated that the Basque diaspora
population is about 4.5 million people. 45
Blas Uberuaga, an American of Basque ancestry, is the former President of the
Basque Club of Seattle and current President and webmaster of the Basque Club of New
Mexico (www.buber.net/NMEE). 46
AVAEH, Caracas, Venezuela, http://earth.prohosting.com/avaeh 47
Oiarzabal, The Basque Diaspora Webscape. Following AVAEH, the earliest
pioneering diaspora organizations to claim a corner on the Web were the political
association Basque Diaspora Association, from Santa Rosa, Argentina
(www.diasporavasca.org); the educational organization Juan de Garay Basque-
Argentinean Foundation based in Buenos Aires (www.juandegaray.org.ar); and the
Basque social club from Seattle, Washington, all of which established their respective
websites in 1997. The Seattle migrant club or euskal etxea became the first Basque
diaspora club ever to construct an online presence (www.seattleeuskal.org).
Seattle was soon followed by other clubs such as the Utah Basque Club from Salt Lake
City (www.utah-basque.com); the Basque Center Euzko Etxea from La Plata, Argentina
(www.centrovasco.com); the Basque Center of Caracas, Venezuela
PLEASE NOTE: DRAFT VERSION (PRE-PUBLICATION). DO NOT QUOTE. Citation as follow: Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (2014). “Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in North America,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada, edited by Dominique Daniel and Amalia Levi. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, pp. 297-313.
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(www.euskoetxeacaracas.blogspot.com); and the North American Basque Organizations
(NABO; www.nabasque.org) in 1998. NABO became the first diaspora federation of
emigrant clubs to organize in cyberspace. Its Argentinean counterpart, the Federation of
Basque Argentinean Entities (FEVA in its Spanish acronym; www.fevaonline.org.ar),
joined NABO’s digital print in 2005. In 1999, the Basque Museum and Cultural Center
of Boise (www.basquemuseum.com), Idaho, the Reno Basque Club Zazpiak Bat,
Nevada (www.renobasqueclub.org), and the Calgary Euskal Etxea from Canada
(www.muturzikin.com/euskalgary.htm) also established their own websites (Oiarzabal,
“Cartography of the Basque Diaspora Online;” Oiarzabal, Basque Diaspora Webscape). 48
Basque Club of Rhode Island, http://ribasque.weebly.com 49
Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, El Salvador,
France, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United
States, Uruguay, and Venezuela. For a full account of Basque diaspora institutions
online see my database, http://euskaldiaspora.com. Pedro J. Oiarzabal, “The Online
Social Networks of the Basque Diaspora. Fast Forwarded, 2005–2009,” in Knowledge
Communities, op. cit.); Oiarzabal, “Diaspora Basques and Online Social Networks”. 50
For example, mobile technologies will have an increasing role in our lives in a near
future. “[T]here are almost as many mobile-cellular subscriptions as people in the
world” (International Communication Union). 51
In research with migrants, for example, a certain persistence of documents on the web
is essential and researchers need to develop new methodologies to capture content that
is dynamic both in terms of technology and accessibility. See Ulf-Dietrich Reips and
Laura Buffardi, “Studying Migrants with the Help of the Internet: Methods from
Psychology,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38, no. 9 (2012): 1405–1424. 52
UNESCO.