Migrant Memories in the Ephemeral Digital Age: The Case of the Basque Institutional Diaspora in...

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 DO NOT QUOTE.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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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,


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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;


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[email protected]), 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.


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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


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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);


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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).


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),


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).




19

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


20

(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

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