Technologies of memory and archival regimes: War diaries before and after the connective turn

This fellowship will pioneer interdisciplinary understanding of the impact of digital change on the cultural memory practices and the 'official' record of the British Army's unit operational reports ('war diaries') through comparative research over two archival sites: the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall and The National Archives (TNA).

Military units document and record their activities in theatre (active combat) by keeping war diaries. War diaries are official records that (i) capture information to be used at a later time by the military to improve training and tactics, and (ii) establish a comprehensive record of a unit's activities to enable future historical research. The CMU's key work includes: improving operational record keeping (i.e. collecting, organising, and archiving active war diaries); developing and maintaining briefing documents to support current operations; working with treasury solicitors and others in compensation claims, and providing documents for public inquiries. TNA is the UK government's official archive. It contains over 1,000 years of history. Staff at the National Archives give detailed guidance to government departments and the public sector on information management and advise others about the care of historical archives.

This work pioneers a a cultural memory studies' approach which sees memory as cultural and social practices which orient persons to possible versions of the past in such a way as to make them relevant to ongoing personal, institutional and political concerns.

This approach will be applied to the first ever ethnography of the British Army's Corporate Memory Unit (CMU) in the MOD, Whitehall, London after securing unprecedented access. This crucially enables the project to uniquely interrogate the connections and disconnections across and between the often publicly accessible features of the new war ecology (public archives, TNA) and the relatively hidden military organizational knowledge production and management (MOD).

This fellowship will examine how the advent of highly mobile digital images and recordings from the frontline presents an unprecedented challenge to the organizational memory of the Army constructed in the context of over a century of maintaining unit war diaries, and what this transformation could mean for changes in the forms of knowledge about war, for the military, archivists, historians and publics.

The impetus for this fellowship is the 21st century Western-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being embedded in the 'connective turn' (Hoskins 2010, 2011). This is the massively increased scale, volume and complexity of digital/digitized information that shape a new knowledge base - an 'information infrastructure ' (Bowker and Star 2000) through which wars are planned, fought, historicised, and (de)legitimised.

In this period, Government electronic record keeping systems have eclipsed previous paper-based systems, which 'has been accompanied both by a marked deterioration in record keeping practices and the use of record keeping to enable an audit culture' (Moss 2012: 860). Specifically, the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars mark the evolution of the MOD organizational memory system from paper to digital. Although the organization was using computers in 2001, it was still operating a paper system, i.e. printing out work and placing in paper files. This compares with the 300 million digital files from operations in Iraq it has to manage today.

A Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB) has been commissioned that comprehensively covers the impact range of this fellowship to maximize the opportunities for impact over the lifetime of the fellowship and beyond.

The fellowship will illuminate the impact of digital change and the related role and importance of personal and organizational memory in the uses, organizational and archival management of the knowledge of warfare via Army's unit operational reports ('war diaries') in and through military and public archives.

This work will benefit the MOD's Corporate Memory Unit through identifying and analysing the CMU's existing memory practices and through assessing the impacts of technological, cultural and organizational shifts on these practices, including the impact of the introduction of digital content and an electronic document and records management system (EDRM). This will be achieved internally through regular internal MOD reports and presentations and will furthermore inform a better understanding and raise the profile of the work of the Corporate Memory Unit within the wider MOD.

The public and policy profile of the work of the CMU will be raised externally via the fellowship workshops, public lectures, and the public forum, as well as via the Stakeholder Advisory Board. This will also open its role to greater public and academic scrutiny.

Fellowship findings will inform wider government understanding and public awareness of the relationship between the introduction of digital technologies and the potential for 'a marked deterioration in record keeping practices and the use of record keeping to enable an audit culture' (Moss 2012: 860), in terms of the functionality of war diaries for public inquiries and for the shifting historical record of warfare. This will be achieved through targeted invitations to events (e.g. Cabinet Office Knowledge and Information Management Unit, Chief Information Officer MOD) and through the series of workshops, lectures, and online publications (working paper and briefings via the interactional web forum), and over the longer term through the final monograph.

The National Archives (TNA) will benefit through the bringing of interdisciplinary expertise (cultural/organizational memory studies, history, linguistics etc.) to develop TNA understanding of the uses of the war diaries collection (online and on-site). The fellowship work will open up original ways of imagining and revealing the organisation and movement of knowledge and mechanisms for greater transparency and improved practices in records management and public history. This explicitly includes revealing the longer-term challenges for TNA of managing war diaries (but also related de-classified military data) that will all eventually arrive in digital (and multimodal) form, and so will enhance TNA's commitment to ensuring 'digital continuity' ('the ability to use your information in the way you need, for as long as you need', TNA 2012).

This will be achieved through dedicated weekly internal TNA reports and the reflexive data exchange between the two researchers undertaking the archival ethnographies (MOD and TNA), and this fellowship thus delivers to The National Archives' organisational research priorities in supporting Government data and policy through illuminating the 'trajectories' of archival data and ultimately knowledge. Furthermore, through its numerous public activities and its interactive web forum, social media elements and a dedicated Twitter feed, the fellowship will promote the presence and usefulness of the war diaries in TNA to a broad audience.

This fellowship will impact upon understandings of changing forms and practices in archival military history directly into Army education through a dedicated seminar (and the development of future seminars) to British Army officer cadets and staff at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, in addition to their representation on the SAB.