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Migrants all over the world have left multiple traces in different countries, and this cultural heritage is of growing interest to researchers and to the migrant communities themselves. Cultural heritage institutions, however, have dwindling funds and resources to meet the demand for the heritage of immigrant communities to be protected. In this article we propose that the key to bridging this gap is to be found in new possibilities that are opened up if resources are linked to enable digital exploration of archival records and collections. In particular, we focus on the value of building a composite and distributed resource around migrants’ life courses. If this approach is used and dispersed collections held by heritage institutions can be linked, migrant communities can have access to detailed information about their families and researchers to a wealth of data—serial and qualitative—for sophisticated and innovative research. Not only does the scattered data become more usable and manageable, it becomes more visible and coherent; patterns can be discovered that were not apparent before. We use the Dutch-Australian collaborative project “Migrant: Mobilities and Connection” as an example and case study of this life course–centered methodology and propose that this may develop into a migration heritage template for migrants worldwide.
Content may be subject to copyright.
Migrating People, Migrating Data: Digital Approaches to
Migrant Heritage*
Published as:
Arthur, Paul Longley, Jason Ensor, Marijke van Faassen§, Rik Hoekstra§, and Nonja Peters**. “Migrating
People, Migrating Data: Digital Approaches to Migrant Heritage.” Journal of the Japanese Association for
Digital Humanities 3, no. 1 (2018): 98113.
Abstract:
Migrants all over the world have left multiple traces in different countries, and this cultural heritage is of
growing interest to researchers and to the migrant communities themselves. Cultural heritage institutions,
however, have dwindling funds and resources to meet the demand for the heritage of immigrant communities to
be protected. In this article we propose that the key to bridging this gap is to be found in new possibilities that
are opened up if resources are linked to enable digital exploration of archival records and collections. In
particular, we focus on the value of building a composite and distributed resource around migrants’ life courses.
If this approach is used and dispersed collections held by heritage institutions can be linked, migrant
communities can have access to detailed information about their families and researchers to a wealth of data
serial and qualitativefor sophisticated and innovative research. Not only does the scattered data become more
usable and manageable, it becomes more visible and coherent; patterns can be discovered that were not apparent
before. We use the Dutch-Australian collaborative project “Migrant: Mobilities and Connection” as an example
and case study of this life coursecentered methodology and propose that this may develop into a migration
heritage template for migrants worldwide.
Global migration is one of the defining characteristics of the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. As Alexander Betts noted in 2015, “There is greater human mobility than ever
before. In 1970, there were 70 million international migrants; today there are well over 200
million” (Betts 2015). With globalization, the opportunity and inclination to move is greater
than ever. In Australia, nearly half of the population now lives in migrant households, the
third-highest proportion in the Western world (see Arthur 2018, 3). Successive generations of
migrants have left material and immaterial traces of their culture and identity in multiple
locations worldwide, forming deep etches in modern collective memory. However, the
documents and evidence of the history of migration are spread very widely and, in most
cases, remain almost entirely inaccessible for research purposes. These records are a vital
resource for humanities and social sciences research on multicultural heritage, and they play a
central role in fostering enduring, multicultural community identities.
Conceptualized as a case study on Dutch-Australian mutual cultural heritage, the
Migrant: Mobilities and Connection (MMC) project set out to examine the archival,
custodial, and digital challenges that researchers face in the quest to discover, collect, and
preserve traces from the past and to propose an approach to managing such material.
Considerable progress has been made on this study, which takes in a range of histories that
the Netherlands shares with Australia, including maritime, military, migration, and mercantile
* Please note: this is a ‘pre-print’ version of a published work. It may differ from the published work in minor
ways, such as page layout, editorial style and typographical corrections.
Edith Cowan University
Western Sydney University
§ Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands
** Curtin University
2
history. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the project is a collaboration among Dutch and
Australian historians and literary scholars from Huygens ING (Amsterdam), the Centre for
Global Issues at Edith Cowan University (Perth), Western Sydney University Library
(Sydney), and the Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute (Perth).
The history of migration is truly international in character. In his article “Global
Migration, 1846–1940,” Adam McKeown begins with the statement, “Mass long-distance
migrations have been an important part of world history; but historians have been slow to
acknowledge their global extent” (McKeown 2004, 155). Making a similar point, Barbara
Lüthi points out that “scholars have begun to look beyond the normative model of ‘global
migration’—one that focuses solely on European migration and the Western world—to focus
on the rich and complex migration patterns and circulations of the entire modern (and
premodern) world” (Lüthi 2010). While this project focuses on a European example against
the backdrop of this immense global phenomenon, the same approach could be used in other
parts of the world. Vast population movements following the Second World War had a
profound influence on people’s lives in both their home and host countries. The impacts of
those migrations continue into the lives of the migrants and of later generations (Arthur 2018,
“Introduction,” 11–12; Schrover and Van Faassen 2010, “Introduction”, 3–14; see also
Persian 2018, 151–76; Williams 2018, 177–200; Peters 2001, 2006a–b, 2016). However, with
more than seventy years having passed since the end of World War II, the opportunities to
gather firsthand postwar accounts of immigration memories are receding, and pressure is
mounting to find ways of recording histories relating to these migrant groups and making
them visible and accessible.
Poignant personal memories are recorded in physical documents such as manuscripts,
letters, photographs, and objects that are now very widely dispersed and fragmented. Some
may be housed in private and public collections, policy files, and records stewarded by the
institutional archives of local, national, and supranational governments. Others may be under
the care of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), museums, or libraries, or be in private
possession in the homes of individual migrants and their families (Peters 2010a; Peters et al.
2017). Adding a high degree of urgency to the task is the fundamental problem of the
blurring of memory with the long passage of time. History can be lost because of people’s
“extraordinary capacity to obliterate memory,” but as Colin Tatz also recently explained,
there is something “more benign but equally dangerous, and that is simple forgetfulness. The
world moves on, history recedes” (Tatz 2018). This project uses as its starting point the
individual life course and the stories it can offer through archived information, and also,
where possible, through recorded memories. This approach is intended to stem the flow of
forgetting in the case of this segment of history that forms an important part of the collective
memory of each of the two countries (home and host land).
In the second half of the twentieth century, the total number of people on the move in
Europe alone was estimated to be thirty million (Hoerder 2002). Of these, half a million were
Dutch nationals—amounting to some five percent of the country’s population—who migrated
to various overseas countries of settlement, including Australia. There were comparable
flows of migrants from other parts of the world—people seeking a temporary or permanent
new home in response to many kinds of pressures, including political persecution,
vilification, or conflict. Little has changed in modern times (see Ensor, Polak, and Van Der
Merwe 2007). In fact, never before have there been so many people migrating across borders.
In 2017 there were 258 million international migrants worldwide (3.4 percent of the world’s
population), up from 173 million in 2000. Of these, 65.6 million were forcibly displaced, 22.5
3
million were refugees, and 10 million remain stateless (United Nations 2017). In using the
MMC project as an example, our intent is to present a methodology that can be applied in
other arenas and across other kinds of migration to contribute toward the preservation of
important cultural data in situations of displacement or disruption that have arisen as a result
of the huge increase in human mobility in recent decades.
In this article we propose a life course–centered approach to finding, connecting, and
opening up heritage collections—for migrant communities, for scholarly research, and for the
general public. With a focus on Dutch-Australian migrants and what shaped the course of
their lives, this method seeks to examine specific social and cultural connections and the
interactions between individual migrants and institutions in both countries. Working across
local, regional, and national scales of inquiry, the method goes beyond the macro or micro
level of analysis typically adopted in migrant and migration research (de Haas 2014).
Given the highly mobile nature of modern global society, the sustainable preservation
of migrants’ cultural heritage has worldwide relevance, extending far beyond the Dutch-
Australian case study, and yet to date this issue has not been adequately addressed (UNESCO
2002). Fundamental questions relating to how to digitally preserve and organize migrant
materials and historical traces remain unanswered. Planning for digital preservation tends to
be uncoordinated and irregular, leading to concerns about the loss of migrant communities’
histories. With vastly improved digital tools and methods now available, there are
opportunities to take positive action to digitally preserve heritage materials and maintain
historical knowledge in ways that will enable them to endure beyond our generations and
beyond the lifetimes of current technology formats. This project demonstrates how, through
collaboration, and by confining the project to a well-defined group, this result can be
achieved transnationally, drawing upon records from both the country of departure and the
country of destination, to provide a more integrated and complete picture.
There is a growing awareness of and interest in the heritage of specific migrant groups
in cultural institutions and within migrant communities. Seen from a worldwide perspective,
migrants often belong to migrating ethnic groups and are a minority in the countries of
settlement. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), and recently the
European Union (EU) have signaled an urgent need for preserving community heritage
(UNESCO 2003; ICOMOS 2004; EU 2014). Museums face unprecedented pressures due to
the difficulty and high cost of preserving ethnically diverse cultural heritage materials in a
time of economic upheaval. According to the 2014 Digital Agenda Toolbox report, “The
digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage and its preservation is a costly task. . . . With only a
fraction (20%) of Europe’s cultural heritage digitised, and only a small proportion of all
digitised items accessible online, this work is still in its infancy” (Digital Agenda Toolbox
2014, 48). The digital processes and platforms used to collect and hold the cultural material
are critically important to ensure longevity and interoperability. The UNESCO Charter on the
Preservation of the Digital Heritage (2003) recommended the use of a template for the
preservation of immigrants’ cultural heritage as an effective tool for addressing challenges
such as these, hence the approach selected for the MMC project. The value of cultural
heritage to a country’s economy and social capital is widely recognized for “turn[ing] . . .
cultural resources into an important building block for the digital economy” and “stimulating
innovation in other sectors” (Digital Agenda Toolbox 2014, 48), and yet the gap between
growing societal demand for cultural services and diminishing resources is difficult to bridge.
4
In the country of settlement, a migrant may be identified through a number of
different official documents and registers. Government archives hold migration registrations
that record departure, travel, or arrival plus documentation pertaining to security checks and
health. Migrants can also be identified through their membership of groups of immigrants
recruited for a particular purpose or under a known migration assistance scheme that has its
own list of participants, or who settled as a recognizable group in the land that was their
destination. Other kinds of documents are generated when individual migrants become
members of migrant associations, where they may be listed as having served on committees
or may be mentioned in newsletters describing events and activities; members may also be
identified through grant applications submitted when these groups have sought assistance by
applying for funds from governments. In addition to governments, numerous civil society
organizations, churches, and other NGOs accumulate document trails through their
interactions with individual migrants (see Figure 1). They provide information about their
families and social group and the governance systems that have intervened to manage their
mobility and their citizenship. All migrants leave evidence of facets of their lives in their
country of origin and in their host country within records and artifacts that can be joined up to
tell their story of migration and form part of the overlapping cultural heritage of the two
places. Each of these traces can be seen, in context, as a representative instance within the life
course of a migrant that can be captured in a template designed to bring these facts, dates, and
figures together to form the frameworks for narratives that can grow and change as more
information comes to light.
In this project the central focus in the development of a migration heritage template is
the individual migrant. The benefits of a migrant heritage template extend far beyond the
arenas of family history and academic research. As the map in Figure 1 illustrates, many
stakeholders are involved, so a template of this kind has the potential to have a wider societal
impact. Most importantly, the template can help members of migrant communities better
understand their own transnational histories.
Figure 1. Scheme of the myriad cultural heritage institutions involved in a migrant life course.
Source: van Faassen 2014b.
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The context and rationale for developing such a template focus on these key aspects,
following the concept of a “data scope” (Hoekstra and Koolen, forthcoming):
Information held by the migrants themselves. Migrants are custodians of the
cultural heritage of their families; as a result, the materials almost invariably exist as scattered
fragments and remnants, disconnected from each other, even within a single family. Despite
the practical difficulties, migrant communities increasingly want to safeguard their heritage
objects through digitization. Although a great deal of work has to be done to achieve it,
digitization enables not only preservation but also the potential to link materials to a wider
ethnic context. Because migrant groups do not usually have the resources or technical skills
to embark on this kind of project, the need exists to create an underlying digital infrastructure
that can facilitate this effort and provide a model for doing so on a larger scale. A template
designed for this purpose can provide both a tool and an incentive for migrants to contribute
and make their own heritage accessible and thus help to supplement the official documents
with voices from the migrant community.
Information held by institutions. At the public-sector level, cultural heritage
institutions—including archives, libraries, and museums—preserve those parts of migrant
cultural heritage that are sourced from documents such as those recording historical
government activities or the membership and activities of migrant associations, and also the
artifacts and memorabilia of key individuals’ estates and migrant newspapers (for example,
the Dutch Weekly and Dutch Courier, digitized by the National Library of Australia).
Increasingly, but only selectively, collections are being made available digitally. Collections
are typically exhibited in isolation from one another, even when they contain information
about the same individual or events. The cross-national dispersion of materials that can be
linked to the same people exacerbates the problem and leads to fragmentariness in cultural
heritage understanding. The template approach offers practical steps toward a solution to this
aspect.
Synthesis and analysis. Academic research organizations can provide the analytical
skills to connect different documents together and link materials to the wider history of global
migration. By guiding researchers toward a variety of sources and collections that they might
not otherwise have considered, the template approach can add new dimensions to research.
While using the individual migrant as the starting point, this approach also allows analysis
across groups and thus supports the construction of broader, evidence-based, representative
stories of the experience of migrant communities.
In the MMC project, the overall aim is to reconstruct migrant cultural heritage to
show how the histories of Australia and the Netherlands have intersected and flowed into
each other through the lives of migrants. Many preparatory steps are required for such a
project. The first requirement is to set up a collaborative relationship between relevant
organizations in the two countries. The next step is to set up processes to identify the
documents that are to be accessed and, if they are in analog forms, to plan for them to be
digitized. Official papers include emigration and immigration records, passenger lists,
passport requests, health clearances, alien registration documents, and citizenship papers, as
well as school, business, and employment records. Where possible, diaries and letters held in
state, regional, national, and international archives, consulates, and other governmental
organizations are also being accessed, and plans are underway for these to be digitized and
linked. While this process is labor-intensive and time-consuming, it is important to recognize
that archives themselves have cultural and political dimensions that are governed by
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underlying institutional priorities and emphases in each country; as a result, historical
knowledge and a critical perspective are required when searching the archives, as is an
awareness of the lives behind the simple factual data. Archives are themselves “already
stories” (Haebich 2018, 37). Archives can provide insights into social attitudes through their
recording and preserving principles. A notorious example is the archive of the West
Australian Department of Indigenous Affairs (DIA), which documents seventy-four years of
state control of Aboriginal people from 1898 to 1972 in the state of Western Australia. As the
DIA archive vividly demonstrates, archives are cultural artifacts that reflect, express, and
consolidate the prevailing social structures and systems of regulation; they are not
“immutable artifacts of the past” but can be adaptive and open to change through new
interpretations (Haebich 2018, 37). For this reason, digitizing archives achieves much more
than simple transfer. It enables archives to be searched for patterns that may stay hidden
when they are in analog formats. Through the life course approach, such patterns may reveal
themselves through formerly invisible common threads or links across individual lives (on
the Dutch in Western Australia, see Peters 2016).
The MMC project started out with a pilot study that involved the registration system
of the post–World War II Dutch consulates in Australia, consisting of 51,525 emigration
cards now held by the Dutch National Archives, The Hague. These contain pre-emigration
demographic data for over 180,000 Dutch emigrants over the period from 1946 to 1992. The
material includes “hard facts” such as composition of family, dates of birth, addresses,
religion, marital status, date of arrival, carriers, and port of entrance, as well as some “soft
facts,” such as nature of employment or profession. From this information a basic picture of
the life courses of migrants can begin to be constructed and some key questions can be
identified. The lives of migrants differ structurally from the lives of most other people, as
their life courses are divided very clearly into the periods before and after migration.
Continuities and discontinuities are very visible across this divide, raising questions such as
which institutions, in the countries of origin and destination, were influential in the
emigrants’ enrollment for migration. The life course approach can, for example, facilitate the
tracing of influences via churches or local community organizations (Green 2005; Green and
Weil 2007; Schrover and van Faassen 2010; Peters 2010b; see also Elich 1987).
Dutch and Australian migrant registrations from both nations’ National Archives
contain the core information on the migrants’ life courses. While these are accessible through
databases, up to now it has only been possible to search them separately. The backbone of the
current research program is the development of a digital platform that links records from the
Netherlands and Australia to create a connected resource with data relating to the life courses
of virtually all Dutch-Australian emigrants from 1945 to 1992 (van Faassen 2014b; Hoekstra
2005). The longer-term intent is to extend the linked archives to other cultural heritage
collections to understand aspects of migration that could previously only be viewed in
isolation or were not visible at all (see Figure 2).
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Figure 2. Scheme for research and community (web) access to migration data
The study of life courses has tended to focus on either the micro level or the macro
level. The micro (close-reading) historical approach is predominantly qualitative in nature,
relying on biographical interpretations of the lives of individuals. The macro (distant-reading)
historical method is serial in nature and distinguishes patterns in the lives of groups of people
but is less personalized. The current project breaks down the barriers between these
approaches. It enables the study of groups of migrants in much more depth than conventional
macro approaches to the individual records in a database would allow. The groups selected
may be arbitrary or identified through a specific question. The research is organized around a
new comprehensive dataset, blending the computer-assisted heuristics of the digital
humanities with traditional archival sources (Ensor 2009). This organization enables the
micro and the macro approaches to be connected into what we call serial qualitative
research, a method that makes it possible to find patterns while retaining access to details, to
make representative selections for case studies, and to generalize and quickly test
representative coverage of the findings from case studies (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Scheme for a Dutch-Australian migrant database
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For all manner of groups and selections it is possible to investigate the life course of
each member in detail. This approach allows for the identification of social networks of and
around the migrants and offers a means to follow their individual and group trajectories as
they migrated from a Dutch setting to their new environment in Australia (Peters 2000, 2001,
2006a, 2006b, 2009, 2010b, 2012). It is also possible to identify the different influences on
the social networks as they evolved, using pattern recognition to show links between life
courses. Such identification allows better understanding both of community formation in the
homeland and of forms of assimilation in Australia with the influences of a different and
changing social context (Peters 2001; Hoekstra 2005; Tilly 2011; Brettell and Hollifield
2014; White and Houseman 2002). The combined Dutch-Australian resource allows
important new questions to be asked and explored, such as which institutions were involved,
and what their influences were on the lives of the emigrants during their time in the
Netherlands and then after their immigration to Australia. The institutions include not only
the Dutch and Australian governments but also the church, employers, trade unions, and other
civil society organizations (Peters 2000; van Faassen 2014a). It becomes possible to answer
questions as to whether specific aspects of the cultural background of the people, such as
original home locality or religion, contributed to the lives they led in their new country. Did
they seek a similar community? Did they join a church? Many new questions can be
identified and pursued now and into the future as a result of the foundations this project has
laid. The connected transnational resource allows access to data in a way that crosses the
chasm that has traditionally existed between the old world and the new, making it possible to
better understand how culture was transferred both ways and new identities were forged. In
addition to basic factual data, other kinds of information and written texts can be integrated
into the database, including literary texts, which are a rich resource for migration history
(Douma 2014; Arthur 2009, 2014).
Concluding Remarks
This collaborative transnational study of migration has many dimensions. First, it seeks to
develop a postwar Dutch-Australian migration database, using a template approach to capture
a wide range of archival and other information in digitized form from both countries, that will
enable seamless searching across institutional and national barriers. The overall purpose of
the combined database is to preserve and better understand the important and extensive Dutch
heritage that has been transferred to Australia as a result of migration and that has been
changed by this process, but continues to have cultural and historical value in both countries.
Importantly, the project seeks to discover hitherto hidden connections and patterns that may
cast light not only on this specific set of transitions across geographical, cultural, and
linguistic boundaries but also on processes of cultural transition or displacement anywhere,
something that is critically important in the current era of unprecedented levels of global
mobility. In other words, the project has value in itself as a specific study of Dutch-Australian
cultural heritage intersections, but it also has representative value as a model to be used in
other transnational contexts.
The project is particularly timely because of the dwindling numbers of post–World
War II immigrants from Europe who have firsthand memories of migration or of their home
country. The project recognizes and addresses the fact that, across the world, archival
materials are dispersed, fragmented, and in many cases endangered. Creating linked digital
resources greatly enhances the usability and value of the separate resources, and linking them
across countries opens up completely new possibilities for the interpretation of the experience
of migration. It allows the movement of people across space and time to be more effectively
9
contextualized, and it provides a framework for accessing the interconnected social, material,
and temporal dimensions of private and public migrant archival holdings around the world.
There are dynamic links and interdependencies to be discovered among collections, and
among the scattered fragmentary records that are incorporated into the databases and given a
safe haven for potential future deeper analysis, when connections may be made with other
migrant stories or other relevant databases. This approach will inspire as well as facilitate
new research that can unpack the multiple shifting configurations of migration that occur on
and over multiple scales and time frames. Fundamental to its success is collaboration. In
addressing the challenges of connecting dispersed collections from many different libraries,
archives, and museums as well as private collections from the community, a joint effort is
required from cultural heritage owners, cultural heritage experts, humanities and digital
humanities scholars, and computer science researchers. The MMC project—with its sound
base of coherent core data and its strong history of transnational research collaboration and
mutual support—is an example that points to multiple possibilities and has already
engendered pride and community awareness in the intertwined Dutch-Australian history of
migration.
10
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... The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm backgrounds, adding layers of complexity to information transitions (Arthur et al., 2018;Krtali� c and Ihejirika, 2023). These transitions are significant not only due to the practical challenges of managing information across different languages, but also because of the affective and cultural implications of maintaining the native language in a new environment (Krtali� c, 2021). ...
... Each of these factors shape how families navigate a new linguistic environment. Legacy preservation involves sustaining cultural and familial heritage through managing personal collections, such as photographs, documents, and religious items, which are essential for passing down cultural knowledge (Arthur et al., 2018;Krtali� c, 2021). Retaining the native language is critical for maintaining identity and continuity, supporting Verkuyten et al.'s (2018) arguments about its emotional and cultural significance in migrant communities. ...
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Purpose: This study explores multilingual information transitions experienced by migrant families, examining the factors that shape these transitions from the lens of information behavior. The research focuses on understanding how migrant families navigate and adapt to new information landscapes while integrating multiple languages into their daily lives. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a qualitative phenomenological approach, conducting 16 in-depth interviews with migrants from diverse linguistic backgrounds to explore their experiences managing multilingual information. The analysis employed content analysis according to Moustakas (1994). Findings: Findings reveal that migration prompts multilingual information transitions in daily routines, inter-familial interactions and extended family and community engagements. These transitions are shaped by factors such as the need to preserve the family heritage, maintain native language use as well as build and sustain relationships across linguistic boundaries. Migrant families adjust their information practices to navigate multilingual challenges, influencing their communication, documentation and connections with family and community. Originality/value: The study presents a theoretical model that illustrates the interactions between information transitions and the factors influencing them, providing new insights into how multilingualism shapes family information behavior in the context of migration.
... Processes of selection and dispersion of information and heritage accumulate to make collections silos of information when they are digitized and datafied. In our case migration registration systems can play this pivotal role in connecting different types of information, ranging from personal files and stories to policy files and propaganda and including archive files, private collections, books, photos, moving images and sound, as well as digital communication such as Facebook and Instagram groups (Arthur et al., 2018). We argue that for exploring dispersed collections and for analysis, a serial resource is vital to interconnect dispersed cultural heritage and provide them with a logical context and make it possible to move beyond the impressionism of isolated case studies and cherry-picking. ...
... Subsequently these cards were repurposed by mainly the emigration attaches that were positioned at the Dutch consulates in Australia to support the migrants in their new home country (Faassen and Oprel, 2020). In doing so we hope to have established a new resource that is easily accessible for a larger public (the core business of Huygens Institute, see also Arthur et al., 2018) and that can be supplemented by other public or private collections, interviews etc. This resource can also facilitate our second aim: to start answering our main research question: how are policy and migrant agency related with respect to the whole migration experience? ...
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... This has included crowdsourcing, publishing, and the sharing of efforts [53]. By engaging citizens rather than working alone with academics, crowdsourcing can help open up and link resources to enable digital exploration of archival records and collections in the quest to discover, collect, and preserve knowledge that may otherwise be lost, offering a means to promote democratic and innovative approaches to the management and safeguarding of collections [58]. Rather than merely being an instrument to involve citizens in the delivery of better content to end users, crowdsourcing offers a way of enabling users to participate in the collection and archiving of previously 'untapped' external knowledge, expertise, and interest, thereby raising public awareness, transcending geo-political borders and boundaries, and promoting greater equality and democratization of knowledge [5,59,60]. ...
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Democratizing access to information is an enabler for our digital future. It can transform how knowledge is created, preserved, and shared, and strengthen the connection between academics and the communities they serve. Yet, open scholarship is influenced by history and politics. This article explores the foundations underlying open scholarship as a quest for more just, equitable, and inclusive societies. It analyzes the origins of the open scholarship movement and explores how systemic factors have impacted equality and equity of knowledge access and production according to location, nationality, race, age, gender, and socio-economic circumstances. It highlights how the privileges of the global North permeate academic and technical standards, norms, and infrastructures. It also reviews how the collective design of more open and collaborative networks can engage a richer diversity of communities, enabling greater social inclusion, and presents key examples. By fostering dialogue with multiple stakeholders, more effective avenues for knowledge production and representation can be built based on approaches that are accessible, participatory, interactive, ethical, and transparent, and that reach a far broader public. This expansive vision of open science will lead to a more unified knowledge economy.
... It is worth noting that the indicator was adjusted by a coefficient of transit migration. Arthur et al. (2018), Fischer and Pfaffermayr (2018), Williams (2009) and many other scholars have successfully used this approach. ...
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Article
У статті запропоновано і апробовано методичний підхід до оцінювання розвитку демографічного потенціалу молоді Карпатського регіону України у розрізі чотирьох складових – концентрації, демографічних втрат і відтворення, міграційної мобільності молоді. Встановлено, що протягом 2010-2020 рр. у Карпатському регіоні України розвиток демографічного потенціалу молоді був помірний; найбільший вплив на формування демопотенціалу регіону мали дві детермінанти – інтенсивність зовнішньої міграції (22 %) і темпи демографічного відтворення (20 %). Побудовані емпіричні показники розвитку демографічного потенціалу регіону на основі структурно-темпорального підходу підтвердила тезу про поширення деструктивнивних процесів у демографічній системі регіону, трансформації статевовікової структури населення, зменшення інтелектуально-кадрового ресурсу тощо. Доведено, що формування інформаційно-аналітичного забезпечення моніторингу демографічного потенціалу регіону, зокрема і міграційної ситуації серед молоді, є основою реалізації проактивної соціально-демографічної політики та ефективним інструментом регулювання міграційної мобільності молоді.
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A B S T R A C T This thesis makes a contribution to anthropological studies of immigrant entrepreneurship, race relations, international migration and identity. The basic premise underlying the study is that minority ethnicity both confers resources and provokes adversity, and that these encourage or increase entrepreneurship within some ethnic groups. The research advocates a subjectivist/objectivist perspective as it gives primacy to the interplay between individuals' perceptions of, and relationship to, the social, cultural and economic structures in which they operate. To fully comprehend the relationship between ethnicity and self-employment, the research sets out to: (1) isolate the conditions under which ethnicity and self-employment reinforce each other among the immigrants from the Netherlands, Greece, Italy and Vietnam who have settled in Western Australia during the last century; (2) explain why these groups developed a particular economic specialisation or spawned numerous entrepreneurs when other ethnic groups did not; (3) determine how they achieved this; and (4) ascertain to what extent their self-employment patterns are a function of pre- or post- migration influences, including their cultural backgrounds and the barriers and/or opportunities present in the host environment. To accomplish these aims I explore immigrant entrepreneurship as a process that involves individual immigrants and evolves within specific historic periods, socio-cultural, economic and organisational milieux. The analysis is based predominantly on qualitative, but also some quantitative data. The former are derived from semi-structured interviews with immigrant entrepreneurs, while the latter are drawn from Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data. Theoretically, the study strives to insert agency in the shape of distinctive gendered individuals, from particular generations, classes and immigrant groups, into current explanatory models. The study endeavours to verify the following four proposition: The first argues that a recognition of a human agency dimension should be incorporated into current explanatory models, as this makes it possible not only to account for the ambiguities, complexities and variations in entrepreneurial concentrations, motivations and styles, but also to explicate the changes that occur within and among individuals and ethnic groups over time . The second proposition concerns the different roles that first- and second- generation immigrants and/or second-wave migrants play in the development of immigrant enterprise. In contrast to most research on this topic, I highlight the generational differences among migrants because their experiences of self-employment are often vastly different. Distinguishing between the generations allows me to demonstrate how and why changes in entrepreneurship evolve and develop within and among individual immigrants and ethnic groups. I propose that first-generation immigrant pioneers 'self-made men' become self-employed in response to discrimination and the opportunities that manifest in the host society, whereas those who follow and emulate them do so because self-employment has become idealised within the ethnic group and/or because they have been socialised or employed in an immigrant entrepreneurial milieu. I predicate these differences theoretically with reference to T.H. Eriksen's (1997) experienced structures of relevance . Third, I also propose that first-generation entrepreneurs utilise more collectivistic ethnic resources than the second, whose use of ideological resources - cultural motives that encourage entrepreneurship - far surpasses the first. The second-generation and middle class immigrant entrepreneurs, who are more self-consciously aware of ethnicity, employ it instrumentally as a functioning ideology; thus, ethnicity is used as an asset or a stigma depending upon the situation, and as a commodity and a common set of values, from which they derive some of their views on belonging, class, status, aspirations and gender. For their part, members of the first generation are more often focussed on primordial ethnicity in terms of kinship, friendship, shared experiences and mutual understandings. The fourth proposition concerns the contrasting conceptualisations of self-employment, 'success' or 'failure' held by immigrants in the case studies. I propose that whereas first-generation entrepreneurs derive their meaning about such issues from the cultural milieux they left behind, the second generation formulates its conclusions from an amalgam of factors drawing on both the country of origin and Australian cultural domains. Finally I contend that these generalisations about 'generation' apply across all the immigrant groups in the study.
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The first “Digital Death Day,” held on 20 May 2010, brought together world experts in the fields of death studies, social networking, and data management. Promoting the event, coordinator Jennifer Holmes commented, “The online memorial has already become the new grave” (Andrews 2010). How seriously should we take such a statement? Was this turn of phrase simply intended to indicate the increasing dependence on digital media for performing social rituals? Or has online memorialization in fact created a new kind of “resting place” for the deceased, and if so what is the nature of that place and how do the living relate to it? Whether through intentional online memorialization or through the unplanned bestowing of an afterlife on anyone who has had an active online presence in life, it is now indisputable that the digital world is being populated, at an exponentially growing rate, by the stories, images, traces, and voices of the dead—so much so that this digital afterlife can be seen as a new kind of immortality. Drawing upon several kinds of digital memorialization, this chapter considers the influence of these new forms—that create a perpetual “here and now” for the dead—on the way people experience and communicate grief and the implications, more broadly, for trauma theory.
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The term Macroscope has recently been introduced as an instrument to study historical big data using digital tools. In this paper we argue the need for a more elaborate set of con- cepts to describe and reason about the interactions to select, enrich, connect, analyse and evaluate historical data using digital tools. Interactions change the data and are essential in understanding any subsequent analysis. It makes them part of historical research method- ology, but there is little consensus on how these steps can or should be performed. Moreover, they are rarely reported and discussed. We introduce the term data scope as an instrument encompassing these choices and interactions. Elaborating on these processes encourages deeper reflection on and discussion of the interactions and their consequences for research outcomes.
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In Polder en emigratie the emigration policy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is analysed as a key component of the social and economic political landscape of the Netherlands between 1945 and 1967. The book shines a spotlight on the way in which various key players from government circles as well as mainstream society join forces after 1945 in order to shape emigration policy. This is set against the backdrop of the fledgling welfare state of the Netherlands and placed within the wider context of international relations. Polder en emigratie sheds new light on the constitutional debates on the origins of governance in the Netherlands and on the participation of women and minority groups in a system that bore a striking resemblance to public sector bodies with a legal mandate, but which was also dominated by organisations from the farming sector. Focusing on the international context made it possible to make links with the establishment of development cooperation as well as immigration policy in the Netherlands. Translated title of the contribution Polder and Emigration : Dutch emigration governance in an international perspective 1945-1967
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The focus of this chapter is the state of the art of digitisation of cultural heritage in Australian archives and libraries from a comparative perspective. Globalisation, mobility and the new techniques that spin off from the digital age bring about new possibilities that stimulate and enhance our capacity to ask new questions about how we perceive ourselves and how we want to preserve our history. It also seeks to make this archival documentation accessible to scholars and community members alike looking for their own family’s history in its societal context—within and across the national borders that hold their records. As migration in all its forms can be seen as a metaphor for the journey of the self and the collective, migrant heritage can also serve as a way to prioritise digitisation projects in cultural heritage institutions. However, more global collaboration and partnerships are needed to achieve this “virtual reconnect” the cross-national scattered nature of migrant histories and heritage held in archives around the world.
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This chapter examines retrospective self-representations of Displaced Person (DP) experiences through literature, including autobiographical novels and memoirs. DPs arrived in Australia with little documentary evidence of their lives in Europe. They also soon found that their stories were not encouraged in an Australian society intent on assimilation. DP narratives were either co-opted to fit into the government’s and media’s representations, ignored, or became part of a diasporic literature. For those DPs interested in reaching out to an Australian audience, autobiographical novels and memoirs have been attempted in order to reposition both their individual life narratives, and their identities. DP memoir provides a mode of representation which can be seen as benign and yet is subversive, precisely because its individualised representations stand in opposition to dominant representations.