The Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism invites you to "The Kitchen Series" a series of seminars providing a collaborative forum to engage with researchers and their projects on the digitisation of data and the use of digitised archival resources.

The Humanitarian Archives Emergency: How and Why Digital Solutions Contribute to the Survival of Archives in Danger 

For more than twenty-five years, humanitarian organisations have struggled to preserve their digital archives and records, as they often operate in fast-paced, low-resource emergency environments where long-term recordkeeping is difficult to prioritise. Recent and severe international funding cuts to the humanitarian and foreign aid sector have compounded this issue into an emergency: a critical shortfall in the digital infrastructure that underpins humanitarian and global health research, learning, and operations. As organisations work under intense pressure in emergency environments with diminishing budgets, data collection and the long-term preservation of institutional memory and knowledge is frequently deprioritised. 

In this session we will consider the profound and permanent consequences of this loss, not only for humanitarian organisations themselves, but for global historical and accountability efforts. The discussion will draw on emerging work within the Humanitarian Archive Emergency (HAE) initiative: an international cross sector network to identify at-risk digital humanitarian records and develop ethical salvage solutions for future research and humanitarian operations. Amongst the salvage solutions we introduce the Digital Humanitarian Archives Toolkit. 

Speakers

Prof. Bertrand Taithe is the Principal Investigator on the project. He is a founding member of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and was the executive director from 2009 - 2020. His research interests are primarily on humanitarianism and humanitarian aid practices. He has published on the history of humanitarian medicine, the history of humanitarian and missionary aid and aid in conflicts. He currently leads a large research project on the history of humanitarian aid entitled Developing Humanitarian Medicine.

Dr Stephanie Rinaldi is the HAE Coalition Co-ordinator. She has a doctorate in Political Theory and has been working on the research programmes of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute since 2017. In addition to HAE she currently manages the Researching the Impact of Attacks on Healthcare and Developing Humanitarian Medicine projects and previously coordinated HCRI’s Emergency Medical Teams research programmes.