ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the digital archive has an important pedagogical role in re-imagining digital literacy. It explores how digital infrastructures could be opened up through pedagogical practice, enabling practical insights into the constructions of power and knowledge that work through the context of the digital archive. The opening exercise opened up the ‘Meta’ space of the digital archive through familiarizing participants with how archival practices are used to organize information in digital infrastructures. Non-technical language was deployed to establish confidence and facilitate participation. Anxiety of inscription characterizes much theoretical work about the impact of the digital on writing, knowledge, and its transmission. Digital infrastructures – the ‘meta’ space about and around the archival content – are social contexts, in other words, within which new forms of collaborative knowledge can be practiced, shared, and developed, and new social encounters with digital il/literacy can become possible.
