ABSTRACT
Archives and archiving have expanded from their once traditional role as restricted and institutionalized domains into a growing host of autonomous, often community-orientated but also artistic resources and practices that act against the exclusions and notions of ‘historical significance’ which permeated their formal counterparts. These alternative archives, sometimes referred to as counter-archives or community archives, can be invaluable resources for researchers of citizen media, and the alternative archive itself may be seen as an instance of citizen media in practice. Alternative archives are not simply repositories for excluded narratives. They contain documents and enable practices that can bear witness, affirm identities, forge collective memories and new socialities, offering sites for critical engagement with both the past and the present. In that sense they are anticipatory, even hopeful endeavours. The affordances of digital technologies have enabled the growth of alternative archives and made them more visible to researchers, with a proliferation of online archives and digitization projects now readily available for analysis. However, the counter-archive has a longer history. This entry will initially draw on examples of pre-digital counter archives such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York (established in 1974), and then proceed to engage with more recent counter-archiving activities, including 858: An Archive of Resistance, an online archive of 858 hours of video footage from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution https://858.ma. It will also engage with some of the vulnerabilities of alternative archives, both online and offline varieties.
