Annual Digital Lecture

2026 Annual Digital Lecture

Explore how digital platforms are reshaping cultural memory at this year’s Annual Digital Lecture.

When

Thursday 26 November, 18:30 – 20:30

Where

Chancellor's Hall, Senate House (London)

From collection to collective: What is an archive now?

Cultural memory seems caught, now more the even, between competing visions for what it is (or should be), what it means, and to whom it belongs. Accepting that there is no neutral account or curation of the past is not the same as embracing the place within our social documentation processes that digital media companies have established for themselves. This position that has enabled them to redefine our material records as their training data.

This transformation can be viewed not just as one predicated on power relations, but also on a shift in the social dimension of knowledge technologies, with the atomised consumer of digital services replacing the spatially, temporally and relationally integrated archival visitor.

The archive is well-positioned to resist the gravity of this larger set of social and cultural trends. However, when viewed not as coterminous with its collections, but rather as a site of collective sensemaking processes, perhaps even of ritual. It is in this kind of space that cultural infrastructure can:

• Foster multiple levels of meaningful friction (synchronic and diachronic)
• Promote knowledge justice
• Integrate emerging technologies ethically and responsibly
• Demonstrate the value of civic investment in democratic participation

This provides a safe space from which to challenge the techno-capitalist dogma of efficiency and individualism.

Speaker

Jennifer Edmond

Jennifer Edmond is Professor in Digital Humanities at Trinity College Dublin where she is co-director of the Trinity Centre for Digital Humanities, Director of the MPhil in Digital Humanities and Culture and a principal Investigator in the newly founded national Centre for advanced digital research Rinn AI.

Over the past 10 years, Jennifer has coordinated numerous significant funded research projects, including her most recent collaborative investigation of AI, big data and democracy, Knowledge Technologies for Democracy (KT4D). She has served in leadership roles in a large number of European-level policy and infrastructure organisations. This includes six years as a Director and President of DARIAH-EU and four years on the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform. She also currently acts as a member of the Governing Board of the European Association of Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH).

Her research explores:

• Interdisciplinarity, humanistic and hybrid research processes (with a special focus on the infrastructures they require)
• Critical digital humanities as a contributor to both research and technology development
• Transdisciplinarity as a paradigm for the humanities

In these fields, she has a publication record including more than 60 internationally peer-reviewed articles, chapters, reports, datasets and books.

Information about event and location

This event will take place in-person at Senate House, London, in Chancellor's Hall. The room is wheelchair accessible. If you have any accessibility requirements, please let us know via the order form when you register. If you have any questions about the event, please email research@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

In the event of a tube strike, the University of London Senate House is within walking distance of three national railway stations, London St Pancras ( around 18 mins), London King’s Cross (around 18 mins) and London Euston (around 12 mins). The nearest bus stops are Tottenham Court Road or Russell Square (Numbers 1, 24, 29, 68, 73, 91 and 390).

Please note that photography might take place during the event. If you would like to withdraw your consent, please email research@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

Past lectures

• 2025: When saving becomes loss: Archival memory in the digital age Watch the recording on YouTube
• 2024: Turning over a new leaf: AI ethics in/through the archives. Watch the 2024 recording on YouTube.
• 2023: Identity 2.0: Memory Making in a Digital Age. Watch the 2023 recording on YouTube. Listen to the Annual Digital Lecture audio series to hear colleagues across The National Archives reflect on themes from the 2023 Annual Digital Lecture.
• 2022: Kate Crawford, ‘Ground Truth: In the Archives That Train Machine Learning’.
• 2021: Lauren F Klein, ‘Data Feminism and the Archive’. Watch the 2021 recording on YouTube.
• 2020: Carly Kind, ‘The death of anonymity in the age of identity’. Listen to the audio recording of the online event.
• 2019: Safiya Noble, ‘Algorithms of Oppression’. Watch the 2019 recording on YouTube.
• 2018: Luciano Floridi, University of Oxford, ‘Semantic Capital: what it is and how to protect it’. This lecture was not recorded.