Websites as historical sources? The benefits and limitations of using the websites of former repatriates for the history of schooling in colonial Algeria

• Published in: Exploring the Archived Web during a Highly Transformative Age. Proceedings of the 5th international RESAW conference, Marseille, June 2023 Vol. 138; no. 1; pp. 311 - 320
• Main Author: Mussard, Christine
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Florence Firenze University Press 2024
• Series: Proceedings e report
• Subjects: Algeria; Archiving, preservation and digitization; Bibliographic and subject control; Computer Science; History; Humanities and Social Sciences; Library and information sciences / Museology; Library, archive and information management; memories; methodology; Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary subjects; schooling; Technology for Human Learning; websites
• ISBN: 9791221504132; 9791221504125
• ISSN: 2704-5846
• DOI: 10.36253/979-12-215-0413-2.27

Since the 1990s, former repatriates from Algeria, now independent, have used the web as their favorite space to post and share their memories. The school memory plays an important part in these online stories, documented by class photos, testimonies of teachers and students, monographs of schools and, more rarely, personal experiences and institutional documents. Based on a small corpus of websites considered to be born-digital sources, this paper will question the different ways the memories of colonial Algeria are mediated in the internet era. It will look at how colonial experiences are recounted on the web, and also focus on the methodological issues social scientists face when working with these materials.