How can the online distribution of heritage facilitate successful forms of collective online memory production? Two online archives from India are taken as case studies to analyze practices that make online archives effective as devices for recalling and constructing the Indian past. It is not only contextual conditions of the Internet age, but also particular applied practices of presenting, communicating, and using social media that enable it. Yet, the analysis of the two recently created online archives, which are partially driven by the idea of widening access, show that they do not so much set up counterpositions to established conceptions of archives as regulating entities, but rather aim at becoming acknowledged heritage agents.
KATJA MÜLLER is a social anthropologist with research interests in visual anthropology, material culture, museum anthropology, and digital anthropology, as well as environmental anthropology. She has been working at the Leipzig Museum of Ethnography on colonial photographs and objects from India, a work that led to her doctoral dissertation at LMU Munich in 2014. Since 2015, she has been a researcher and research coordinator at the Center for Interdisciplinary Area Studies at Halle University. Her current research analyzes digitization processes in both Indian and German archives, as well as work on coal mining in Germany in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney. E-mail: katja.mueller@zirs.uni-halle.de