As part of a project looking at the digitisation of archives and collections held by members of the public, I've been wandering around an absorbing example called CAIN, which is about conflict and politics in Northern Ireland.
Many important collections are established by ordinary citizens of course, because the institutional view of history is so partial and sometimes in denial. The potential contributions of resources like these to present and future understanding is enormous.
On sites like these you can linger over memorial quilts, reflect on the faces of children killed in the troubles, or learn lots about murals.
And just when you're comfortable receiving data in the usual formats - images with a bit of digestible explanatory text - you click onto something that makes you see things in a different light. From this page you can see a 'Spreadsheet of Deaths Associated with Violence in Northern Ireland, 1969-2001, (Version 1; dated 16 June 2009)'. In fact it goes up to 2005, listing 3649 fatalities.
I stare at a lifeless name, and the screen spells out:
Rationale:Adventitious
Causality: Contingent
Context: Explosion
Here's the list of punitive categories for the dataset:
Internal Security
Enforcement
Intimidation
Reprisal
Factionalism
Retaliatory
Victimisation
It was compiled by Michael McKeown, a retired teacher from North Belfast. The word 'painstaking' comes to mind.
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