Digital lieux de mémoire : connecting history and remembrance through the internet

Digital Humanities is an emerging field of knowledge that has triggered scholarly interest throughout the past decade. Architectural historians are also engaging in it, presenting their findings in new ways via multimedia companions to scholarly journals, using advanced techniques of 3D-simulation to study historical built environments, mining data from the growing number of historical sources that became available via digitisation projects, or drawing on data-visualisation software to map networks. The new technologies demand new approaches: as the sources change, what we perceive as sources also changes. Thus, the digital revolution does not only impact on our work procedures, it makes us apprehend the seemingly immaterial contents of the www as new material to work with. Beyond readily accessible digitised databanks, and high resolution photographs in official digital archives, for example, the Internet also offers access to everyday, personal sources on urban history. Non-institutional web presences that address the urban pasts of cities in former European colonies across the world have emerged as potential sources of this kind. Often instigated by former colonials, these websites, which are situated in a liminal space between fact and fiction, pose challenges to architectural historians. Their implications and potentials are discussed here from a Portuguese, a Belgian and an Indian perspective