Exploring Value in Digital Archives and the Comainn Eachdraidh

This report engages the multifaceted ways in which Cultural Value is produced by the Comainn Eachdraidh (Historical Societies) movement in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. It shows how grass-roots community activity surrounding history, heritage and culture can have a resounding impact upon the communities involved, energising them into a variety of different actions. It also highlights how these activities have been finding new expressions through digital technologies, including digital archives and social media, from which different notions of cultural value are being shaped. The following report should be read as a series of vignettes that speaks to the concept of cultural value in different ways. A central proposal from the project is to comprehend cultural value as a flexible and differentiated concept that can mean a number of different things in different spaces and places. This reflects the ethnographic methodology which has been employed to understand the complex ways in which communities in the Outer Hebrides derive benefit from cultural activity and participation. At its core, the report highlights how the production of community heritage in the Outer Hebrides creates cultural value for communities in a variety of different ways: from helping develop connections between land, people and place that are central to the on-going development, the ‘liveliness’ of Gaelic culture, and the benefits sought in building connections and dialogues between people both out with the immediate community and in the extended diaspora.