‘I’ve never told anybody that before’: the virtual archive and collaborative spaces of knowledge production

The creation of ‘virtual archives’ of community spaces has the potential to engage the community members who inhabit (or through some other form of lived experience, identify with) those spaces as active participants in the collaborative construction of knowledge regarding their cultural, historical and social significance. In the representation of community spaces using ‘immersive’ and ‘embodied’ technologies and the open dissemination of the resulting archival materials through online platforms, new ways of accessing, experiencing and reflecting upon the quotidian reality of such spaces are facilitated. With the addition of participatory features, the virtual archive is reconfigured not simply as a method of representing data, but as a dialogic platform with the potential to democratise the processes through which situated knowledge is produced. In this chapter, each of these arguments will be evaluated and problematised using a specific virtual archive project, developed by the author, and a specific community as an illustrative case study.