Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

Harvard Kennedy School of Government | Harvard University
Mylène Tanferri

Mylène Tanferri

mylene_tanferri (at) hks.harvard.edu

Mylène Tanferri is a fall 2015 Visiting Research Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her doctoral research aims to understand historical archives digitization as a cultural/technical practice with a focus on the access promises that accompany it. While at the STS Program, Mylène will work on the political dimensions of heritage and archives digitization initiatives. Mylène is a PhD candidate at the digital cultures and humanities lab at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in co-supervision with the information science program at the University of Bahia, Brazil.

As archives are considered important places for cultural identities, Mylène’s work seeks to understand the changes at stake when historical documents are made available and combinable through Information and Communication Technologies. By following the everyday work of different agents and their various activities around heritage access through digital means, she observed that national and supranational actors are growing increasingly invested in heritage digitization projects. The possibility to (re)create shared memories and identities through a digitally accessible heritage is frequently attributed to digitization. As institutions negotiate and interpret their resources and understandings of the digital, Mylène’s research seeks to understand how this work is done by singular archival repositories.

Mylène received a specialized MA of Arts in Historical sciences of culture from the University of Lausanne in 2011. She completed her MA internship at the Jorge Calmon Memory, Santa Casa de Misericórdia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. She completed fieldwork in different Brazilian heritage institutions for her research.

Publications:

“Archives de la Recherche et des Institutions Académiques : Pouvoirs, Savoirs” in J.F Bert, M. Ratcliff, eds, Frontières d’archives: Recherche, Savoirs, Mémoires (Genève : Archives Contemporaines, forthcoming)
“Définition et Standardisation : le travail du Conseil International des Archives” Numéro spécial Archives, Ecrire l’Histoire, n.13-14 (2014), p. 63-71

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