Alice in Archive Land

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Alice in Archive Land is the creative response to my 2021 ‘Interactive Digital Media and Web Archiving’ PhD Placement with the British Library.

Over the course of the placement, I was responsible for identifying the best instances of digital publications in the UK Web Archive's New Media Writing Prize Collection. This unique opportunity meant comparing a total of 970 captured instances--copies of websites created via crawls--of the 76 archived works. On my journey, I encountered a range of confusing and frustrating issues, from missing images through to scrambled navigation.

I decided to recreate this experience in my response, allowing readers to explore the impact of a bad quality archival instance.

Why Alice?

I chose Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as the tale is internationally recognised. This was crucial to the work as it gives the majority of readers a passing knowledge of the story’s contents, allowing them to follow the narrative without requiring it to be completely intact. This partially recreates the experience of an archivist, who will have the live version of the work for comparison.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has also been updated and adapted numerous times, via new illustrative editions of the book and a range of different media. This meant a plethora of assets were available for use in a work that, according to its digital nature, had to be multimodal.

Finally, this range of adaptions allowed for the play of remediation.

Remediation?

Remediation is a media theory where the content of an older work is adapted or used within a new media format. In Alice in Archive Land, this is carried out in two ways:

Firstly, the text of Alice in Archive Land is a blending of the narratives of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Nursery Alice.

Secondly, the imagery used in Alice in Archive Land includes illustrations from various editions of the text and audio and video clips from early film adaptions, all of which are either out of copyright or within fair dealing.

The interplay of these assets brings with it a new understanding of the work and an awareness of the proliferation of both Alice as a cultural figure and the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, itself.

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Bibliography

Alice au Pays des Merveilles (1949) Directed by L. Bunin. Available here. (Accessed: 13 December 2021)

Alice in Wonderland (1903) Directed by P. Stow and C. M. Hepworth. Available here. (Accessed: 13 December 2021)

Alice in Wonderland (1931) Directed by B. Pollard. Available here. (Accessed: 13 December 2021)

Alice in Wonderland (1933) Directed by N. McLeod. Available here. (Accessed: 13 December 2021)

Dodgson, C. (1864) Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Western Manuscripts Add MS 46700. British Library, London.

Carroll, L. (1865) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. London: MacMillan and Co.

Carroll, L. (1889) The Nursery "Alice". London: MacMillan and Co.

Carroll, L. (1907) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. London: Cassell & Co.

Carroll, L. (1907) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. London: Ernest Benn Limited.

Carroll, L. (1907) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. New York: Dodge Publishing Company.

Carroll, L. (1940) Elisi Katika Nchi Ya Ajabu. Translated from the English by E. V. St Lo de Mallet. London: The Sheldon press.

Carroll, L. (1910) Przygody Alinki w Krainie Cudów. Translated from the English by Adela S. Warsaw: Wyd. M. Arcta.