“Dad can you tell me the history of our family, why do we have Kobele in our last name, are we really the only family with that last name?” I remember asking that as a young child. I was always fascinated by history, culture, traditions. I had this insatiable curiosity, especially about my own family.

At my French lycée in Guinea we learned about Guinea’s history but it was the surface version. Dates, colonialism, independence, the same textbook stories over and over. I wanted to know what was behind those neat tales. I wanted the stories passed down in families, the memories people carried in their heads, the kind of knowledge you do not find on a page.

I remember my siblings and I going on treasure hunts in my grandma’s backyard. Her house was a colonial house and we would dig up old coins. I would hold them and just be in awe of the history they carried. Whose hands touched them, what markets they had traveled through, what life was like when those coins were in use. That was history to me, not just what was written down.

Another moment that shaped me was when my mom introduced us to a griot, a man who knew our family history. In West African culture, griots are like living libraries — oral historians who hold genealogy, memory, and community history. He told us he knew our family’s story and gave us pieces of it. I had to leave for an internship, but my sister stayed. I told her we needed to sit with him, record him, let him tell us everything. We kept saying we will do it tomorrow, we have time. But tomorrow never came. One day it was “I will stop by tonton’s house,” and the next it was “I will stop by to give condolences.” We never got to record him. That was when I really understood the proverb “when an old man dies, a library burns.”

So for this project I want to ground it in family names, oral histories, and everyday objects like those coins or old photos. These are fragile but powerful archives. A family name like Kobele can hold migration stories, lineage, and connections that official records never captured. A griot’s memory can connect hundreds of years of history that no colonial archive preserved. Even a photograph in someone’s drawer can open a whole chapter of Guinean life.

The ways of knowing I want to bring in are oral tradition, memory, objects, and family storytelling. These are just as valid as written records, even if they are harder to pin down. They challenge what people usually think of when they hear the word “archive.” Archives are not only state documents or libraries. They are also the stories people tell at night, the nicknames in families, the songs people sing, the heirlooms in a box under the bed.

Some digital humanities projects inspire me because they make space for these alternative ways of knowing. The District Six Museum in South Africa collects stories and community memory about forced removals during apartheid. The Slave Voyages Database uses data to tell a massive story but still leaves room for fragments, silences, and questions. Even closer to Guinea, Camp Boiro Memorial is an example of how digital archives can preserve memory that is painful but necessary to document.

Digital humanities to me is the bridge. It is a way to capture these living forms of history before they disappear, to put them into a format that can live on, but also to show their value to scholars and to the people themselves. I want Guineans to see their history not just as something written by outsiders but as something that lives in them and can be recomposed and preserved through new tools.