When I think about the perspective I bring to this project, I realize it is not neutral. I come to this with what I call inherited responsibility and diaspora urgency. My family lived through Guinea’s most fragile years. My grandfather was a minister under Sékou Touré. My grandmother worked as a secretary during a time when silence could mean survival. These are stories that do not exist in official state archives. They live only in memory. And the older my relatives get, the more I feel the anxiety of time slipping away.

That is why I see this project not as hobby work but as cultural infrastructure. When an old man dies, a library burns. I felt that proverb in my bones the day my sister and I lost the chance to record a griot who knew our family history. Digital humanities gives me a way to fight back against that loss. I want to build something that allows Guineans to piece together their stories, to see how families and communities are linked, and to hold on to memories that textbooks will never capture.

My process has been layered. On the personal side, I started with my own family: recording my grandparents, digitizing photos, asking my parents questions I used to ignore. On the community side, I realized my friends (Fulani, Mandingo, Susu, Toma… ) are also carrying pieces of Guinea’s hidden history. One friend’s grandfather died in Camp Boiro, another has griots in their family who can recite lineages that stretch back generations. It became clear to me that this is not just about me. It is about building a shared space where all of these fragments can coexist.

I have also been learning from models like the District Six Museum, which showed how communities can be co-creators of their own memory instead of just subjects being studied. That is the spirit I want for this project. I imagine it as a kind of “digital griot” a place where Guinean families can see themselves in the national story, and where researchers can learn without extracting.

What I hope audiences take away is different depending on who they are. For Guineans and the diaspora, I want this archive to feel like a homecoming. I want them to see their family names, their regional histories, their songs and recipes, and know that their stories matter. For scholars, I want to raise questions about what counts as an archive and how African communities can own their own knowledge production. Digital humanities is not just a tool here, it is a way of decolonizing the record.

There are still questions I am figuring out. How do we document trauma, like Camp Boiro, without reopening wounds? How do we make sure families remain in control of their stories once they are digital? How do we balance fragile oral histories with government documents or existing scholarship? And how do we build something that lasts in a country where internet and electricity are not always reliable?

I know I cannot answer everything right away, but my lens is clear. I am not just a student testing out DH methods. I am a Guinean trying to make sure that my generation and the ones after us do not lose the libraries carried in our elders’ minds. Memory is infrastructure. If we do not preserve it, we will keep building our futures on erasure.