Popular music, community archives and public history online : cultural justice and the DIY approach to heritage

This chapter explores the expanding range of community archiving activity concerned with the preservation of cultures, experiences and memories associated with popular music. Engendered by forms as disparate as jazz, rock, soul or country music, such is the variety of this field that a similarly expanding scholarly literature has emerged as a means of mapping and understanding its meanings and significance. While much of this activity takes a familiar physical form (Baker, 2017), here we explore the ways in which the digital enables the extension of such activity. In further democratising the nature of historical work and the archive, online practice is also suggestive of how popular pleasures are subject to a form of cultural justice, a concept which frames this chapter.