How can digital archives help societies confront contested pasts without merely replicating traditional historiography? Designing participatory digital commons can be a way to transcend the concept of digital archives as static repositories but make them sites of active, multi-voiced memory. Ideally, digital archives also challenge dominant interpretation frameworks and offer an important counterpoint to extractive (social media) platforms. This paper explores how the Irish Letters 1916-1923 project, through its infrastructure and ethos, can serve as a model for participatory knowledge infrastructures.

Letters 1916-1923 is Ireland’s first participatory digital humanities project begun in September 2013 as Letters 1916. The digital archive gathered correspondence (including postcards and telegrams) dated between November 1915 and October 1916, with the Irish Easter Rising (April 1916) as its midpoint. The project expanded its time frame several years later to encompass much of the Irish Revolutionary period. At the time of writing there are approximately 7000 letters in the database (with approximately 4500 fully transcribed and available to the public). Choosing letters as the focus of the project was prescient. As a genre, the epistolary form created a strong historical connection and emotional bond to the lives of those who lived a century ago.

In creating the Letters 1916-1923 digital archive, an iterative and participatory design approach was taken (Schreibman, et al., 2018). Project collaborators ranged from individuals interested in the period, educators and their students, families who held letters wishing to make the lives of their relations part of a national narrative, to those in institutions who wished their holdings to be part of a larger corpus. As it invited the public to engage with letters as both historical artifacts and personal narratives, the project disrupted what Luc Boltanski has termed the "illusion of innocence", a willful ignorance that enables established narratives to suppress uncomfortable truths (Barget, 2018). As such, Letters 1916-1923 encourages collaborators and users to confront the many complexities of Ireland’s revolutionary period by design.

Letters 1916-1923 moved beyond the crowdsourcing model, which has been criticised as extractive when work gets outsourced to those with lesser skill than individuals within the academy and/or the project team (Open Objects, 2012). Rather, Letters 1916-1923 invited public co-creation through a robust outreach agenda, increasingly focusing on digital literacy through country-wide workshops, with a focus on reaching out to those who are systemically technically marginalised. This established public involvement as a scholarly practice that challenged limiting beliefs about who our scholarship is for and embraced the role of the humanities as a public good.

The mutual benefit was immense. Not only did Letters 1916-1923 fulfill its goal to convey a mosaic of life lived, messy and complex, it was instrumental in reclaiming or reviving unheard voices and lost narratives. In this way, the project sets a model for a digital archive that does not just study the public good but enacts it, which ties in with current re-discoveries of the commons in fields as diverse as ecology and economy. (Bollier, 2025).