When the documentary Vanished Archives was screened two years ago in Hongkong, media and public attention were drawn to the virtually nonexistent history of the 1967 Riots in the Hongkong government archives, raising awareness on the absence of archival legislation in Hongkong and its impact on public history creation and a variety of issues. As a break from dissertation writing, I finally managed to watch the entire documentary today on YouTube, and learnt how the declassified records at The National Archives UK – along with oral history accounts and various sources – made up for the lack of public records relevant to the series of incidents and generated new insights on the Riots.

(Cantonese with English subtitles)

My dissertation investigates the mnemonic practices – or known as social/collective memory creation – of the late era of British Hongkong (c.1980s-1997) enabled by public records declassification in The National Archives UK, crowdsourcing heritage, and social media, using the project Decoding Hong Kong’s History as a case study subject. Drawn altogether in my writing are the politics of colonial archives, participatory culture of Web 2.0, Hongkong public history, shifting/decentralising powers of archivists/records/users, and digital curation; I’ve happily taken the challenge of squeezing all these ideas into 50 pages by mid-January.