Dialectics of Liberation Congress - Creating a Digital Archive

The thesis undertakes the challenge of creating a practical concept for an academically operated digital archive of the Dialectics of Liberation Congress from a cultural science perspective. The primary objective was to prepare and preserve the congress material using digital methods, enabling future analysis through digital tools. The thesis also includes an introduction to the history of archives and their repeated redefinition, particularly influenced by the digital transformations of recent decades. The historically significant congress, held in London in the summer of 1967, was a reflection of the cultural and political counter-movements of the 1960s and featured notable participants, such as civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). A scalable prototype using TEI P5 was developed to archive both physical documents and audio recordings from the event. The work addresses the complexity of preserving mixed media formats and annotates the digitized audio recordings, particularly the speeches of Carmichael. A custom <milestone> element, which marks the text within audio files by indicating boundary points unaffected by XML's tree hierarchy, was implemented to manage non-chronological and overlapping recordings.