The growth of digital humanities studies has raised crucial questions about access, ownership, and representation of cultural memory. While global initiatives are committed to preserving documentary heritage, the concept of “engagement”, understood as active, meaningful and reciprocal participation, emerges not as an option but as a fundamental requirement for projects that aspire to fill deep historical gaps ethically and effectively. It is in this context that the ERC-2023-COG REDMIX project

ERC-2023-COG Grant Agreement 101124725 - Unpacking Mixedness for an Inclusive History of the Red Sea, 1800s-2000s, https://doi.org/10.3030/101124725.

is situated, whose goal is to unlock, preserve, and “boost the volume” of silenced or forgotten histories of the mixed-ancestry communities of the Red Sea. Beyond its ethical framing, this work presents the first implementation results of REDMIX, focusing on 1) co-design practices, 2) inclusive digital access, and 3) semantic infrastructure development.

The challenge lies not only in scattered and uneven sources but also in building a digital memory infrastructure that does not reproduce the dynamics of colonial exclusion or other forms of subordination, marginalisation, or racialisation. REDMIX therefore proposes a model in which engagement is the methodological and ethical principle that informs every stage, from technological conception to public restitution, from data collection to validation process, transforming an archive from a simple repository into a dynamic platform for the co-creation of knowledge.

The fundamental premise is that genuine engagement with marginalised histories requires a decisive departure from traditional archival models, which are often Eurocentric and top-down. The question “for whose benefit is memory preserved?” serves as the compass guiding the project. Aligning with the critical reflection on the decolonisation of knowledge, REDMIX recognises that the communities whose voices are documented must be active agents in the process of memory construction, not simply passive subjects of extractive research. This ethical commitment translates into operational protocols for informed consent, the contextualisation of materials to avoid perpetuating colonial or derogatory narratives, and respect for the sacred or sensitive nature of certain documents (Caswell, 2018; Risam, 2019).

The implementation of this approach is articulated in a multi-layered engagement strategy that combines inclusive design, technical development, and public outreach. The first pillar is the “public engagement as co-design”. Rather than relegating community involvement to outreach events after research is completed, REDMIX integrates continuous, reciprocal dialogue from the outset. This is realised through a program of community meetings and workshops in the Red Sea region, conducted between March 2025 and April 2026, structured not as focus groups or one-off consultations, but as iterative spaces for shared reflection and feedback at key stages of the project’s development. These gatherings serve to present the team’s progress, from archival taxonomy to source identification, to community members, scholars, and local stakeholders, inviting their immediate feedback. The archive’s structure, content, as well as its interpretative frameworks are continuously adjusted in an inclusive, emic-sensitive manner, transforming the archive into a living site for co-creating knowledge. This process ensures that the platform reflects the ways these communities conceptualise their identities, their temporalities, and their histories and herstories, making the archive a dynamic and living - yet virtual - space of collaborative knowledge production, where narrative authority is shared.

The second pillar is the “design of a fair digital gateway”. In detail, “fair” explicitly refers to the integration of both FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) (Wilkinson, 2016) and CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) (Carroll, 2020), particularly relevant when working with marginalised communities. The REDMIX website

https://redmix.eu/ (accessed 05-05-2026).

is not a static brochure, but the primary engine for broad engagement. Its development was guided by an ethic of radical accessibility, designed to dismantle the barriers of the digital divide, which go beyond simple access to hardware to include digital literacy and the availability of resources (Mutsvairo, 2019). Development began with the identification of the three key user personas: a mixed-ancestry user, a researcher, and a general user. This analysis led to specific design choices: a trilingual interface (English, French, and Arabic) to ensure linguistic relevance with awareness that additional languages relevant to the history and communities of the Red Sea could be further incorporated; a “low bandwidth by default” design, with a minimalist layout, sparing use of high-resolution images and optimised fonts to ensure fast loading times; and an architecture that seamlessly integrates the website with the central digital archive, creating a continuous user journey from public discovery to in-depth research. This approach makes engagement technologically possible for the audience that matters most to the project.

The third pillar is the “construction of a sustainable and dynamic technical infrastructure”. To address the requirements of sustainability, long-term preservation and replicability, in line with best practices for interoperability (Library of Congress, 2023), it was decided to use DSpace, an open-source software, to create the project’s digital archive. The choice of DSpace is motivated by its stability, wide adoption, and extensibility, particularly through RDF-based extensions enabling Semantic Web integration. However, the commitment in this case goes beyond simple accessibility, aiming to facilitate discovery and innovative research. The REDMIX roadmap includes implementing semantic web technologies, a set of standards which enable the transformation of an archive from a collection of isolated digital objects into a network of interconnected data (Hawkins, 2022). This evolution will make the archive a dynamic research tool, enabling sophisticated forms of data linking and knowledge discovery, revealing hidden relationships between people, places and events through the collected materials. In this way, the technological infrastructure itself becomes a facilitator of deeper intellectual engagement, offering researchers and communities new ways to interact with the recovered voices.

In conclusion, REDMIX demonstrates that in the digital age, commitment must be woven into the very fabric of a cultural memory initiative. Through conscious design choices, from the language of a website to the architecture of a database, from workshop methodology to technological roadmaps, it is possible to create memory infrastructures that not only concern communities but are for them and with them. REDMIX therefore offers itself as a practical and critical model of how digital archives can go beyond preservation to become vibrant and equitable platforms, deeply committed to sustaining and reactivating cultural memory for future generations, placing human involvement at the centre of the technology that surrounds it and gives it meaning.