The material disappearance of cultural institutions raises critical questions regarding the continuity of collective memory and the preservation of documentary heritage. In cases where an institution no longer exists physically, the surviving archive becomes the only possible means of understanding its identity, functioning, and historical relevance. This is precisely the context of the Museum of Ethnology of Porto (MEP, 1945–1994), whose material disappearance contrasts with the persistence of its historical archive — a dispersed, vulnerable documentary corpus that, until recently, remained inaccessible to the public. More than a preservation issue, the fragmentation and inaccessibility of the archive constitute a form of historical invisibility, as the absence of organisation, contextualisation, and mediation prevents the production of knowledge about the museum. Recovering the memory of a disappeared institution therefore requires articulating three dimensions that define the theme of engagement in Digital Humanities: engagement with memory, with technology, and with the communities that reinterpret the archive — understood in this study as the set of users, namely researchers, heritage professionals, and the general public, who interpret, relate, and produce knowledge from the documentation based on the conditions of organisation and mediation that structure the archive.

The studies on archives of disappeared institutions have increasingly become relevant in the field of Digital Humanities, particularly in discussions regarding archival silences (Schwartz & Cook, 2002) and the role of digital technologies in mitigating gaps in cultural heritage. In contexts where buildings, collections, museological practices, and scientific networks no longer exist, the archive becomes both testimony and mediator — a documentary object that carries information, but also requires critical reading, contextual reconstruction, and technologically mediated interpretation grounded in technical rigour and ethical awareness.

At the same time, debates on archives as data emphasise that digitisation should not be limited to the production of digital copies or metadata records but understood as an interpretative process through which the archive is structured, contextualised, and rendered intelligible, enabling the production of new relationships, narratives, and modes of inquiry. The MEP case thus constitutes a relevant contribution to contemporary debates on the role of digitisation in the reactivation of cultural memories at risk of disappearance.

At a moment when digital preservation is increasingly understood as a continuous practice of participation, institutional responsibility, and sustainability (Owens, 2018), and when technological mediation is recognised as an interpretative and non-neutral process (Drucker, 2011), this study proposes an integrated approach to the safeguarding, digitisation, description, and public dissemination of the MEP archive, developed in collaboration with Património Cultural, I.P. (PCIP), the institution responsible for its stewardship. The aim is to demonstrate how a historical archive — as the sole surviving evidence of a materially disappeared museum — can be reactivated as a cultural, academic, and social resource through methodologically rigorous and user-oriented digital processes, whilst affirming the epistemological value of this reconstruction as a condition for the recovery of knowledge that would otherwise would otherwise be inaccessible.

This study is grounded in a methodological model that combines traditional archival principles — such as provenance, organicity, and respect for original order — with contemporary digital preservation frameworks — namely the OAIS model — international description standards — ISAD(G), ISAAR-CPF, PREMIS — and FAIR principles, which ensure interoperability, reusability, and accessibility. The (re)construction of the MEP’s institutional logic required a detailed analysis of the documentation, aimed at structuring the archive, reconstituting relationships between different documentary sets, and creating conditions for reading and interpretation, thereby transforming a fragmented corpus into a coherent, intelligible, and searchable structure. This archival (re)construction does not seek to physically recreate the museum, but rather to restore its institutional memory based on the documentary corpus, highlighting the interpretative nature of the process and its dependence on available human, technical, and institutional resources.

Beyond archival organisation, the project offers an original contribution to the field of Digital Humanities by articulating different scales of engagement: the micro-scale — corresponding to the relationship between each document and its context of production; the intermediate scale — associated with digital mediation, description, and standardisation; and the macro-scale — linked to practices of public access, international reuse, and community participation. By taking the archive as the starting point for reconstructing a disappeared institution, the study demonstrates how methods of description and digitisation can be used not only to preserve information, but to reconstruct historical structures, scientific practices, and institutional networks. This model may be applied to other archives of disappeared or dissolved institutions, particularly in contexts marked by fragmentation, contributing to addressing a significant gap in digital preservation practices applied to documentary heritage.

The technological dimension of the study includes the rigorous definition of digitisation workflows, cleaning and handling procedures, quality control, file normalisation, naming standardisation, and digital organisation. These processes are complemented by the development of a technical dossier that visually documents all stages of the methodology, clarifying specific cases, preservation requirements, and models of digital provenance, including decision-making criteria for handling incomplete or unstable documentary sets. These elements constitute concrete forms of technological engagement, ensuring durability, authenticity, future legibility, and sustainable migration of digital objects. The resulting archival organisation also prepares the archive for future integration into arquiv@ — the PCIP digital archive platform dedicated to the public dissemination of administrative and audiovisual documentation — while also establishing the conditions for its long-term preservation and access.

The project also incorporates a user-centred mediation dimension, essential for transforming a documentary repository into an accessible, navigable, and interpretable resource. User manuals, navigation pathways, platform functionality explanations, glossaries, and conceptual mock-ups were developed to support the location, consultation, and interpretation of the archive. These strategies are complemented by mechanisms aimed at simplifying normative complexity, including differentiated explanatory layers, structured navigation, and progressive access to information according to user profiles. This layer of mediation constitutes, following Risam (2019), a critical mechanism for inclusion and the democratisation of digital heritage, mitigating inequalities of access and expanding the community able to engage with the archive. The future online availability of the archive will also enable the integration of multilingual strategies, enhanced accessibility, and potential automatic enrichment tools, as well as participatory practices — such as user annotation, research reuse, and collaborative interpretation — fostering broader and more diverse forms of engagement.

The use of visualisations — including archival trees, relational maps, diagrams of administrative structures, and flows of documentary production — enables the construction of an evidence-based digital narrative that renders the museum’s internal functioning intelligible solely through the archive. These visualisations also function as interpretative interfaces that facilitate understanding for non-specialist users, contributing to the intelligibility of the archive. Moreover, they are particularly relevant in contexts of materially disappeared institutions, where no buildings, collections, or exhibition spaces remain to mediate public interpretation.

Despite the results achieved, the project also faces challenges inherent to the nature of the archive: documentary gaps, the need to stabilise incomplete series, material and technological constraints, and dependence on institutional platforms. In response to these limitations, the methodology incorporates adaptive strategies — such as the explicit documentation of absences, relational reconstruction across dispersed sets, and the preservation of uncertainty as part of the record — ensuring transparency and methodological consistency.

The relevance of this study for Digital Humanities becomes evident in demonstrating that engagement is not unidimensional, but operates simultaneously across technical, institutional, social, and cultural domains. By integrating archival methodologies, digital preservation practices, and mediation mechanisms, this study shows that digitisation can constitute not merely a technical operation, but a process of social, historical, and scientific reconstruction.

The MEP case demonstrates that historical archives of disappeared institutions are not merely passive remnants, but shared memory platforms that can be reactivated through rigorous and inclusive digital methodologies. The results obtained — including the full structuring of the archive, technical documentation, metadata models, interpretative visualisations, and mediation tools — show potential for application in other heritage contexts facing similar challenges. This study thus contributes to contemporary debates on digital preservation, public participation, and engagement practices by making explicit the conditions, limits, and possibilities for transferring this methodological process, demonstrating how Digital Humanities enable the production of knowledge through the relationship between technology and memory.

Note

This research was conducted as part of a doctoral project entitled “Museum of Ethnography and History of the Douro Litoral: Safeguarding and creating a memory space”, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), under the individual doctoral scholarship with the reference 2022.13991.BDANA (DOI: 10.54499/2022.13991.BDANA). The project is also supported by Transdisciplinary Research Centre «Culture, Space and Memory» (CITCEM) — financed by National Funds through FCT, under the project reference UIDB/04059/2025 (DOI:10.54499/UID/04059/2025).