Websites as historical sources? The benefits and limitations of using the websites of former repatriates for the history of schooling in colonial Algeria

Abstract

Since the 1990s, former repatriates from Algeria, now independent, have used the web as their favorite space to post and share their memories. The school memory plays an important part in these online stories, documented by class photos, testimonies of teachers and students, monographs of schools and, more rarely, personal experiences and institutional documents. Based on a small corpus of websites considered to be born-digital sources, this paper will question the different ways the memories of colonial Algeria are mediated in the internet era. It will look at how colonial experiences are recounted on the web, and also focus on the methodological issues social scientists face when working with these materials.