This session focus on two Brazilian trans-disciplinary projects in which historians, librarians, architects and artists collaborate to disseminate historical information, at once winning over the public and teaching new researchers to use primary sources. Both projects, The Visual Memory Network of Victoria Bay and Itabirito, reunite names and places and construct a methodology to provide universal access to historical information (for anyone who navigates the web). All documentation produced and assembled over the course of the projects is accessible via the web.

The first project, the Visual Memory Network, speaks to the historian-collector who uses the Internet as a means of connecting information. The connection of digital files according to their similarities allows information from different places and periods to be clearly displayed on the same screen. By changing the way information is displayed, the network breaks from a model that privileges a universal, chronological history, in which the date sequence supplies an a priori sense of historical development and a logic sequencing of facts. The network offers many different ways of accessing images and texts, by exploring the web and interweaving technological effects in opposition to lineal homogeneous time. The second project rescues the anonymous inhabitant by digitizing, indexing and linking the public records of Itabirito, Minas Gerais, be they iconographic (photographs and maps), textual (19th century manuscripts of the records offices of the region) or bibliographic. In accessing this information, the resident will find the necessary elements for producing his own history and that of the history of the city, relating them one to the other.