Postscript: A Digital Inquiry Into Inherited Memory

This Capstone project explores the intimate mechanics of family memory through digital interfaces and media, centering on a set of more than fifty letters my late grandmother wrote in 1947 during a four-month journey across Europe. Through a series of digital interventions — including mapping, text analysis, and interactive storytelling — Postscript captures the process of my own memory formation as I connect to my grandmother's legacy. The project specifically engages with digital technologies' unique affordances (like interactivity and nonlinearity) to interrogate how digital methods of analysis and expression can develop, as well as distort, modes of relationality and identity. Moving viewers through a three-part narrative arc from distant to close reading methods, the project demonstrates that digital tools not only represent memory but also perform, enact, and transform it. Postscript contributes to the digital humanities by offering a new formal approach to memory-based storytelling that treats the technical apparatus itself as part of the memory work. It demonstrates that the intimate scale of family memory, approached with computational creativity, can reveal insights about memory's operations that larger-scale collective memory projects might miss.