Digital archives: tools, ethics and issues of materiality
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Join Dr Eleni Liarou and an international panel of academics, Dr Emily Bell, Dr. Joseph John Viscomi and Dr. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, who will lead the second workshop of this series on digital archives and they will present their work in relation to digitisation and new research tools, the politics of data archives and the relationship between archives and historical materiality. The workshop is hosted and supported by BIRMAC and the VASARI research centre for Art and Technology.
Summary of presentations:
Emily will introduce The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata, a resource that brings together database histories, language variants, newspaper terminology, and Xpaths for specific fields, in a format that creates a controlled vocabulary designed to be used across disciplines and inside and outside the academy. This case study demonstrates how researchers can use different collections and their metadata to ask research questions across national and linguistic borders, discussing the tool ShiCo and how it enables us to map conceptual shift over time.
Joseph will explore the relationship between archives and historical materiality through his research on the depopulation of towns and villages in Southern Italy since the late 18th century. The study of migration has long opted for an approach that follows migrants, and their archives, out of and away from their points of departure. Few studies have located their subjects in the material landscapes from which migrants departed. Joseph will discuss how a critical examination of these histories requires a fresh perspective on the connections between archives, materiality, and land. He will also speak about a visualisation project, in collaboration with the radical cartographer Philippe Rekacewicz, that aims to digitally ‘map’ material and oral archives.
In recent years big data technologies bring with them new and crucial uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors and, as a result, new ethical challenges which require urgent attention and analysis. Nanna will address these uncertainties through cultural theories of the archive, arguing that big data presents our contemporary era with a number of pressing archival uncertainties. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, respectively, the talk tunes in on three types of uncertainty that overlap and intertwine, yet also reveal different configurations of archival uncertainty, which Nanna will argue is central to the understanding of conditions of the digitally networked data archives that have become a crucial component of the cultures of surveillance and governmentality today.
Contact name:
Eleni Liarou