Tagging Matters Review

From ActiveArchives

Maria Ptqk reviews the week and makes some notes

Shift in the culture of archiving:

From maintaining and saving to making available for re-use: culture of remix, collective intelligence and creation, expanded publications (expanded writing, reading, editing, archiving) and merging publications (merging the act of writing, reading, editing, archiving). What to archive?

The Wikipedia model (where only the definitive version is shown and the discussion is hidden and its genealogy hard to find) assumes that “objectivity” and “thruth” are possible and that univocity (one single version of facts) is desirable. Thus, assumes a Modern, Encyclopedian approach to knowledge that leaves behind the production of meaning throught contradiction, paradox, ambigüity, etc. It also puts the emphasis on written culture and dismisses oral cultures and peripheral and invisibilized knowledges: a hierarchy of knowledges.

The question is rather:

How to archive to make visible the process behind the creation of “thruths”, the misunderstandings, the multi-understandings, the disagreements, the ambigüity, the genealogies, the context and the environment in which the archiving takes place. There idea that “there are no original version, only copies” can be put the other way round: “there are no copies, only originals”, in the sense that: Each version, format, infrastructure creates a new meaning for the content. The same content in a different context has a different meaning, thus is a different content.

But if all the versions are originals, is it possible to trace back the genealogy? Open standards are key for the circulation of archives. But the very idea of “standardization” belongs to the (Western) tradition of serialization and industrialization: division of tasks and products into fragments and categories that can be manufactured in large scale (like a triple: [subject] > [predicate] > [object]).

Standarization takes out the complexity and the context.

Ie. 'ASCII Imperialism', as mentioned in “Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life”: English as a main language of the internet - you cannot express accents, variations, dialects, Euro-english, Afro-english.

The ghost of Haraway:

“Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic.” "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."

Haraway suggest an approach that is not about “controlling the knowledge of humanity” controlling knowledge and making the world fit in some standard, in an historical process of categorisation. and progress: how to be always more productive.

we fragment reality to such an extent that we no longer have a view of the totality: context connects fragment into a totality. What she suggests: to create the conditions for the permanent negotiation and the cohabitation of different meanings and different forms of authority. A holistic (not fragmented) perspective towards reality in which the context is just as meaningful as the content. Which connects to Ted Nelson´s idea of hypertext as a way to visualize “the complex, the changing and the indeterminate”. How does disambiguation plays into this?

Semantic web in the economy of the internet:

What is the role of the user in the semantic web? In the 2.0 paradigm, the user is a creator, a producer, a disseminator, a “content curator” and an archivist. With semantic web these tasks are taken a step forward: the user will be more efficient creator, a producer, a disseminator, a “content curator” and an archivist. Semantic web follows the pattern of the current social web, in which the value (symbolic but also economic) of the internet is produced by the users, but is capitalized by a few companies (Facebook, Google, etc.). It is a form of invisible and unpaid work. Are open source and independent media platforms an alternative model? Or are they an invisible and under-paid laboratory for the main commercial model of the internet?

We co-own the source code and the how.to, but do we co-own the value and the profit? Are we the (unpaid, invisible) beta-testers of the semantic web? Institute of Network Culture: nationalization of Google http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/query/

Indymedia network disappeared, no recognition, no genealogy. a laboratory for citizenship media before the burst of 2.0. (-> geocities was "saved" by users before it went completely down)

If we don't write history, traces are lost (-> what about archive.org? the wayback machine? do we have to save a trace of everything? how to remove traces we don't want others to see anymore?) Les "nettoyeurs du web": http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2009/11/23/les-nettoyeurs-du-net_1270862_651865.html

Indymedia was like a laboratory, that seems lost. Economies of the Commons 2: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/projects/economies-of-the-commons-2/ What is the return a user can have from an institutional archive? Am I a parallel 'minor agent'? Or in a position of reciprocity?

Contextopedia: http://lasindias.net/indianopedia/Contextopedia

Contextopedia is a repository where one or more people explain the meaning of the terms they use in their network, together with broader contextual information: history of the collective they belong to, geographical descriptions of places, etc. Contextopedias sum-up what is not to be discussed anymore. Contextual definitions define identities. Two persons might disagree on everything but, as long as they share a common understanding of the contexts, they will share a common identity and will accept that their disagreement happens in the frame of a similar understanding of the world, and not of an antagonism.The network made up of all contextopedias is at the same time: an identitarian expression, a map of identities and a form of distributed encyclopedia.

Emerged around a discussion on Wikipedia and the topology of the web. Wikipedia (or the academia, or the media...) centralize the creation of contexts, thus of identities...