Page 232 - The Black Box Book

DILEMMAS OF DIGITAL CURATION

Digitization and digitalization have become fundamental means of trans-
formation of memory institutions and their role in the information society.
Not only the collections of artworks, literature, and documents, but also
majority of social representations have turned to data formats. Digital
media and institutional critique have transformed knowledge processes
and organizational ecologies. Archives and galleries have become content
providers for digital distribution channels. While they became primarily
providers of digital content, the indicators according to which their per-
formance is evaluated are quantity of digital content they produce, its
reach, and consumer engagement on digital platforms.
Nevertheless, the flip side of this picture has revealed many on-
going and even enlarging gaps and problems calling for critical analysis.
At the very heart of these issues are general questions of democracy
and equal rights to social representation. The architecture of corporate
digital infrastructures limits the discourse and our ability to represent
non-majority societies, and more than human actors. Moreover, there are
unresolved concerns about environmental and climate issues affecting
the sustainability of digital transformation. Facing these circumstances, Despite all of the novel approaches in curation and seemingly unlim-
the humanities and digital curation of media art are in the process of ited possibilities of displaying the archival material, it is always limited by
embracing new approaches. the underlying information infrastructures, which carry a variety of biases
The first stage of the digitalization of cultural heritage and the ac- and presumptions. For example, communication channels, data modes,
companying discourse within the digital humanities began in the 1990’s. and visual rhetoric are borrowed from areas like commerce and business
Scholars participating in projects of building research repositories and applications. In the words of Miriam Posner:
editing metadata were engaged in a wide range of discussions, from
technical to philosophical, and they were getting acquainted with markup “We can do what we know how to do: visualize datasets that we in-
languages and creating model content types. Within that convergence herit from governments, corporations, and cultural institutions, using
of humanities and information engineering, the power of rhetorical argu- tools that we have borrowed from corporations. Or we can scrutinize
ments had been slowly embodied and tamed by information structures. data, rip it apart, rebuild it, reimagine it, and perhaps build something
(Drucker, 2012) entirely different and weirder and more ambitious.“ (Posner, 2016)
At the same time, the digital archiving strategies, influenced by post-
structuralism and deconstruction, were reshaped by the urge to reconsider Jonathan Gray and his colleagues draw attention to how data infra-
categories of identity, gender, race, nations, authorship, power relations, structures carry normative forces by producing data formats prioritising
bodies, and subjectivity. Questions that are part of decision making at certain ways of knowing over others and thus can be also mal-aligned
the memory institutions, like what and why something is included in and with publics interests. (Gray et al., 2018) They emphasize our need for
excluded from digital archives and represented in research, turns out to ‘data infrastructure literacy’, which provides more than just knowledge of
be political, or at least a matter of collection policies. data as a resource of static and finished information to be utilised, but
embraces how data infrastructures organize and materialize relations
between people, things, disciplines and technologies. The data literacy
should not just accessorize people with data processing skills, but its
goal is to cultivate sensibilities for data culture and data politics. These
new sensitivities include our awareness of whereas infrastructures “make
space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention
around data in educational programmes and beyond, including how data
infrastructures can be challenged, contested, reshaped and repurposed.”
(Gray et al., 2018)
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