New challenges for the dissemination and use of digital archives

Introduction

Session 4: Dissemination and use of digital archives

Dirk De Meyer, Ghent University, Belgium

In this session, we shall try to consider what we can do with these massive amounts of well-managed, well-preserved 0s and 1s.

More precisely we might want to focus on

- how this new documentary material re-orientates the use of archives,

- how its restitution into the (digital) public domain can enhance research and advance knowledge,

- and how, in more general terms, this affects scholarly research.

Since our main focus is on these issues – issues concerning dissemination; issues concerning new ways of the interaction between the archivist and the scholar – we will in this session, contrary to the other sessions, not only consider ‘digitally born’ archives, but digital archives per se. Because it is this heterogeneous mix of documents that we want (and need) to study.

I will start with pointing out six issues, six tasks for the ‘disseminating digital archivist’, but I will gradually turn my attention towards the ‘online scholar’. In various combinations at least, some of these six issues will return in this session’s presentations.

1

Opening the gates

The role of the archivist – traditionally the gate keeper of the archive – has evolved towards the gate opener, the one who facilitates access.

Can the ‘digital archivist’ offer new gates, new alternative ways of accessing the collection?

Over the past years, online access has been granted to several architectural collections. Some institutions have offered fully searchable online collection catalogues. Time has come now to focus on what kind of instruments we can add to these efforts, in order to open the gates even more widely, and on how we can facilitate new research strategies.

2

Connecting the documents

Facilitating access to archives is not only about providing access to more documents, but rather about creating better ways of connecting them.

One of the really great things about the collection I was responsible for at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is exactly the – physical – connections and permanent interactions between the different parts of one collection: P&D, Photography, Archives, but also the Library, all of them rightly considered part of the collection.

Digitisation offers a new scale to this strategy: interconnections can now be made outside the walls, between different institutes. We are able to bring virtually together drawings or other documents scattered in collections throughout the world.

One of the earliest databases that was set up in this way is Lineamenta. It was developed by the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and the Max Planck Institute. Lineamenta is a database and a tool for scholarly research of architectural drawings in various collections, that enables research to be conducted and managed entirely online. Some of the session’s speakers will show a next step in developing example of an integrated system of accessing different databases with iconographical or other material.

3

Creating new tools

For the digitally born document, the computer screen is its natural habitat. But also other documents, such as scanned drawings, can now actually be studied and analysed on the computer screen. High-resolution scanning has allowed the drawing to be viewed in its original dimensions, along with its watermark. It has allowed the correct evaluation of the drawing’s level of precision and quality of execution – even on the computer screen. The combination of such high resolution scans with new tools for the analysis of images on the computer screen has offered new prospects for the study of architectural documents. Lineamenta, to stay with the same example, made it possible to make online measurements utilising historic units of measure, to compare different images, mirror them, comment on the drawings or their details, and send notes by e-mail.

Such toolshave facilitated access to the drawings, while contributing to the preservation of delicate original material.

With digitally born documents, the development and combination of tools can go far beyond the possibilities with scanned documents. We are able to develop integrated platforms upon which various applications can operate that enable us a better analysis of the document, or the documentation of the built artefact. We can combine 2D and 3D sources as well as geometrical representations with heterogeneous sources of both born-digital and non-born-digital origins. Examples follow.

4

Generating content

My fourth point is not about the tools, but about the content itself. How will we generate content in the (near) future? And, moreover, who will do it?

After a first period in which the attention has been focused on the impact of phenomena of digitisation on technical issues of storage and preservation – in other words on how we store things and make them available for a more or less passive user –, the attention tends to move to the cultural uses, if not to the ‘content’ itself.

Until 2003-2004, content creators accounted for a marginal fringe of web users, but today we tend towards a situation in which the internet user becomes as much a creator of information as he is its consumer.

In his recent book, La Télécratie contre la démocratie. Lettre ouverte aux représentants politiques (2006), the French philosopher and Director of the department of cultural development of the Centre Pompidou, Bernard Stiegler, pointed out that “le Web 2.0 est relationnel dans la perspective où il s'agit donc de repenser l'utilisateur et ses relations avec les autres, plutôt qu'à des contenus ou des machines.”[1]

This is of enormous consequence and constitutes a fantastic opportunity for archives and museum collections: archives will not only provide better access to information and content, but they will be receiving content from a community of scholars that comments on the documents and interacts among one another. We are leaving the information provider model for another model in which content is generated, reviewed, corrected, criticised permanently in a much more diffuse way among all participants in the community.

Every archive or museum collection conserves those works or other complex groups of documents that would benefit from a collaborative research effort and critical interaction between participants from various fields and institutions worldwide.

5

Changing the roles

Moreover, we might be evolving towards a situation in which the importance of an archive will not anymore be defined exclusively by the quality of its own service. Rather, it will also be defined by the quality and the frequency of the contributions by its users, who, in the process, have transformed themselves from mere users to practitioners, interveners, content creators.

This, together with the complexities of processing a digital archive, affects the very nature of the roles of everyone involved in the process: the archivist, the scholar, etc.

6

Changing the processes

For my last point, I would like to make reference to the story of the dwarf in the chess automaton. In 1769, the Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade sceptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet's doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a dwarf chess master cleverly concealed inside.

Why is the dwarf in the chess automaton of relevance to us?

Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs – something children can do even before they learn to speak.

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

This question might turn out to be very relevant in the context of the eventual merging of top-down, controlled, thesaurus-based cataloguing with the widely spread practice of social tagging.

Epilogue

The dwarf in the chess automaton is also of relevance for us in a more general way: it is a reminder that, in dealing – as an archivist or as a researcher – with a digital architectural archive, we will always simultaneously be dealing with both the automaton and the dwarf.

Dirk De Meyer

Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Jozef Plateaustraat 22, Ghent 9000, Belgium

Dirk De Meyer (Antwerp, 1961) is an associate professor at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, Belgium. From 2003 till 2005 he was Chief Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

He was trained as an engineer-architect at Ghent University and subsequently studied architectural history at the Istituto universitario di architettura di Venezia. He holds a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He held study residencies in Prague and Rome, and was a visiting scholar at CCA.

He is a founder and co-director of the interdisciplinary research team GUST (Ghent Urban Studies Team), and was the Director of IRHA, the Institut de Recherche en Histoire de l’Architecture, an interuniversity research organization based in Montreal.

He has published on baroque architecture in Central Europe, and on the post-war urban condition.

[1]“We need to rethink the user of the web in relationship to the other users, rather than in relationship to the content or the machines.” (my transl.) in:Stiegler, Bernard, La Télécratie contre la démocratie. Lettre ouverte aux représentants politiques, Paris, Flammarion, 2006; pp.229-231. Stiegler is referring to a documentary and technical definition of Web 2.0 by Vincent Puig (Institut de Rechercheet d'Innovation duCentre Pompidou à Paris), working document.