The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites

Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn, Steven Cooke, Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn, Steven Cooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138581296
• eBook ISBN: 9780429015298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites presents a fascinating picture of the ways in which today's cultural institutions are undergoing a transformation through innovative applications of digital technology.

With a strong focus on digital design practice, the volume captures the vital discourse between curators, exhibition designers, historians, heritage practitioners, technologists and interaction designers from around the world. Contributors interrogate how their projects are extending the traditional reach and engagement of institutions through digital designs that reconfigure the interplay between collections, public knowledge and civic society.

Bringing together the experiences of some of today's most innovative cultural institutions and thinkers, the Handbook provides refreshingly new ideas and directions for the exciting digital challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. As such, it should be essential reading for academics, students, designers and professionals interested in the production of culture in the post-digital age.

Part I

The emerging global digital GLAM sector

5

Theorising heritage collection digitisations in global computational infrastructures

Fiona R. Cameron

Introduction

Digitisations (commonly described as digital copies of heritage collections) are viewed as immaterial, informational replicants of their parent, the ‘real object’, and as networked human and machine subjectivities. Here, connecting people and sharing information of the real via the digitisation continues to be the primary concern. The value of the digitisation settles on their role as forms of cultural communication alongside their potential to promote the radical democratisation of institutions in regard to access to and engagement with their collections. Accordingly, users are conceived as autonomous human actors within a global infosphere.

While material heritage is founded on an artefactual notion of identity, the digitisation is founded on an informational one (Owens, 2018, pp. 13–17). The digitisation as an ‘informational object’ attempts to carry the cultural information and aesthetic impression of its parent, although how accurately it does so is a question of much debate. The digitisation is also classified as informational in a software sense.

Within the immaterial and informational discourses occasioned by computer code to which the digitisation is attenuated, materiality is rendered less important or indeed irrelevant because it is put to work to authenticate its parent not itself. Put simply, the digitisation is informational, the material object is its parent and the information of the parent is encoded into the digital. To this end, the digitisation is subject to and judged based on a relation of sameness—in respect to how well or accurately it simulates its parent, the physical object, and what it lacks in terms of its physical characteristics and aura, that is, its history and connections with people and events in the past.

Breaking the material, immaterial binary: the first theoretical move

Since 2005, I have sought through my research and writing to break the material/immaterial binary and cast the digitisation as a non-identical thing through a series of conceptual moves. In 2007, I argued for rethinking the digitisation, using Michelangelo’s David and the digital version, by lending equal weight to digital materiality as the first step in redefining the place and value of digitisations within institutional settings:

There is … a need to move away from formalist notions of technology and materiality, the original and authentic, and the desire to make digital objects fit into the rubric of replicant … the digital historical object should no longer be understood as a terrorist. By understanding its modality and materiality these discussions clearly pose new roles for the digital historical object beyond its role as servant to the ‘real’.

(Cameron, 2007, p. 89)

While taking the materialities and the differing ways the analogue and digital were crafted seriously, the narrative I progressed in 2007 framed a humanist account of the relations between the digitisation and its ‘real parent’ by focusing on the human–technical, thereby foregrounding human actants and their processes of production including that of the computational. While gesturing towards the sequential and iterative processes by which their respective making was performed, both narratives restricted the coordinates and ecologics of each to their respective materials as marble; the act of sculpting; computational operations and code; human intent; labour and subjectivities. Here, the explication of the digitisation’s materiality and auric capacities was a way of describing their ‘essence’ as an antithesis to discourses of immateriality.

Importantly, digital historical replicants (digitisations) can be viewed as objects in their own right through consideration of their processes of production; they can play to notions of polysemy, the experiential and the sensual (Cameron, 2007). Further, I considered the different affectual tone of the digital and analogue as a way of demarcating their non-identical nature as an entry point to consider the alternative uses of digitisations as representational, as presence, as affect, as experience and as value in a museum context.

I demonstrated how the materiality of the ‘real’ and the digitisation are different in essence and composition; the former analogue made of continuous data from one point to another as well as discrete data, whereas the latter comprised at its most fundamental level digital codes, with each thing exhibiting their own unique processes of production.

I also made a case for digitisations to be considered as different, albeit related, things in respect to their ‘real parent’, where difference was based on their respective materialities, processes of production and notions of authenticity. The digitisation does not lead to the impoverishment of its original—rather, it is and does something different, but also carries some of the information and affectual responses invoked by its parent. By reworking the digitisation in material terms, I sought to unravel the fear-based disregard of the so-called replicant and its charge as an imposter circulating at the time.

From this position, it was clear that digital cultural heritage objects as digital reproductions are a new type of thing (Cameron, 2007). They have their own history; each are unique in their technical and processual characteristics and they embody a different type of computational aesthetic and individuated politics. While digital historical collections shared some of the attributes and responses invoked by the real parent, they were not identical in respect to authorship, provenance, materiality, their objecthood and aura. These narratives still upheld a hierarchy of materials—marble, as opposed to digital code—thereby situating the digitisation and indeed the born digital ‘object’ further down the value chain. In contrast to the digitisation that is viewed as immaterial, physical objects were also seen as having an inherent material essence that resided within them. Accordingly, the digitisation also remediates representation as dialogical and polymorphous through their distribution (Cameron, 2008, pp. 229–243).

The parent and the digitisation as related, overlapping, non-identical assemblages: the second theoretical move

More recently, I reframed digitisations differently, viewing them as things in themselves: as related, overlapping, emergent and non-identical assemblages in respect to the ‘real parent’ (Cameron & Mengler, 2015, pp. 69–70). Here, I shift the interpretation of the digitisation from a sole focus on their technicity and semiotic meanings and the study of their effects on the human subject to their repurposing in broader ecologies and heritage contexts.

My first task in the conceptual reworking of digitisations was to extend the array of coordinates that constituted each. In a series of articles and the co-authored chapter ‘Transvisuality, Geopolitics and Cultural Heritage in Global Flows: The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict and the Death of the Virtual Terrorist’, and through working with two Palestinian objects and their digitisations—a British Mandate coin and a thob abu qutbeh wedding dress—I finally laid to rest debates about the virtual as inferior, suspect and irruptive and called for the release of the virtual as a terror suspect (Cameron & Mengler, 2015, pp. 59–72). I worked with alterity here as an analytic to pull apart discourses of simulation by ascertaining the relational contrasts between the thob and the coin. I founded my argument on a deeper consideration of similarity and difference not only in terms of substance and affect, as I had some in previous work, but also through framing the digitisation and its parent as a broader range of human, non-human, inhuman and more-than-human coordinates, and rethought as processes in relational, agential terms. Here I restored material attention to the digitisation through a different relational, multiagential, compositional and affordance lens.

Rather than thinking of the thob and the coin as ‘dead things’ or concrete stable entities, as the copy and the original, or solely in terms of bits, computer code, processes, platforms and algorithms or respectively physical matter such as marble, I instead argued they each become enlivened, vibrant, mobile, heterogeneous assemblages as mixtures of different types of content, processes and materialities (Cameron & Mengler, 2015, pp. 68–71). The respective assemblages of the thob and its digitisation comprise all manner of human and non-human elements and organic and non-organic matter. These coordinates include bronze; cotton; soil; silk worms; cotton plants; threads; people; digital code; digital cameras; algorithms; interfaces; elemental forces such as rare earth minerals; silicon and carbon; the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; ideology; religious and spiritual phenomenon; aesthetic values; heritage values; laws; social practices; technologies; political and personal views such as emotional links to homeland; land; women’s culture; marriage; love and happiness; the skill and beauty of the handmade stitch and others that may not be perceivable (Cameron & Mengler, 2015, pp. 68–69). These all comprise power relations, agential, machinic and human subjection that are heavily trafficked across the assemblage.

Accordingly, digitisations and their so-called real parent also invoke a different sensing of things. The digital thob and the ‘real’ thob also embody different experiences; for example, the latter provides a tactile experience of the fabric and the stitching of the motifs whereas the former emerges through a graphical interface, through computational processes in which the visual, mutable and interactive rather than the tactile is foregrounded. Conversely, the items may invoke identical affects such as belonging to territory and fear of cultural appropriation. In this sense they are at once non-identical but at the same time overlap, sharing some of their affordances such as in the ways humans read them as representational in the invocation of territory and homeland.

Further, the digitisation invokes different modes of experiencing and perceiving things, which is also enabled through interaction, immersion and haptic experiences (Cameron, 2007, p. 89; van der Akker & Legéne, 2017, p. 8). In respect to degradation, the breaking down of fabric is a qualitatively different process to the degradation of the digitisation through bit rot. The aesthetics are different but also overlap, due to the superficial charm the digitisation shares with its ‘real parent’.

Digitisations are coupled to their material parent through their semblance, but they and indeed other copies rarely if ever are the same as each other; they appear on different platforms, browsers, monitors and according to different resolutions (Allison, et al., 2005, p. 366; Hamid, 2009, p. 2554).

Normative practices invoked by the parent–copy relationship based on information theory overlook the digitisation as a thing in itself with its own coordinates and interdependencies. So here I instigated a shift in thinking of the digitisation as information to materiality, and then as a multi-agential and distributed assemblage. In doing so, I decentred human agency and opened the digitisation to the full range of material, human and more-than-human agencies as exogenous and endogenous to itself. The notion of objecthood operates according to the assumption that things function on the basis of the spatial and temporal boundaries of any given object. But here, digitisations become processes—they look like objects, but are reframed as assemblages. They appear as objects because their becoming proceeds at a speed above the threshold of human discernment and indeed through internal machinic processes that may not be known, or at the very least be discernible, to humans. While digitisations appear as stable things on the screen, they are already evidentially born of manipulation—the writing of codes, algorithms, pixels and electromagnetic fields—and therefore are discerningly emergent. The same can be said for the ‘real’ thob. Its becoming proceeds at a slower rate because of its solidity, at a threshold below human discernment through a different set of complex agentic processes as its making and its unmaking, its degradation. Both the real and digitisation become processual and continuous as different temporalities and modalities. Here the digitisation and ‘real parent’ become, respectively, the radical interrelatedness and gathering of diverse actants (Cameron, 2014, pp. 208–226; Cameron & Mengler, 2015). Each of the components within these respective assemblages are themselves composites of things that have their own properties and expressive forms, agencies and capacities to affect and be affected within their unique fields of dynamical relations as they come together in various combinations, interact, compete, emerge and dissipate (Cameron, 2010, pp. 112–129, 2014). The digital and the analogue as things are put into motion as assemblages in which new object, thob and coin assemblages are continually modified, made and remade through the insertion of new and at times competing actants such as the subjectivities of Palestinian and Israeli curators or through algorithmic processes (Cameron, 2010, pp. 112–129). The so-called discrete analogue and continuous digital distinction is unravelled, and at the same time folded together in new ways. This new concept treats the digitisation and the real parent as relational.

Accordingly, our experience of reality is neither analogue nor digital, virtual nor real, rather it embraces all these things. Inserting the thob and the coin into a more-than-human framework, disrupts the sole focus on the social constructivist informational framework to which it is attenuated. The informational and representational therefore become just one type of actant in the case of curatorial authorship—or actants if invoked by the multiple subjectivities of the human. Through this process, I disrupt the archetypical informational rendering of the digitisation and rework it as encompassing different conceptual, material practices and affectual registers. I shift the interpretation of the digitisations from a sole focus on their technicity and semiotic meanings and the study of their effects in their engagement with the human subject.

Significantly, here I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Framing interviews
• Part I: The emerging global digital GLAM sector
• Part II: Animating the archive
• Part III: Designing engaged experience
• Part IV: Locating in place
• Afterword
• Index