arnoud glaudemans, rienk jonker and frans smit beyond the traditional bounderies of
archival theory: an interview with eric ketelaar
objects, of infrastructure: in taking the media as such as the object of research,
rather than their informational content. Ernst's approach could be useful given the
fact that we are moving into a world of less text and more moving images.
EDITORS: Would you also say that the materiality of what you want to capture can
be seen as context: the medial possibilities, impossibilities and consequences as
Ernst sketches, for instance of audiovisual media, who work differently than text?
ERIC KETELAAR: No, context is a concept. Whether context is a material
manifestation or not, does not make any difference for the context. In both cases,
material (object) and immaterial (process-bound), you will have to capture the
context(s) in which records have been created and used. Take installation art, and
see how artists deal with the archive. There are many installation artworks where the
viewer, user or any individual is part of the installation. The moment he or she walks
into the room, the installation 'starts'; a video or something. What is material here,
and what not? I would say that the materiality of the installation has to be captured
somewhere. Even for an immaterial performance. Or if we take an example I use in
my foreword of ballet, of dance; it is impossible to capture the whole thing, so you
will have to rely on capturing as much of the materiality as possible, and knowing
that it will never be complete. If only because even a video of a ballet on stage does
not take into account the fact that there also are viewers taking part in the
performance. Why do we still perform Shakespeare's plays? Because every play -
every instance - is different from the other; and even in one season, the interaction
of viewers and performers differs.
The ubiquity of data as sketched by Jeurgens will have a lot of consequences for
record creation and capture. The same goes for the cooperation between human and
machine. Other very important issues raised in the article are the 'mechanisation'
of record creation, and appraisal, not so much for cultural heritage, but as a means
to enhance the accountability of the archive or record creator. Jeurgens stresses
rightly that we have to 'revisit' or review what appraisal can and should be when
confronted with today's ubiquity of data. You should, somehow, make a distinction
between 'raw' data and records in the legal sense.
As to the contribution by Glaudemans and Verburgt I think, as discussed before, it
is not right to prioritise an object-like concept of a record; it should not be taken as a
product but as a process. I have doubts about the claim that in the digital, two
domains currently exist where consignation takes place: for the record has to exist
somewhere, even in the cloud it exists, so the cloud is a place of consignation just as
the national archives are. Also, consignation is not so much about fixity, I
understand it as a much broader term. As to Flusser, whose work I did not know
before, I agree that the fact that we are sender and receiver, at the same time in the
same space, will have enormous consequences. I do not expect though, that this
implies the disappearance of the distinction of public and private (as Flusser
stresses); not in all cases. It depends what Flusser means with public; if you and I are
sending and receiving together, I would still regard it as private.
I am struggling a bit with Yeo writing that a record does not contain information,
but that information is one of the 'affordances' - next to for example evidence,
accountability, identity - 'that arises from engagement with records'. So, he makes a
distinction; you have a record, but that record only contains information to the
extent that there is someone who is using that record. That must be a very sad
message to the information philosophers: saying that a record does not contain
information! In a sense he is right, in that an object has no intrinsic meaning in
itself. The meaning is given by the one who is interacting - viewing, using, etc. - with
the object.
EDITORS: So, the definition of information as meaningful data would fail?
ERIC KETELAAR: Well, it does not fail, but the question is: to whom and when is
data meaningful? If I understand Yeo rightly, he stresses that it becomes meaningful
only when someone attaches meaning. This someone, one might add, could even be
a machine. Would this be true?
EDITORS: We cannot talk for Yeo, but when you 'push it' like this, he might not hold
on to this view. Maybe he is saying: let's put the informational aspect aside, and
focus on the performative aspects of a record, maybe even an algorithm.
ERIC KETELAAR: Let's take an author who is writing on a piece of paper; that writing
has a particular meaning for him or her: the author. The moment he or she pushes
the button 'save' or 'send', he or she is no longer 'meaningful' and can't influence
the receiver in sharing the authorial meaning. The receiver may attach a totally
different meaning. So, the data are there, and in the context of creation they had a
particular meaning, but the moment they are transferred along the chain to another
person or machine, it is not assured that the meaning stays the same. As I said
earlier: the value of a record is in the eye of the beholder. It may change over time,
and in different spaces. Each activation of the record adds meaning, new meaning,
that may be different from the meaning of the author. So, I understand Yeo when he
says: records do not contain information, they make it possible. I am certain that
Yeo's account of speech acts gives us an important additional methodology to look
beyond the object of the record and focus on how that record has been created and
used; to view records as a particular form of social practice in a cultural context.
I agree with Jonker's statement that 'An archivist can only ensure and ascertain
that an information object under his control has the same quality as when it was
ingested, it is trustworthy with guarantees about the integrity. An archivist cannot
and from an ethical viewpoint may not deliver a statement about truthfulness of the
information.' But I would go one step further, and say that the archivist can assist or
help the interpreter by providing, from his discipline, data about the context. Take
for instance the example of someone in the reading room of an archival institution
who comes up to the archivist on duty and asks: I have a record here and do you
think, is it true or not? Then the archivist should answer: that is not my business,
but I can see that the paper has been tampered with; I can see that this document
was bound later in the file, etc.
Jonker writes: 'We as archivists are in this fluid digital world looking for fixation
points; we want to be able to fixate moments. But to be able to fix, it must be clear
why something has to be fixed, what content is to be fixed and eventually how this
fixation is to be carried out technically.' Is the characteristic of a fluid world not that
you cannot and should not fix things?
archives in liquid times
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