arnoud glaudemans, rienk jonker and frans smit documents, archives and hyperhistorical societies: an interview with luciano floridi FLORIDI: I think that is a good way of putting it. There are cultures or societies where there is so little trust that you would want to check everything. I think that there are these flexibilities within our societies about where the trust stops. We really are on the verge of the transformation of the digital, where the digital is becoming more trustworthy by blockchain and the versioning of files. I hope we will always have someone somewhere to certify and authenticate. We need a kind of authority that generates the trust. This is an argument for the authorial sources of trust, like archives, museums, libraries, or galleries, and the ability to generate trust, which would make our digital world much better. There is one point that connects trust to persistent representation. When you list these values of trust, authenticity, persistence and truthfulness, you can see that, morally speaking, they are not necessarily good in themselves. I can have, for instance, an authentic, legal decision where Jesus is condemned to be crucified. It is not morally good, but it is very authentic, truthful and trustworthy. I think our society is now at a certain point of maturity of thinking about ethics. We finally realise that a lot of things we call morally good are not necessarily morally good in themselves, but they help the moral good to develop. They are conditions that facilitate the morally good. I like to call this infraethics. It is the infrastructure of practices that facilitates morally good behaviour. The crucial role of records in our society is conditional and infrastructural. They enable and empower a better society. Archives and records are maybe more useful than ever, given the massive communication on social media. All that 'liquidity' is not necessarily good. You need stable records to check the value. I disagree with the view of the library and the archive as a warehouse, as essentially a place where you store documents. That was never the real nature of either the library or the archive. They have, and had, a social and political function. Thinking of archives and libraries as warehouses would mean their end. Just as it happened with those bank branches I referred to earlier. We do not need a warehouse. Who goes to the warehouse these days? The view that we are just collecting things like butterflies to put them on shelves or inside drawers is wrong. We will pay for this mistake politically through the gradual corruption and the pollution of the space of information. And this will happen precisely because, in a variety of ways, everybody involved - the archival and library sources included - did not play their role properly. We should hear the archival people in this country (UK) say 'this is rubbish, this is not true, we have the records if you want to check, you are welcome any day, here is all the good information you need'. There is a political or socially committed role for the archivist to play. The preservation of memory is only half the task, the other half is to ensure that the preserved memory plays a fruitful role in society, reminding us who we are, and what we may be able to achieve collectively. Of course, there is always a tension here. But archives involve more than just storing and giving information. They should help form and inform the social debate. If we reduce the role of archives and libraries, the places of memory, to warehouses, then we stop talking to society, and this can have very negative effects. EDITORS: You think it has to be an active role and not a passive one? FLORIDI: An active role, absolutely. And it is time because society is not going in the right direction. When you see that millions of French people are voting for a fascist party, it is clear that they have forgotten history. Their archives are not talking. And they are silent because they are warehouses. And if you do not go there, they are not telling you anything. And that is a scandal. EDITORS: We could analyse this in terms of the distinction between strong and weak authenticity. Strong authenticity is as we discussed earlier: a thing is what it 'purports to be', as the archivists call it. Next to that you have weak authenticity in which for example records are used to construct identities. There the political aspect comes in. For example, the Amsterdam Museum, formerly the Amsterdam Historical Museum, has a city marketing website. The Amsterdam Museum contributes to deliberate citybranding by saying: we are the city of tolerance, the city of Spinoza and the city of higher arts. And in one little sentence they say: oh yes, we cannot avoid talking about it (although we would like to) but the city was also guilty of slavery offences. The curators should play an active role here and say: everything we curate is strong authentic material. Irrespective of any political or marketing argument our collection should be accessible without any restrictions and without any framing based on political or economical bias. FLORIDI: Yes, the spin here, the story-telling, the framing, the selection of 'forgets', the edits, the undertones... all this is, by the end of the day, the way history is treated, and it is a scandal. Consider the UK. The way we understand British history is not realistic. Many have this deluded view about colonialism for example, where the British are the only ones who actually have a "good colonial past". If you also read other sources, say Indian reports about what colonial Britain was like in India, about the massacres, the wars, the killing, the expropriation, the violence, the arbitrary borders. It is not that all this is denied, but it is never highlighted. Records are always incomplete, but not all incomplete records are born equal, so to speak. What do you celebrate during the year? One does not apologise once a year for the massacre of some people in some distant colony, of course not. What one celebrates may be the winning of a war, or the day of the declaration of independence. This is what creates social memories and social identity and cohesion. But it is also dangerous. If we 'edit' our memory too easily, like the digital very much enables us to do, we end up in a filter bubble. The people of strong authenticity should act. But it is a big call for a profession that has been a little bit shy and less prone to be in the limelight. EDITORS: Our next question is more about data science. Are archival concepts, like authenticity and provenance, be relevant in the data science setting? We observe they are not used very often in practice. Or should we assume that these concepts are already part of the functions that are developed in data science? FLORIDI: No, I think the question you are asking is open. As you know I chair the Data Ethics Group of the Alan Turing Institute, which is the British institution for data science. One of the things we are talking about more broadly is information quality. Authenticity is one of these qualities. But reliability, timeliness, accessibility and availability are important as well. One debate we are having at the moment is archives in liquid times 312 313

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2017 | | pagina 158