Abstract
Community archives serve an array of purposes and types of communities (fan clubs, scientists in particular disciplines, ethnic neighborhoods). We discuss here civic community archives; civic archives, like “civic science,” have expressly progressive political aims, question established order, and contribute to inclusive knowledge production and prosperity. Designing civic archives involves many types of analysis and poses many design challenges. In this paper, we share an analytic framework developed to guide the design of civic community archives, drawing on both cultural theory and our experience designing archives for different kinds of communities, with different purposes, within larger ethnographic projects. We question how to characterize “the community” in community archive projects, and the stakeholders in such projects. We ask what should be recollected in community archives and for what purposes. We also ask how, by design, community archives can connect diverse users, analog and digital components (including human and technological), and complicated pasts to creative futures. Throughout, we call out the double-binds of civic community archiving, delineating risks and possible pathologies as well as generative potential. We approach the work as cultural anthropologists and ethnographers involved in building the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (https://github.com/PECE-project/pece-distro), open source digital infrastructure for sharing and collaborative analysis of ethnographic data.
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Notes
- 1.
We recognize that “capacity” has become a widely circulated developmental “buzzword” (Cornwall 2007) which carries negative valences amongst many communities who have been frequent subjects of development interventions. We use it to signal the continued importance of building up individual and collective abilities to work together on a tangle of late industrial issues.
- 2.
The archive name remains preliminary and may be changed for strategic or legal reasons.
- 3.
See the Wikipedia entry on the courtroom sketch as a data type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtroom_sketch), and “Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustrations archive at the US Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/drawing-justice-courtroom-illustrations/about-this-exhibition/).
- 4.
In translating a description of the Quotidian Anthropocene Archive project into Turkish, for example, we were asked if “data collection” is equivalent to “data set,” with the translator oscillating between “veri seti” (data set) and “veri toplama”.
- 5.
Lauren Klein, for example, has worked with an archive focused on Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved people he owned, showing how creative modes of handling and displaying data can bring archival absences and silences to the surface and into memory (Klein 2013).
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Fortun, K., Fortun, M., Hitomi Skye Crandall Okune, A., Schütz, T., Su, SY. (2021). Civic Community Archiving with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography: Double Binds and Design Challenges. In: Rauterberg, M. (eds) Culture and Computing. Design Thinking and Cultural Computing. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12795. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_3
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