Beyond Search

This research delves into the realm of digital audiovisual (AV) archives, focusing on user experience and advocating for the integration of exploratory approaches alongside conventional search. Within cultural heritage institutions, conventional keyword-based search interfaces have long served as the primary means to access digital AV archives. However, these interfaces often fall short in addressing the diverse needs of users and serving more exploratory or open-ended queries. Drawing on a series of illustrative case studies, this report showcases innovative practices in the cultural heritage domain. Furthermore, it looks beyond archives to seek inspiration from practitioners in other disciplines, such as artists, filmmakers, and community initiatives grappling with similar questions. The research report identifies four core themes: Generous + Fluid Interfaces; Situated + Experiential Entry Points; Computational Sensing + Algorithmic Metadata; and Participatory Sense-Making + Storytelling. Each theme offers distinct benefits in terms of user engagement, accessibility, contextualization, and storytelling. Challenges of complexity, accessibility, and compatibility are also discussed. This research endeavors to redefine the potential of the interaction paradigm and offer a rich set of pathways, where digital AV archives transcend conventional search methods to offer immersive, dynamic, user-centric experiences. By integrating exploratory interfaces, cultural heritage institutions can unlock the full potential of their collections, making them more engaging and accessible to a broader audience

The digital environmental humanities (DEH) in the anthropocene: Challenges and opportunities in an era of ecological precarity

Researchers in the complementary fields of the digital humanities and the environmental humanities have begun to collaborate under the auspices of the digital environmental humanities (DEH). The overarching aim of this emerging field is to leverage digital technologies in understanding and addressing the urgencies of the Anthropocene. Emphasizing DEH’s focus on natural and cultural vitality, this article begins with a historical overview of the field. Crafting an account of the field’s emergence, we argue that the present momentum toward DEH exhibits four broad thematic strains including perennial eco-archiving; Anthropocene narratives of loss; citizen ecohumanities; and human-plant-environment relations. Within each of the four areas, the article identifies how DEH ideas have been implemented in significant projects that engage with, envision, re-imagine, and devise communities for environmental action and transformation. We conclude with suggestions for further bolstering DEH by democratizing environmental knowledge through open, community-engaged methods

Abstracts: HASTAC 2017: The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities

The document contains abstracts for HASTAC 2017

Haunted/Haunting Digital Archives of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: Weaving Ghost Stories around the Ongoing Disaster in the Past, Present and Future

This thesis examines the digital archives of the Fukushima nuclear disaster that took place on 11 March, 2011. I propose key thesis questions regarding the roles of the digital archive in articulating the memory and knowledge about the disaster, in relation to its capacity of storytelling. I specifically focus on the production of “ghost stories,” the stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities produced in the digital archive as a flexible, transformative vehicle of ephemeral data. This research draws on interdisciplinary discussions in the fields of media studies, sociology and archival studies, as well as the contributions of feminism and queer theory to delineating the struggles to engage with lost histories and submerged narratives. My contribution is both theoretical and methodological, in developing hauntology as a way of intervening to temporal and narrative modalities of the practices of digital archiving. In formulating hauntological methods, I attend to the creation of “haunted data” and the contingent dis/appearance of digital traces, which have allowed me to employ archival imaginaries to take into account gaps, absences and erasures as a constitutive part of archival storytelling. I also aim to demonstrate a multivalence of haunting at work in the mutual construction of the archive and the archived, with the Fukushima disaster as both haunted and haunting object of inquiry. The digital archives I analyse in the empirical chapters are: two archival repositories on the website of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that owns the damaged plant; the Japan Disasters Digital Archive (JDA); SimplyInfo.org and Nukewatch.org; Teach311.org. They are “moving” repositories that keep archival objects in motion, and I ask how they articulate and bring together the fragments of the disaster, by intervening to, and generating the intricate web of connections between the past, present and future. Throughout the thesis, I argue that the constant and contingent retelling of the Fukushima disaster in the practices of digital archiving calls attention to narrative possibilities afforded by digital technologies. This research explores how the production of the digital archive entails the conflation of fact and fiction, of multiple temporalities that register different facets of haunting, and myriad regimes of remembering and forgetting, which would shape our understandings of the ongoing disaster with no definitive beginnings and ends

Exploring the possibilities of Thomson’s fourth paradigm transformation—The case for a multimodal approach to digital oral history?

This article seeks to reorientate ‘digital oral history’ towards a new research paradigm, Multimodal Digital Oral History (MDOH), and in so doing it seeks to build upon Alistair Thomson’s (Thomson, A., 2007, Four paradigm transformations in oral history. Oral History Review, 34(1): 49–70.) characterization of a ‘dizzying digital revolution’ and paradigmatic transformation in oral history (OH). Calling for a recalibration of the current dominance of the textual transcript, and for active engagement with the oral, aural, and sonic affordances of both retro-digitized and born digital OH (DOH) collections, we call for a re-orientation of the digital from passive to generative and self-reflexive in the human–machine study of spoken word recordings. First, we take stock of the field of DOH as it is currently conceived and the ways in which it has or has not answered calls for a return to the orality of the interview by digital means. Secondly, we address the predominant trend of working with transcriptions in digital analysis of spoken word recordings and the tools being used by oral historians. Thirdly, we ask about the emerging possibilities—tools and experimental methodologies—for sonic analysis of spoken word collections within and beyond OH, looking to intersections with digital humanities, sociolinguistics, and sound studies. Lastly, we consider ethical questions and practicalities concomitant with data-driven methods, analyses and technologies like AI for the study of sonic research artefacts, reflections that dovetail with digital hermeneutics and digital tool criticism and point towards a new MDOH departure, a sub-field that has potential to inform the many fields that seek patterns in audio, audio-visual, and post-textual materials, serially and at scale

The Practice of Microtopia: Microfiche Archives of Troubled Places

This PhD by publication (route 1) concerns narratives of contemporary troubled places that involve the memory and repair of events of hazard, trauma and conflict arising from contested matter. The three artworks published in 2013-16, together with a written exegesis, explore the intersection of troubled places with the miniature medium of microfiche, a cultural practice of transmitting knowledge through time as tiny celluloid, photo-chemical artefacts. A genealogy of microfiche’s twentieth-century function in library, military and state epistemes, in real and speculative applications, reveals its entanglement with human desire for a compact, resilient remembrance that will survive crisis. Artistic deployment of obscure microfiche apparatus comments on wider society’s incomplete, unclear, forgotten or concealed remembrance, in both physical and virtual media. The research considers the material and memorial challenges of three troubled places, including a gamma-ray burst in the early Universe, a site of genocide legacy, and infrastructure for toxic nuclear waste containment. Through the interface of troubled places and microfiche the research arrives at ‘microtopia’, a new creative method for the remembrance, archiving, and recall of memories, things, and places. Microtopia is a knowledge practice involving the witnessing of complex sites of remembrance through its production of multiple narratives. Microtopia method gathers evidence of contentious material and technologies, as observed and recorded in conversations, numerical data and photographs. Factual accounts are interwoven with situated micropolitical memories, producing traces of speculative-fabulation. In microtopia artworks, these different narrative modes are expanded and combined through studio editorial collage, poetry and comics illustration, to differently imagine the unclear past, burdened contemporary, and inconceivable futures in troubled places. ii The Practice of Microtopia The resulting publications/artworks offer methods for the management and remembrance of the material remains of an event, and affective encounters of those acting in the sites. The research is situated within the field of contemporary archival-art research, which samples and counter-witnesses official bodies of evidence to insert antagonistic or fictional strata into production of place. The use of microfiche contributes to this research by signalling the continuing need for archives to occupy plural forms of remembrance to counter inevitable medial ruination. Microtopia joins monuments, artefacts, and digital records in support of future re-telling of troubled places

Cruiser and PhoTable: Exploring Tabletop User Interface Software for Digital Photograph Sharing and Story Capture

Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing around piles of recently developed snapshots, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. The current, purely digital, methods of sharing do not provide the same experience as printed photographs, and they do not provide effective face-to-face social interaction around photographs, as experienced during storytelling. Research has found that people are often dissatisfied with sharing photographs in digital form. The recent emergence of the tabletop interface as a viable multi-user direct-touch interactive large horizontal display has provided the hardware that has the potential to improve our collocated activities such as digital photograph sharing. However, while some software to communicate with various tabletop hardware technologies exists, software aspects of tabletop user interfaces are still at an early stage and require careful consideration in order to provide an effective, multi-user immersive interface that arbitrates the social interaction between users, without the necessary computer-human interaction interfering with the social dialogue. This thesis presents PhoTable, a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, the computer-arbitrated digital interaction allows PhoTable to capture the stories told, and associate them as audio metadata to the appropriate photographs. By leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can enable users to become immersed in their social interaction, telling stories about their photographs, and allow the computer interaction to occur as a side-effect of the social interaction. Correlating the computer interaction with the corresponding audio allows PhoTable to annotate an automatically created digital photo album with audible stories, which may then be archived. These stories remain useful for future sharing -- both collocated sharing and remote (e.g. via the Internet) -- and also provide a personal memento both of the event depicted in the photograph (e.g. as a reminder) and of the enjoyable photo sharing experience at the tabletop. To provide the necessary software to realise an interface such as PhoTable, this thesis explored the development of Cruiser: an efficient, extensible and reusable software framework for developing tabletop applications. Cruiser contributes a set of programming libraries and the necessary application framework to facilitate the rapid and highly flexible development of new tabletop applications. It uses a plugin architecture that encourages code reuse, stability and easy experimentation, and leverages the dedicated computer graphics hardware and multi-core processors of modern consumer-level systems to provide a responsive and immersive interactive tabletop user interface that is agnostic to the tabletop hardware and operating platform, using efficient, native cross-platform code. Cruiser's flexibility has allowed a variety of novel interactive tabletop applications to be explored by other researchers using the framework, in addition to PhoTable. To evaluate Cruiser and PhoTable, this thesis follows recommended practices for systems evaluation. The design rationale is framed within the above scenario and vision which we explore further, and the resulting design is critically analysed based on user studies, heuristic evaluation and a reflection on how it evolved over time. The effectiveness of Cruiser was evaluated in terms of its ability to realise PhoTable, use of it by others to explore many new tabletop applications, and an analysis of performance and resource usage. Usability, learnability and effectiveness of PhoTable was assessed on three levels: careful usability evaluations of elements of the interface; informal observations of usability when Cruiser was available to the public in several exhibitions and demonstrations; and a final evaluation of PhoTable in use for storytelling, where this had the side effect of creating a digital photo album, consisting of the photographs users interacted with on the table and associated audio annotations which PhoTable automatically extracted from the interaction. We conclude that our approach to design has resulted in an effective framework for creating new tabletop interfaces. The parallel goal of exploring the potential for tabletop interaction as a new way to share digital photographs was realised in PhoTable. It is able to support the envisaged goal of an effective interface for telling stories about one's photos. As a serendipitous side-effect, PhoTable was effective in the automatic capture of the stories about individual photographs for future reminiscence and sharing. This work provides foundations for future work in creating new ways to interact at a tabletop and to the ways to capture personal stories around digital photographs for sharing and long-term preservation

Reciprocal Relationships and Creative Expression in Literacy Learning: Ameliorating Disability Circumstances and Empowering Individuals

Individuals engaged in the production of art, who are untrained, and marginalized by disability, are known as outsider or visionary artists. With them in mind I sought to better understand the relationship between art-making and meaning-making. Students with disability attributes in my classroom were motivated by arts-based activities, prompting me to include art in the content I taught. My own art-making grew out of those efforts, and in order to better understand how to implement my classroom practices, I began an autoethnographic study that evolved into phenomenology, positioning myself in the disability culture first, and then conducting an archival document search seeking evidence of the use of arts-based activities in teaching students with disabilities. I located extensive records on two community schools in Depression-era New Mexico. The schools were progressivist experiments in curricular reform initially focused on bilingual education. Art projects and lesson plans included in teacher diaries spanned seven years, evidencing reciprocal relationships, along with focus on creative expression as central in the culturally-based literacy pedagogy of the reforms being implemented. Contextually, this work is grounded primarily within the ideologies of John Dewey, and Paolo Freire. Data were collected and reported using narrative storytelling, observations, and reflections, personal art making, and archival document searches with research journaling. This research contributes to evolving perceptions about the value of reciprocal relationships in literacy pedagogy, and suggests the need to expand scholarship regarding engagement in arts-based activities with persons with disabilities, and the community school as a means to reach underserved populations

Cruiser and PhoTable: Exploring Tabletop User Interface Software for Digital Photograph Sharing and Story Capture

Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing around piles of recently developed snapshots, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. The current, purely digital, methods of sharing do not provide the same experience as printed photographs, and they do not provide effective face-to-face social interaction around photographs, as experienced during storytelling. Research has found that people are often dissatisfied with sharing photographs in digital form. The recent emergence of the tabletop interface as a viable multi-user direct-touch interactive large horizontal display has provided the hardware that has the potential to improve our collocated activities such as digital photograph sharing. However, while some software to communicate with various tabletop hardware technologies exists, software aspects of tabletop user interfaces are still at an early stage and require careful consideration in order to provide an effective, multi-user immersive interface that arbitrates the social interaction between users, without the necessary computer-human interaction interfering with the social dialogue. This thesis presents PhoTable, a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, the computer-arbitrated digital interaction allows PhoTable to capture the stories told, and associate them as audio metadata to the appropriate photographs. By leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can enable users to become immersed in their social interaction, telling stories about their photographs, and allow the computer interaction to occur as a side-effect of the social interaction. Correlating the computer interaction with the corresponding audio allows PhoTable to annotate an automatically created digital photo album with audible stories, which may then be archived. These stories remain useful for future sharing -- both collocated sharing and remote (e.g. via the Internet) -- and also provide a personal memento both of the event depicted in the photograph (e.g. as a reminder) and of the enjoyable photo sharing experience at the tabletop. To provide the necessary software to realise an interface such as PhoTable, this thesis explored the development of Cruiser: an efficient, extensible and reusable software framework for developing tabletop applications. Cruiser contributes a set of programming libraries and the necessary application framework to facilitate the rapid and highly flexible development of new tabletop applications. It uses a plugin architecture that encourages code reuse, stability and easy experimentation, and leverages the dedicated computer graphics hardware and multi-core processors of modern consumer-level systems to provide a responsive and immersive interactive tabletop user interface that is agnostic to the tabletop hardware and operating platform, using efficient, native cross-platform code. Cruiser's flexibility has allowed a variety of novel interactive tabletop applications to be explored by other researchers using the framework, in addition to PhoTable. To evaluate Cruiser and PhoTable, this thesis follows recommended practices for systems evaluation. The design rationale is framed within the above scenario and vision which we explore further, and the resulting design is critically analysed based on user studies, heuristic evaluation and a reflection on how it evolved over time. The effectiveness of Cruiser was evaluated in terms of its ability to realise PhoTable, use of it by others to explore many new tabletop applications, and an analysis of performance and resource usage. Usability, learnability and effectiveness of PhoTable was assessed on three levels: careful usability evaluations of elements of the interface; informal observations of usability when Cruiser was available to the public in several exhibitions and demonstrations; and a final evaluation of PhoTable in use for storytelling, where this had the side effect of creating a digital photo album, consisting of the photographs users interacted with on the table and associated audio annotations which PhoTable automatically extracted from the interaction. We conclude that our approach to design has resulted in an effective framework for creating new tabletop interfaces. The parallel goal of exploring the potential for tabletop interaction as a new way to share digital photographs was realised in PhoTable. It is able to support the envisaged goal of an effective interface for telling stories about one's photos. As a serendipitous side-effect, PhoTable was effective in the automatic capture of the stories about individual photographs for future reminiscence and sharing. This work provides foundations for future work in creating new ways to interact at a tabletop and to the ways to capture personal stories around digital photographs for sharing and long-term preservation