This paper presents the first results in our investigation of the emerging Digital Heritage concepts in Brazil. It focuses on the analysis of a government experience with social media intended to prepare an official report on digital culture. We found that this report follows the Unesco guidelines in general, but falls short in the discussion of so-called born-digital heritage. Our hypothesis is that this omission is due to the lack of relevant web-archiving initiatives in Brazil.\ud
\u

Dantas, Camila Guimaraes

Dodebei, Vera

English

Was ist, nach WITTGENSTEINS TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS, Sprache und wie setzt sie sich zusammen? Diese Frage wird unter semantischen und pragmatischen Gesichtspunkten zu beantworten versucht. Im Mittelpunkt steht das Verhältnis zweier Sprachebenen, der Zeichensprache und der Umgangssprache, das am Ende als ein Doppelverhältnis - ein Verhältnis von Analyse und Generierung - klassifiziert wird, von dem allerdings nur eine Seite funktionstuechtig ist: die analytische Seite. Zu dieser Erkenntnis führt die Analyse der Einheiten der beiden Systeme "Zeichensprache" und "Umgangssprache". Die atomare Ebene der Zeichensprache und ihr ontologisches Gegenstück erweisen sich bei dieser Analyse als für Sprachbetrachtung untaugliche logische Konstrukte. Die Sprachdarstellung des TRACTATUS wird weitgehend verworfen, da sie meiner pragmatisch-semantisch angelegten Prüfung nicht standhalten kann

Reifarth, G.T.

Sammelpunkt. Elektronisch archivierte Theorie

  F. Sudweeks, H. Hrachovec and C. Ess (eds). Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Communication and Technology 2010, Murdoch University, Australia, 28-34. RESEARCH NOTES ON THE EMERGING CONCEPTS OF DIGITAL HERITAGE IN BRAZIL  CAMILA GUIMARÃES DANTAS AND VERA DODEBEI Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Abstract. This paper presents the first results in our investigation of the emerging Digital Heritage concepts in Brazil. It focuses on the analysis of a government experience with social media intended to prepare an official report on digital culture. We found that this report follows the Unesco guidelines in general, but falls short in the discussion of so-called born-digital heritage. Our hypothesis is that this omission is due to the lack of relevant web-archiving initiatives in Brazil. 1. Introduction  “The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.” (The Long Now Foundation, 2010)  Essays, software, and other text produced by the Long Now Foundation in the United States already use a five-digit system, as the line on the foundation’s website that is the epigraph of this article mentions. This may hint at far-fetched science fiction, but it is really a contemporary practice meant to preserve and protect information. Dany Hillis proposes bringing the frontier of the future within the horizon of everyday life, something that seems to have slipped from our sights ever since the momentous turn of the millennium. However, when encountering this inscription on the screen it is hard not to feel a tinge of living in a present that already sees itself as the past of a faraway future. What is the meaning of this zero, or, more to the point, of the intention contained in the inclusion of this digit? What are the present day discussions and ideas concerning the preservation of digital content? Furthermore: to what extent is the international debate spearheaded by the UNESCO and professional entities such as ICOM being reflected in Brazil?  Recent studies in the field of social memory have shown an increasing appetite for the consumption of the past (Huyssen, 2001). Web-archiving is the focus of huge digital archive projects around the world, such as Internet Archive, the largest born-digital archive in the planet. It was created in 1996, based on data from Alexa.com, and its goal today is to be an archive of the entire web. Another example is Archipol, an archive  EMERGING CONCEPTS OF DIGITAL HERITAGE IN BRAZIL 29 created in 2000 by the Documentation Centre for Dutch Political Parties and Groningen University in order to preserve the content of Dutch political party websites. In the United States of America there have been several experiences involving post-trauma archives, such as the September 11th Digital Archive which was created to electronically preserve the memory of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. This archive contains approximately 150,000 digital items and in 2003 was incorporated by the Library of Congress. In England, BBC People’s War, a digital archive that was created in 2005 to celebrate the end of the Second World War, received a lot of attention - 48,000 online testimonies and 15,000 pictures have been uploaded. And there are even more examples. In April 2009, for example, New Zealand launched the National Digital Heritage Archive, considered “the core to addressing the collection, preservation and access of digital-born content”(NDHA,2010). It is also important to mention the broad variety in scope of all these aforementioned initiatives.  Some archives covers a wide range of subjects while others are theme-oriented, signaling that the configuration of this field is still undefined. The worldwide network of computers has become at the same time a tool to collect information and an object of study and as a result different kinds of web archives have started to flourish. According to Dougherty and van den Heuvel, “given this shift in attention toward online culture – both studying it and incorporating it into research practices – digital cultural heritage resources, such as web archives, are becoming fundamental assets to humanities and social sciences researches. Web archive is growing in its own right, and this growth and the value it can offer to the humanities depends on steady development of tools, standards, policies, and services upon which researches using digital cultural heritage in their research can rely”(2009, p.3).  In order to understand this scenario, scholars are focusing on many issues related to the spread of social remembrance practices through new information technologies, such as the mediation of the medias (van Dijck, 2007) and the elaboration of theoretical frameworks in order to approach contemporary interfaces between memory and media (Olick, 2007).They also plea for the investigation of the main theoretical problems related to specific empirical cases (Zierold, 2008). This brings us to the exact purpose of this short paper: to map the emerging concepts of digital heritage in Brazil in a government-sponsored social network created to debate the so-called “digital culture.” To this end, we will first explain the context in which the discussion about digital heritage emerged. We will then describe the project and explain why we think it is an interesting object of study. Next, we will present our analysis of the proposed “digital memory” document, and compare it to the guidelines set forth by Unesco. Finally, we point out some problems and try to understand why, intriguingly, there is a lack of interest in born-digital heritage in Brazil, and conclude by presenting a few possibilities for further research on this topic.  2. Digital Heritage: uses of the concept Studies on the concept of heritage (patrimônio, in Portuguese) have shown its historical construction and situate it as an invention of modernity which developed and became institutionalized in nineteenth-century France. During the twentieth century the concept 30 C. GUIMARÃES DANTAS AND V. DODEBEI  expanded to embrace and include other cultural objects in a trajectory which culminates with Unesco defining certain practices and knowledge as immaterial heritage worthy of being preserved. In the Western world, concern for heritage expanded remarkably and was often connected to national and identity-formation projects (Choay, 2001).  Modern calls for heritage preservation are usually accompanied by a “rhetoric of loss,” that is, an appeal to the alarming prospect of the disappearance of certain assets deemed historically relevant, and has led many international and national organizations to assume an activist role (Gonçalves, 2003). The selection of the assets which deserve to be considered heritage is disputed territory; there is a complex political, cultural and technological dynamic underpinning the definition of what should remembered or forgotten.   Mentioning this ongoing debate on the subject of heritage implies indicating its main points of reference. Within the broad universe of digital records we can classify as heritage, not only those whose production was intended for the worldwide computer web but digitalized ones as well, as, for example, manuscripts and other medias which are stored more effectively in digital format rather than in cd-roms. The greatest challenges, however, lie in the definition of born-digital heritage, given the technical specificities of the content flowing through the web and the speed at which new support technologies become available (Dodebei, 2009).   In 2003, UNESCO launched a charter for the preservation of digital heritage. The charter advances a well-founded defense of heritage preservation based on the central assumption that this legacy indeed exists. Article 7 defines what falls under the definition of heritage to be preserved:   As with all documentary heritage, selection principles may vary between countries, although the main criteria for deciding what digital materials to keep would be their significance and lasting cultural, scientific, evidential or other value. “Born digital” materials should clearly be given priority. Selection decisions and any subsequent reviews need to be carried out in an accountable manner, and be based on defined principles, policies, procedures and standards. (UNESCO, 2003).   The text evidently champions the development of international policies that foster the preservation of digital heritage, stressing the importance of born-digital content (which is created in binary code). In Brazil, the National Council for Archives (Conselho Nacional de Arquivos) launched a similar document calling for the preservation of digital heritage. The text emphasizes the risk of loss given the rapid transformation of technological support and proposes possible lines of action for preservation, although it does not place great emphasis on born-digital content (CARTA, 2004).   This is the context in which we should analyze the discussions being carried out at the Brazilian Digital Culture Forum (Fórum da Cultura Digital Brasileira).   EMERGING CONCEPTS OF DIGITAL HERITAGE IN BRAZIL 31 3. Brazilian digital forum: a snapshot The Brazilian Digital Culture Forum was created in September 2009 with the cooperation of the Ministry of Culture (Minc) and the National Research Network (Rede Nacional de Pesquisa - RNP). The social network’s mission was to gather in the course of one year a variety of opinions related to “digital culture” in order to guide future public policies. The Forum itself is not an interface whose aim is to propose any legal changes, but the documents it drafted can potentially be discussed in future governmental policies.    Figure 1.  Visualization of the geographic distribution of the forum users. Retrieved March 2, 2010 from http://culturadigital.br/blog/2010/01/19/culturadigital-br-um-mapeamento-dos-usuarios-da-rede/.  The map above shows that the distribution of participants in this digital interface is geographically uneven. On January 15, 2010 there were 3,692 users of which 1,045 were located in the state of São Paulo State, the most industrialized area in Brazil. Despite this discrepancy, we notice that people from all over the country are involved in the Forum. As our main goal here is simply to provide a snapshot of the Forum, there is no need to further discuss its composition.   In January 2010, a total of 191 groups discussing subjects such as music on the web, the digitalization of documents or the spread of knowledge through Information and Communication Technologies. Each group engaged in discussion and had its own networks, which could be created by any Brazilian citizen. At the same time, the proponents of the Forum created five working groups, each one with headed by coordinator in charge of elaborating a final report. These groups were: Digital Memory, Digital Communication, Digital Culture Infrastructure, Digital Art and the Economy in Digital Culture. In addition to this virtual network, the Forum organized a Conference in November 2009 to promote further discussions and debate the ongoing works.   By January 2010 the Digital Memory Work Group had 197 members. There were several debates on the themes related to the preservation of information on the web. It is important to mention, though, that important institutions in field of information technology in Brazil were not engaged in this initiative (Lourenço, 2010). This was a source of complaints among cyberactivists who tried to use the Forum as an opportunity to make their statements on the subject of memory preservation. It is important to explain that although in 2004 the National Council of Archives (CONARC) drafted a 32 C. GUIMARÃES DANTAS AND V. DODEBEI  national version of the Unesco Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage (2003), there had been no prior initiatives related to this topic.   In order to try to map the concepts of “digital memory” circulating in the Forum, we researched the comment files and the final report. Our purpose was to answer this question: what is exactly being named “digital memory” (memória digital)? First of all, the category seems to be very broadly defined, resembling the definition of anthropological approaches to culture (Geertz, 1973). Basically, anything on the web could be made to fit under this large umbrella category. In the document on digital heritage there is a description of the state of the art in Brazil. It is shown that the country is involved in important international movements such as the Free Software Movement and heritage projects such as the World Digital Library. However, there is a lack of coordination on the part of the institutions committed to these projects and there is no specific national protocols related to the preservation and access of digital data (i.e. infrastructures and metadata).  4. Final notes: an open concept of digital heritage In the Digital Memory Work Group no mention was made to born-digital content or to initiatives related to it around the world. More than a concept, the term “digital memory” was used as a broad category, as we have mentioned, but it seems not to include born-digital heritage. And what could be the reason for this omission? More important than pointing out this absence or trying to understand it, perhaps it is more fruitful to indicate the broad scope of the discussion and, above all, to mention the connection to the main issues indicated in UNESCO official documents.   The Forum’s final document defends the creation of a protocol for the preservation of “digital memory” by using open source software. At the same time, it posits that without a minimum level of communication among the country’s institutions on the topic there is the risk of inefficiency: the same manuscripts might get digitalized twice, resources might be spent on the data processing of the same archive into binary code. Thus, as unlikely or even undesirable is the possibility the preservation of digital preservation might be centralized it is interesting to reflect upon the possible means of regulation and how to assure efficient use of resources. The document, as the discussions in the Forum, is for the most part related to the current state of the issue in Brazil. Taking this into account the absence of any explicit mention of the preservation of born-digital heritage becomes more understandable. We have realized that if, on one hand, Brazil was quick to incorporate social networking tools (such as Orkut and Facebook) or micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, on the other one, with respect to the sharing of “digital memory” tool such as Omeka or Archive-it there are few relevant experiences. There are many online archives rendering digitalized material available however there are no relevant experiences in Brazil concerning born-digital heritage.   We thus arrive at an important juncture, namely the relation between technological artifacts and social categories and concepts. This is not an issue requiring an immediate solution, rather it opens vast new territory to be chartered. The case we are reporting provides important information towards the elaboration of broader questions. How to understand the creation of categories related to a newly-created technology?  EMERGING CONCEPTS OF DIGITAL HERITAGE IN BRAZIL 33 Investigating cases such as this one, from a micro perspective, allows us to corroborate the hypothesis of Briggs and Burke (2006) on the non-linear character of the social history of media. The constancies and continuities in the appropriation and practices of new information technologies have also been detected by Pierre Lévy in his works (1993). Thus, although the Forum’s discussion was guided by the use of new technologies, the assumptions at stake belong to a dated an analogical paradigm in which the heritage assets correspond to a static object and not to a webpage or a collection of “tweets” on politics. We cannot affirm that the final Document or even the discussion among the group’s 197 members fully depict the Brazilian picture. This has not been the intention of these research notes. Our interest is to reflect upon this small universe and based on it reflect on the intertwining of concepts and technologies, and the continuities and changes in this process.  Acknowledgements We especially thank Rogério Santana Lourenço, the coordinator of the “Digital Memory” Work Group, who was kind enough to sit down with us for a lengthy interview about the Forum.  References Briggs, A. & Burke, P. (2006). Uma história social da mídia – de Gutenbergh à Internet. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar.  Choay, F. (2001). A Alegoria do Patrimônio. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade; UNESP. Conselho Nacional de Arquivos (2004). Carta para a preservação do patrimônio arquivístico digital [Electronic version]. Retrieved January 10, 2010 from http://www.documentoseletronicos.arquivonacional.gov.br/cgi/cgilua.exe/sys/start.htm?infoid=64&sid=5.  Dodebei, V. (2009). Digital virtual: o patrimônio no século XXI. In: V. Dodebei and R. Abreu (Eds), E o patrimônio? Rio de Janeiro: Contracapa.  Dougherty, M & van den Heuvel, C. (2009). Historical Infrastructures for web-archiving: annotation of ephemeral collections for researchers and cultural heritage institutions. Retrieved February 10, 2010 from http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/Dougherty_Heuvel.pdf.  Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.  Gonçalves, J. R. S.(2003). O patrimônio como categoria de pensamento. In: Abreu, R.; Chagas, M. (Eds.) Memória e Patrimônio. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A. Huyssen, A. (2001). Seduzidos pela memória. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano. Lévy, P. (1993). As tecnologias da inteligência – o futuro do pensamento na era da informática. São Paulo: 34. Lourenço, R. S. Documento do Eixo Memória Digital. Retrieved January 10, 2010 from http://www.slideshare.net/Culturadigital/documento-do-eixo-memoria-digital.  National Digital Heritage Archive (NDHA) Launch (2010). Retrieved April 09, 2010 from http://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/national+digital+heritage+archive+launch.  34 C. GUIMARÃES DANTAS AND V. DODEBEI  Olick, J. K. (2008). From Collective memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products. In: A. Erll and A Nunning (Eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (pp 151-162). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. The Long Now Foundation. (2010). Retrieved April 09, 2010 from http://www.longnow.org/about/.  UNESCO (2003). Unesco’s basic texts on the information society [Electronic version]. J. G. Mastrangelo and M. Loncarevic (Eds). UNESCO, Paris. Retrieved January 10, 2010, from http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/files/12845/10711584655basic.pdf/basic.pdf.  van Dijck, J. (2007). Mediated memories in the digital age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.  Zierold, M. (2008). Memory and media cultures. In: A. Erll and A Nunning (Eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (pp 399-408). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.  

Research Notes on the Emerging Concepts of Digital Heritage in Brazil

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Sammelpunkt. Elektronisch archivierte Theorie