digital archive

The inherent complexity of multimodal databases constitutes a challenge in terms of structuring and interoperability. However, it also stimulates the translation of organized data into enhanced and adaptable interfaces. Using the Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature (www.po-ex.net) as a framework, I will describe possible strategies for curating digital archives, through appropriation and remixing of database assets, allowing artistic and creative re-interpretations of experimental and electronic literature.

(source: abstract repository)

This dissertation arises from an interest as a research fellow at the project “PO.EX'70-80 – Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Poetry” which has in its essence the problematic of digital archives for variable and multimodal media. Sharing is nowadays a word contested in many ways, and it is this same fact that underpins this thesis too. The distribution of information and the works of art in various digital files is our topic in scrutiny. With this sharing it is our intention to inform about distinct authors and art forms, making them present in a world where the multimodal and the cultural diversity seem to walk together, but also seem to be quite ephemeral in its productions. Assuming that the digital files are critical to the preservation and dissemination of artistic content, the aim of this dissertation will be to know a little more of this world of participative, multimedia and hypertextualized culture, and ending with an overview of the forms of archiving that digital makes possible today. This research also includes the analysis and qualitative assessment of five digital archives: PO.EX'70-80, ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice), VirtualArt Database, ELD (Electronic Literature Directory) and NT2 (Nouvelles Tecnhologies Nouvelles Textualités). We investigate and propose a autonomous model of analysis and evaluation, aiming to understand the pros and cons of these archives and how they are made known to the public and their users.

(source: abstract in repository)

In their article "A Survey of Electronic Literature Collections" Luis Pablo and Maria Goicoechea describe characteristics and functions of collections of electronic literature and analyze descriptors used and the way information can be accessed. Based on their observations, Pablo and Goicoechea advocate a database structure which is flexible and can produce a dynamic archiving model as texts are registered and collected so that tags form a close set for the texts in the collection and this set can expand as new texts make new tags necessary. Further, the organization of tags into ever more complex taxonomies seems inevitable, since this provides an accurate description of knowledge accumulation with respect to the field's richness. They postulate that the study of tagging practices applied to digital works provides us with guidelines not only to describe texts of electronic literature, but also to demonstrate the wide variety of forms which a literary text can embody.

(Abstract article)

A brief introduction to the 1960-80s Portuguese experimental group of authors and Po-ex.net, the digital archive of Portuguese experimental literature.

Walid Raad's The Atlas Group Archive (1989-2004) is a transmedial, fictional 'archive' which supposedly encompasses donated testimonies on the war in Lebanon (1974-1991), including diary logs, photographs (some of which contain notes), and videos, archived on theatlasgroup.org. In this case, the fictionality of the archive creates an archive where no real archive exists. The entire archive is transmedially constructed, in which the layering of content in each image becomes the key feature. There is, for example, a document named "Let's be honest the weather helped" (1998) contains a series of black-and-white images of buildings with colored dots on them, which supposedly signify various types of bullet hits (see fig. 1). The dots cover the whole area of bullet impact, so this media filter makes it impossible to verify if there were indeed bullet hits, and let alone which color the bullet tips were. The transmediality of the project is thus a means in conveying the impossibility of an archive and the unrepresentability of trauma. Medial borders are crossed through layering of content, reinforcing and destabilizing the truth value of testimony. Apart from being published on the website, Raad's project has been exhibited in different galleries around the world.

The Atlas Group Archive can be seen as an instance of 'traveling memory' (Erll), a term to describe the dynamics of commemoration in the current age of globalization. Analyzing The Atlas Group Archive as an instance of traveling memory, I argue that the internal and external institutional context of the archive largely influences its ability to become a traveling memory which "has brought forth global media cultures" (Erll). I compare the effects of the different interfaces in which this work has appeared. Apart from being published on a website, Raad's project has been exhibited in art galleries around the world. Academics have often pointed to the ways in which The Atlas Group Archive plays with the blurring of fact and fiction. I take this observation to the next level by reframing it as the engagement with decontextualisation and recontextualisation. In my analysis, each context becomes an integral part of the images, a layer of content providing meaning. In the online archive, the images function as an icon of the material notebook, and the black background of the images functions as an index, signifying that the images are uncropped and therefore authentic . In the context presentation of the exhibition, however, these images function as icons and index primarily to show that absence of their referentiality. The notebook does not exist and the black background is part of the artwork. I analyze the project's narrative function's using Manovich's criteria for narrativity in databases: the distinction between 'text', 'story', and 'fabula'. Though highly transmedial and fragmented, The Atlas Group Archive accommodates to this model, as it uses multimedia (a 'text' across media borders) to narrate the Lebanese war ('story'), colored by narration of events experienced by actors ('fabula'), and together these three elements form an archival format. According to Benjamin, the opposition between information and storytelling resides in the fact that "while the [storyteller] was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensable for information to sound plausible" (101). In the case of The Atlas Group Archive, we might say that these two categories are combined. The fabula is miraculous, but the contextualisation of text and story into information makes the unity plausible. The Atlas Group Archive's narrative functions by the virtue of fragmentation, which becomes an integral part of the content: it fills gaps while at the same time creating them.

(source: author's abstract)