The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation

in a More-than-Human World

Fiona R. Cameron

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000368215
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: Museum Studies

The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation critiques digital cultural heritage concepts and their application to data, developing new theories, curatorial practices and a more-than-human museology for a contemporary and future world.

Presenting a diverse range of case examples from around the globe, Cameron offers a critical and philosophical reflection on the ways in which digital cultural heritage is currently framed as societal data worth passing on to future generations in two distinct forms: digitally born and digitizations. Demonstrating that most perceptions of digital cultural heritage are distinctly western in nature, the book also examines the complicity of such heritage in climate change, and environmental destruction and injustice. Going further still, the book theorizes the future of digital data, heritage, curation and the notion of the human in the context of the profusion of new types of societal data and production processes driven by the intensification of data economies and through the emergence of new technologies. In so doing, the book makes a case for the development of new types of heritage that comprise AI, automated systems, biological entities, infrastructures, minerals and chemicals – all of which have their own forms of agency, intelligence and cognition.

The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, archives, libraries, galleries, archaeology, cultural heritage management, information management, curatorial studies and digital humanities.

1

Introduction

Refiguring digital cultural heritage and curation in a more-than-human world

Waking around 5.30am each morning, former President Donald Trump routinely turned on his television and tuned into CNN, Fox News or MSNBC in the White House master bedroom. Propped up on his pillow in night attire Trump grabbed his iPhone, often tweeting from his personal account handle @realDonaldTrump or his presidential account, inspired or infuriated by what he saw and heard.¹

Trump used Twitter to rule: to break news; to boast; to thank supporters; to spread propaganda; to announce policy and military commands; to insult; and to threaten. His impulsive and sometimes outlandish outbursts included threats to the Iranian president after Mr Rouhani cautioned the US about the nation’s hostile policies towards Iran;² a proclamation to stop sales of 3D plastic guns and threats to shut down government if the Democrats didn’t agree to fund the wall between Mexico and the US.

Figure 1.1 Donald Trump’s tweet to Iranian President Rouhani, July 23, 2018 via Twitter.

As the coronavirus continued to assert itself, reproducing and spreading insidiously at alarming rates, Trump in the face of this escalating crisis referred to Covid-19 as a Chinese virus thereby deepening a US-China diplomatic confrontation over the outbreak and angering Chinese government officials. The World Health Organization in response warned against using such terms to describe the crisis, in an effort to prevent racial discrimination against Chinese people.³ While making the final adjustments to this manuscript news broke that Trump and his wife Melania had tested positive for Covid-19 on the 2nd of October 2020. In a tweet released at 2.45 pm he wrote, “Tonight @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER.”

All Trump’s tweets, from the strange or mundane to those seen as insulting and threatening and his most recent Covid-19 diagnosis have been designated as historical data worth preserving in the archive because they are official statements and therefore a record of his presidency.⁴ Historically many presidents have edited, and even destroyed, records, diaries, letters, and emails, unintentionally or intentionally, to protect themselves, their privacy, and their political allies. But since the NARA directive, the White House is now legally obligated to preserve all original tweets.⁵

Trump’s tweets as historical data worth preserving are surprisingly new forms of digital cultural heritage, that is, whether they are his policies and opinions launched through the platform or the re-tweets and responses they elicit, including those that are critical and racist.

But rather than locked away in the archive, their heritagization took a different turn predicated on their continuing existence within the world of serendipitous experience. Trump’s tweets are used throughout the book not only to expand thinking in regard to the types and forms of digital cultural heritage that are emerging but also as an example of heritage out in the world as a means to rethink practices relating to objects, objecthood, the archive and curating in a more-than-human world.

Our very existence has become datafied. Digital data is omnipresent in what we do and how we experience life: how we record our lives, how we spend our leisure time, how we conduct our work and love lives. How we view ourselves as biological species is also a question of data, from the 3D digital imaging of ourselves as a foetus before we enter the world, to digitally mediated diagnoses as to when and how we might die, and even how we might conduct ourselves as digital humans after death.⁶ Our every move, our activities, and actions are monitored, monetized, and bureaucratized, made subject to machinic calculations and used to create identity profiles and on-sold by global oligarchs such as Google and Facebook.⁷ The use of drones equipped with infrared cameras to check and monitor the temperatures of quarantined citizens in Fuxin, Liaoning Province⁸ in an effort to prevent the coronavirus asserting itself illustrates how our bodily functions, biochemical processes and the virus itself are interpenetrated and converted into data for the purposes of surveillance and reporting. Drones are used to disinfect, control crowds, monitor, traffic, dispose of medical waste and deliver supplies⁹, all producing their own data as Covid heritage in the making.

Data is embedded in our devices, from the cars we drive to the domestic appliances, the stoves, fridges, and washing machines we use in the seemingly private spaces of our homes. Smart machines embedded with artificial intelligence unleash their capacities onto the world. Computers win Poker, even beating professional players.¹⁰ AI is replacing humans’ labour in the manufacturing and sex industries.¹¹ Even mundane things such as our phones and elevators contain embedded AI. Our decision-making capacities have also become algorithmically inflected and personalized, from the items we are encouraged to purchase to the programmes we are recommended on Netflix.

A new species of cell zombie (oblivious to the world and others around them and its dangers while glued to their phone) has emerged as an outcome of our addiction to connectivity. Data is able to be produced and accessed anywhere while on the move. As smartphones become integrated into our lives, we are witnessing a digital image explosion in which hundreds of billions of them now circulate on internets and through social media platforms. Smartphones have also become regimes of control, evident with the rise of digital profiling and personalization, but most alarmingly these devices are linked to an emerging digital dictatorship in China, a social credit system where points are accumulated or lost depending on our online or offline choices and behaviour.¹²

The networked capacities and smart properties in all manner of digital machines and commonplace devices we use all create data. Vitally, data production is no longer a human capacity and never really was. All manner of things produce and archive data online and offline, from social bots on social media sites to sex robots, autonomous weapons, embedded medical devices used to predict an epileptic seizure, automated systems in banks, and the machine learning capacities on social media sites such as Facebook that structure our choices and what we might remember. The production of data by all these entities is discussed in Chapter 7. Even bacteria are creating data, as made evident through bio art experimentations.¹³

Due to the rise of data economies, the emergence of data as a modality for governing and for profit generation, the interpenetration of the digital into everyday life alongside the replacement of traditional forms of heritage such as books, paper records, correspondence, photographs, film, sound recordings and artefacts, in digital format, has led to a burgeoning of digital data, much of which has the potential to become heritage of the contemporary world.

Digital cultural heritage is conceived as all digital data that a society sees as important to retain and keep as a source of knowledge for future generations. Digital data therefore is the new cultural heritage of life, one that is increasingly threatened and therefore valued.

Significant digital data as a new type of digital cultural heritage product emerges as two distinct forms: digitally born, derived from data only existing in digital format, and digital surrogates¹⁴ (now popularly known as digitizations), or digital reproductions of pre-existing works.¹⁵ This is a distinction that was first made official by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 2003.

Digital cultural heritage is viewed as human productions and about human concerns first and foremost. We generally consider ourselves as beings who make, own, and use objects;¹⁶ use digital media; use digital resources; make digital things; live in a digital society; and use a variety of digital media objects whose seemingly “immaterial” qualities and indeed their technics are taken for granted until they break down. Born-digital heritage and its collection therefore are about what we have done; what we value; how we thought about something; and what we experienced in the past that we now see as significant. Collecting digital data is a series of actions directed to framing the past and making judgments about what should be carried forward to the future. In broader societal terms digital cultural heritage is about our social relations, about our economic life and transactions, about our history, how we identify ourselves, our opinions and our politics.

Cultural heritage objects have been described by cultural theorist John Plotz as “the eloquent signifiers by which western culture makes the social known to itself.”¹⁷ Now digital data is made subject to the same systems of meaning. Accordingly, digital cultural heritage categorization implies that things are metaphysically stable. Nouns stabilize their role as signifiers. Heritage descriptors and narratives of its history define their subject. Here, data through heritage production emerges in new forms as lofty, western, and humanist.

Digital data in a heritage framework and within heritage institutions focuses on the formal technical qualities of digital data and hardware. It is framed according to computer science, information theory, and digital communication, and concerned with internet-mediated networking and the use of tools for cultural communication from personalization and locational intelligence to data analytics. The future of the digital and its entanglement with heritage remains focused on the development of higher-quality digitizations, visualizations, more effective digital communication strategies and literacies, and the iterative application of digital technologies and emerging trends across all areas of operation and practice. Attention has been directed to all these things while digital machines and data languish in museum storerooms, and billions of files lie like sediment in the cloud, in hard drives and all manner of devices. Data in itself as a form of heritage has to date received little attention, especially in regard to its theorization.

We are currently witnessing a turn to born-digital objects, digital hybrid objects or variable media, and an interest in digital materiality as bits central to preservation strategies as the essence of our contemporary past and our future. Alongside this is an emerging interest in the other-than-western cultural contexts and meanings of digital things that challenge west-centred notions of heritage that are routinely attached to them. But at the same time, we must take heed of a profusion of forms that are currently being produced due to the rise of algorithmic mediations and all manner of AI smart data and machines. Such trends, as yet largely unacknowledged in the heritage field, direct our attention away from an anthropocentric notion of digital cultural heritage to that of the more-than-human and non-human forms of data production. This represents a shift in heritage as human-centred productions to new types of humanism that acknowledge our profound entanglements with data.

Accordingly, digital cultural heritages are not simply temporal forms of human memory, human categories of intelligibility, ephemeral, immaterial, material, or technical things. Digital cultural heritage is no longer solely a reflection of human creativity mediated through data and technical systems but also encompasses the creative impulses of a wide range of other-than-human actors. Furthermore, digital cultural heritage can no longer be thought of as human–machine productions or even strictly a product of human intelligence. Emerging genres of digital data and digital machines are all potential heritages. AI, machine learning, and social bots are all involved in heritage-like making practices, and at the same time many are potential objects of heritage. New hybrid forms are emerging such as 3D printed materials.¹⁸ Therefore, the category of heritage producers and productions must be expanded to include the technical, the machinic, the more-than-human and the non-human as new figurations and configurations.

Digital data is a term used in the broadest sense to encapsulate our digital interface with the world. Technically speaking, the smallest unit of digital information is called a bit and is embedded in layered, modular architectures and all manner of digital machines exhibiting properties of decomposability, adaptability, traceability, and interoperability.¹⁹ Often represented by a single binary number or value as a 0 or 1, as on and off switches, bits are instructions that are stored within, manipulated by, and communicated through digital systems that appear as images or sounds.

Strikingly, digital data as heritage is not just the new fabric of human life, it is radically embedded in the vast and sprawling ecological circumstances of life itself.²⁰ As digital data becomes more ubiquitous and its production accelerated due to the Covid-19...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction Refiguring digital cultural heritage and curation in a more-than-human world
• 2. The official birth of digital data as universal heritage
• 3. Digital data as the heritage of the modern world
• 4. Object concepts in digital cultural heritage
• 5. From objects to ecological formations
• 6. Digital data and artefactual production
• 7. Curating inside the archive and out in the world
• 8. The rise of more-than-human digital heritage in the Technosphere
• 9. Conclusion Framing a more-than-human digital museology
• Index