Tom Schofield is an artist, designer, researcher and academic based at Culture Lab, Newcastle University, UK. His practice-based research spreads across creative digital media, archives and collections interface design / visualisation and physical computing and he designs, codes, builds and writes about this work. His artwork has been exhibited internationally and he publishes in media art, design and HCI contexts. He also teaches in and out of academia focussing particularly on the role of new technologies in culture as it impacts in architecture, art, literature and design.
David Kirk is Reader in Cultural Computing based in Open Lab at Newcastle University in the School of Computing Science. His research covers a broad range of topics in Human-Computer Interaction, with an emphasis on designing to support practices of human memory and developing intersections between philosophical anthropology and design intervention.
Telmo Amaral is a research associate at Newcastle University's Open Lab and his current work focuses on biological image analysis, bridging academia and industry. He completed a PhD on medical image analysis at the University of Dundee and investigated deep learning techniques at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering in Porto. Before that, he worked as a research assistant in a variety of areas, including digital systems testing, telecare, distance learning, and lifestyle monitoring. His background is Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a master's degree from the University of Porto.
Marian Dörk is a research professor for information visualization at the Institute for Urban Futures of the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. In the context of his doctoral studies at University of Calgary and his postdoctorate at Newcastle University he designed and studied novel visualization techniques in particular with regard to their potential for exploratory information practices. Since Fall 2014 he leads a 3-year research project on visualizing cultural collections and since January 2015 he has been co-directing the Urban Complexity Lab, a newly founded research space at the intersection between information visualization and urban transformation.
Mitchell Whitelaw is Associate Professor in the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research http://www.canberra.edu.au/research/faculty-research-centres/cccr, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra. A practitioner and theorist, his research interests include generative systems, data aesthetics and digital cultural collections. His work on generous collection interfaces has been supported by institutions including the National Archives of Australia, the National Gallery of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales.
Guy Schofield is an artist and lecturer based at University of York. His career has included work for film companies, game studios, festivals and art galleries for which he has made and exhibited videos, sculpture, installations, performances and software. His current research focuses on participatory production technologies, including mobile technology for live events and low-budget digital film making.
Thomas Ploetz is a Computer Scientist who works in the area of pattern recognition and machine learning, specifically within the ubiquitous computing area. He has developed and deployed innovative sensor data analysis and recognition methods in many practical application domains. Relevant for this work is his expertise in sequential data analysis, specifically automated handwriting recognition.
This is the source
We present archival liveness
as a concept in design and the Digital
Humanities and describe its development within a Research Through Design
process. Working with a newly acquired archive of contemporary poetry we
produced designs that both manifested and geared in to
Presenting archival liveness
as a concept in design and the Digital
Humanities.
Digital interfaces to archives and cultural collections have, in recent years,
become a crucial means of accessing our heritage and their design has become a
subject of interest in interaction design
In answer, we present a novel approach to the design of archive and collection
interfaces and introduce the concept of the play of possibilities for
design
We describe a Research Through Design approach interfaces
to refer to the online catalogue interfaces we were
developing. We refer to aspects of this interface work as visualization
where it is specifically data driven and involving graphical representation.
Crucially, by considering the process of archiving as live and taking this as the
focus of our design interventions we address an area of concern to archival
institutions
We contribute:
Our research comes at a time when an interest in the theoretical and critical
concerns around archives has begun to pervade discussions of designing for
the archive. This tendency reflects themes in archive-oriented humanities
scholarship, since the early 1990’s in particular
Our research was conducted in the context of an eighteen-month-long research project. At the outset our university had recently acquired the archive of a publisher of contemporary poetry, Bloodaxe Books, consisting of around 60,000 items (see Figure 1), mostly edited manuscripts of poems.
We were engaged to produce experimental interface design research as part of
an inter-disciplinary team together with other researchers from the creative
arts and humanities. Around thirty project participants, mostly poets
themselves, were engaged in personal, creative-practice research in the
archive. Importantly, the archive itself was in a completely un-catalogued
state at the start of the project. Research was consequently being conducted
Liveness has been productively recognized as a concept in the field of HCI
and has been investigated across areas including live electronic music live
. These considerations lead us to consider notions of
archival liveness and its possible application to the study of the user
experience of archives, collections and their interfaces.
Previous accounts of liveness …the properties of intimacy and
immediacy experienced by both spectators and performers
In the context of data-driven technological experiences (such as viewing or
using visualization) however, an account of how the formal characteristics
of the supporting infrastructure actually contribute to the phenomenon of
liveness is so far under-developed. As part of our second contribution, we
develop this formal description and describe the role it played in affording
opportunities for design. In this sense we find commonality with research in
live electronic music, in particular Freeth et al.
Concerns about the power of archives to produce particular versions of our
cultural past should the focus be on
received traditions and the canon, or on local knowledge and
diversity?
dialogue
between
collections interface designer (as author) and user (as audience).
With the integration of archival record keeping and networked technologies
(such as document-storing servers, online record aggregators critical node
in the
relationship between archive, archivist and user, archival interfaces are
implicated in the interconnections between power, institution, memory and
artefact described above. As well as the decisions taken by archivists as to
inclusion, preservation, access and description, a set of further
considerations inform the presentation and curation of archives. Such
considerations encompass interface design, data management strategy and
access policy and are a site of potential interdisciplinary collaboration
and user engagement. The context of a research project afforded us an
opportunity to pursue creative exploratory work in this design space.
We have seen first that liveness has been of interest in design communities in providing clues about the experience of live performance and interaction. Significantly, we have noted that we can develop the concept of liveness in the archive by supporting the discussion of experience with a description of some of the formal features of the archival process which contribute to the phenomenon of liveness. The development of designs exploring archival liveness is proposed as a useful contribution to the rich but complicated design space of archival interfaces.
We adopted a Research Through Design methodology as exemplified by Frayling,
Gaver, Bowers and others allow a range of topical,
procedural, pragmatic and conceptual insights to be
articulated
In the following we describe four distinct design activities: Archive Inserts, Box Log Connections, The Marginalia Machine and a Twitter bot. These activities were conducted on an overlapping timeline; here we present them in a roughly chronological sequence that shows their formative role in developing our understanding of archival liveness.
Inspired by previous Research Through Design work cultural probes
activity to gain insight
into the way the archive was being used by our project participants and to
uncover some of the things they found interesting about the materials
themselves. As poets with substantial domain knowledge they could be
considered as lead users
With our project partners we also held a series of four, hour-long discussion meetings with groups of around ten participants at a time. These meetings were audio recorded and transcribed. In the following section we draw on the probing activity and the results of the discussion together. We emphasize that these activities were undertaken not as information gathering or requirements analysis activities per se, but to sensitize ourselves to the material and its prospective users. That is to say our discussions were not directed towards user requirements specifically but instead tried to get some flavor of their experience in the archive.
Towards this end we also spent time physically situated in the archive
ourselves. We observed during this period that the library silence imposed
by the archive’s location in the university Special Collections
room
meant that participants who were potentially conducting related research
were unable to communicate. Indeed a participant commented during a session
that,
Partly in response to this scenario, we created a probing activity,
Archive Inserts
(see Figure 2) which used a bookmark-like insert
to act as a conversation backchannel
for participants. A trial of
this activity revealed a number of interesting features of the archive which
focused our interests and informed future designs.
We scanned the completed inserts and conducted a basic thematic analysis,
sorting results into the following categories; materiality
,
typographical
, literary criticism
, questions about the
cataloguing process
, poems
(several participants chose to
leave poems for others to find), links between items
,
illustrations
(several participants drew pictures of what they
found) and declarations
(comments which didn’t appear to solicit a
particular response).
There were two principal outcomes from our analysis. First: it was clear that temporality was a significant factor in the participants’ experience of the archive. Second: virtually all of the aspects identified as interesting by the participants were not intended to be described in metadata in the forthcoming catalogue, and thus would not be represented in future interfaces to the archive. This latter observation is fundamental to the value we identify for a Research Through Design process in this context. These outcomes are described further below.
A number of comments from participants suggested that being in the
archive conveyed a sense of temporal connection with the people and
events of the past. One participant jokes that the editor of Bloodaxe,
was figuratively
Similarly, a number of participants discussed the importance of the
historical situatedness of the items. They speculated on the
circumstances under which items were produced and this speculation was a
significant facet in their experience of archival research. One item (a
manuscript by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova) prompted the writer of
one probe insert to ask:
The interest in the material aspects of the archive described by the participant above was a recurrent point raised both in discussion and in the probing activity.
The items in the Bloodaxe archive are mostly late stage proofs of poems,
often similar to the published versions of the work. The two significant
differentiating factors therefore are first, the quality of the printed
material in the forms of paper densities and grades, the marks of
varying kinds of typewriter, word-processor and printer and second, the
handwritten editorial notes (see Figure 3). These latter when inscribed
in the margins are termed marginalia
in archival parlance. The
marginalia were interesting to us, firstly because they were interesting
to participants and secondly because of the link described above between
marginalia and the
We have already described the importance of the archival catalogue and
interface as critical nodes
The item in question had no
These comments reinforced our early justification for designing within the archive during the cataloguing process and contributed to our growing definition of archival liveness in that they strongly associate the degree of definitiveness of the catalogue with a sense of time.
Our work with participants had revealed a number of features of interest in the archive that informed our designs. First our sense of the vital importance of the temporality of archive materials was clearly shared by participants. Second, the aspects of materiality valued by the participants presented us with some clear ideas about what kinds of material to work with. Lastly the comments about the relationship between materials and the ongoing cataloguing supported our earlier impression that presenting the archive during the cataloguing process might engage users at this critical and contested stage.
Having spent time in the archive and with project participants we developed
two main design proposals both of which adopted the archival marginalia as a
starting point for a creative design intervention. A further design was
produced early in this process and is described separately. Although neither
of the former two was in itself an interface design, both were produced to
lead
to the catalogue and future interfaces to it in different
ways. The first design intervention was a live Twitter bot, connected to the
digitization process in the library (see Figure 4). The server running the
bot uses machine learning techniques to separate handwritten notes and
illustrations before tweeting the resulting image with a link back to a
catalogue page with basic catalogue information. The detection of this
marginalia relies on the results of optical character recognition (OCR) as
performed by the Tesseract OCR engine
OCR detects typewritten symbols, associating a level of detection confidence with each symbol. This allows estimation of the expected colour and dimensions of typewritten symbols for a given document. Regions of content either ignored by OCR or whose colour and/or dimensions lie outside the expected range for typewritten symbols are then deemed to be marginalia.
The second intervention was an artwork, the Marginalia Machine (see Figure
5). The Marginalia Machine is an X/Y
or Cartesian
plotter
which draws details
The Marginalia Machine is based on a kit of parts sold by Makeblock pen up
or pen
down
messages. To produce these coordinates we wrote a Python script
which vectorised the marginalia images (produced as described above) and
produced an XML document of coordinate data. A supporting documentation
video, shown in the gallery space, described the technological processes
behind the machine and its context in our design research.
The design process afforded a number of insights that support our
contribution of a definition of archival liveness. As we developed our
designs, a set of three sites of liveness
emerged, each with its own,
idiosyncratic sense of liveness. These were: the special collections area of
the library itself, the server infrastructure that would host aspects of our
design interventions, and the manifestations of our designs on Twitter and
in the gallery.
The production of both the Marginalia Machine and the Twitter bot entailed a long, friendly, and respectful exchange between ourselves and the professional archivist and digital assistant in the library. This relationship and the practices it uncovered informed our developing sense of archival liveness. A challenge of working with archival materials during the cataloguing process is that access to those materials and sources of metadata must be negotiated and then technically facilitated before formal procedures are in place or perhaps circumventing existing procedures. In the Bloodaxe Archive a conventional workflow was in place wherein items were catalogued and scanned, and image files converted for preservation. The cataloguing was conducted using a web-based tool which eventually aggregates the collection with other UK archives. This kind of workflow is based on a long production cycle and with the assumption that the catalogue will be published near the end of the cataloguing process. Further, there was little formal connection between the catalogue and digitized files. Although they were connected by reference numbers, the digitized items were not seen as part of the archive, but as illustrations for the catalogue.
The cataloguing and digitization process as described above had a
distinct liveness
of the archive was suppressed.
Despite the formality of this workflow, we were aware that a parallel set
of informal organizational practices were at work in the library. For
instance the archivist preferred to keep her catalogue in spreadsheets
before transferring new records to the records management software at
the end of the month. The digital assistant meanwhile had a complex but
well-defined folder structure by which she kept track of which documents
had been scanned, converted, uploaded and saved. Through regular contact
we were able to negotiate access to these intermediate working
structures in order to engage with the processes behind the production
of an archive. While doing so we were careful to communicate our
intentions to the archive staff so that they understood that these areas
were to be partly made public. An example of one outcome of this access
can be seen in a visualization
The visualization shows relations between the roughly sorted boxes (see
Figure 6) in which the archive was delivered to the university. If an
author or title is in both box 6 and box 15, for instance, this
connection will be drawn on the graph and a list produced on the right
hand side. Also visible in the image is a figure for the most popular
(as in most viewed by participants) box (44 in this case). While
ostensibly a tool by which participants could more efficiently search
the boxes, this visualization also served the purpose of showing a
pre-catalogued representation of the archive; the archive in its nascent
state. As such it was a time marker
in the process of archive
creation. More importantly for our argument it was made possible by
access to two items; an informal spreadsheet provided by the vendors of
the archive, Bloodaxe Books, and a Microsoft Word document in which the
archivist recorded the participants’ archive box requests. Neither were
part of the formal cataloguing process but
The approach taken with the Box Connections visualization influenced the
development of the Marginalia Machine and the Twitter bot. Having become
familiar with the archival activity in the library we became interested
in releasing materials as and when they were produced rather than at the
end of the envisaged production cycle. By releasing images early and
often, alongside what parts of the catalogue existed, we were attempting
to provide indices to archiving
In order to achieve the above we developed a technical framework to
support our intervention. The particular affordances of the technologies
involved also played a significant role in developing our
characterization of archival liveness. Such affordances defined this
site for work
. We explored, tinkered with and organized those
technologies according to a mixture of technical criteria (what will be
stable) and aesthetic and theoretical ones (what organization of
technical resources would most aptly reflect the work in the archive).
By doing so, a sense of the human inflected our technical work, just as
technical considerations inflect the (human) work of the archivist and
digital assistant. That is to say that archival liveness reflects an
integrated set of technical and human factors which together define the
particular kinds of time in the archive.
Both the Twitter bot and the Marginalia Machine were intended to respond
to the digitization of new images in the Bloodaxe archive. To make this
possible we developed scripts that would scan a working folder on the
server space of the digital assistant. With her consent, we asked the
university technical services for read-only permission to this shared
storage. Similarly, we wrote scripts to convert exports of the catalogue
to a data structure to support a work in progress online catalogue. We
emphasize these points because they are germane to our wider discussion
that our process was not part of the envisaged production flow for the
archive. We further suggest that these opportunistic technical
interventions take advantage of the mess
described by Dourish & Bell
2011
To check the status of the shared folder we wrote a simple shell script
triggered by a Cron process. Cron is a Unix tool for scheduling the
execution of scripts, but it comes with its own temporal constraints. It
is designed for regular tasks and accordingly can be scheduled to run on
the minute (at the most), on the hour (or n minutes afterwards),
everyday and so forth. In that sense Cron became part of the temporal
range of archiving activities as we connected it to our designs. While a
scheduled check seems to break the immediacy implicit in the notion of
liveness, we felt that live
does not necessarily imply
continuous
. The archive is live insofar as it is an ongoing
process. Breaks and pauses such as those introduced by Cron are part of
the
Having chosen this approach we encountered another significant temporal
feature of the technologies. Our script cross referenced each item in
the shared folder (of multipage scanned PDFs) with each item in another
folder, where extracted and compressed JPEG versions were stored, in
order to identify new PDF files. This process itself was lengthy because
of the volume of files involved, taking around half an hour to run. Once
a new file was found, a series of further processes added to the
execution time. First the PDF was extracted to individual JPEGs using
command line image processing software ImageMagick
As well as the timeframes already described regarding the working rhythms within the library and the various running times of scripts and processes the public manifestations of our designs introduced a third temporal issue that pertained to the experience of archival liveness.
The micro-blogging service Twitter is based on short updates which appear as a mix in a user’s timeline. We were conscious of the risk that a heavy stream of updates from the archive would overload followers’ timelines and alienate or annoy them. Equally however we wanted to retain a sense of the particular rhythms of the archival process, so to tightly schedule updates felt restrictive. To reconcile these two opposing concerns we allow a maximum of three marginalia images per hour to be tweeted. As this compromise shows, we sought to manage the performance of archival liveness in the public realm.
The Marginalia Machine presented its own constraints. Because the working pattern of the digitization process is irregular, and of course takes place on weekdays, there were significant problems with presenting a live-connected version that was in synchrony with the archival process. For an artwork in a gallery, long periods of inactivity do not often make for a satisfying experience. To provide a satisfying experience for visitors while attempting to maintain a connection to the live archiving activity we had the Marginalia Machine draw from a bank of twenty of its most recent images. We hoped that the constant, noisy activity of the machine would be indicative of the activity of the archive even though some of the direct temporal correspondence had been broken.
In the previous section we described three distinct temporal facets to our
work in the archive: the working rhythms of the archivist and digital
assistant, the execution and scheduling times of the technologies, and the
frequency with which we updated the Twitter feed and Marginalia Machine. Our
motivation for these designs was to manifest the liveness of the process of
archiving within our designs but a tight binding to this process was in
conflict with the technical and experiential concerns we outlined. However
rather than seeing this as a compromise, we suggest that archival liveness
is embodied equally in these three facets and that weight should be given to
each within the design process. Following Freeth and Tanaka
By distinguishing between the working rhythm of the staff in the archive and
the various constraints and affordances of the server infrastructure we
reflect an obvious historical tension between the working patterns of people
and technologies design to support them. Rather than representing this
distinction as a binary one however, our approach based in archival liveness
nuanced our understanding of the particular kinds of temporality in
different parts of what might be thought of as an ecosystem of work and
technology. The pursuit of archival liveness, as we have said, brought us
into closer contact with the archivist and digital assistant as well as the
library technical services team. With this close contact we gained unusual
access to the way their work was organized across a diverse technical
infrastructure. We observed a disjuncture in the temporal patterns of the
archival process and the way that the archive was accessed by our
participant researchers. Where the archivist and digital assistant worked to
long time frames with a tendency to batch processing and repetitive
activity, the participants were inclined to dip in and out
of the
archive irregularly. Our intervention through Twitter in some senses mimics
this comparison. After running the bot for several weeks, we noticed that in
periods when digitization was taking place, tweets would commonly appear
around 5pm; seemingly the digital assistant placed scanned PDFs in the
complete
folder as one of her last tasks of the day. The
appearance of the tweeted marginalia image on followers’ Twitter timelines
however will be interspersed with other material. What was a semi-regular
event for the digital assistant manifested as sporadic for the followers of
the bot.
Gearing InThrough Liveness
As well as presenting design opportunities, we note that our particular
engagement also created a kind of gearing in
gearing in
. In the
context of the archive we can see the progression of our design
interventions from the cultural probes to box log connections, to the
Twitter bot and Marginalia Machine as ways of learning to mesh
our
designs with the work of the archive. Our treatment of archival liveness was
in many ways a process of orientating ourselves to the various rhythms of
the archiving process and the materials available at each stage. One
practical advantage of this gearing in
was that we were able to produce engaging, timely
designs at stages of the project earlier than might have been otherwise
possible. More significantly, this gearing in gave us access to a rich set
of materials and concepts, prompting designs that offer new modes of
engagement and reflection on the archive.
In this project we were focused on the liveness of the archiving activity
principally because of our desire to engage users with the archiving work.
However by highlighting the archiving process we were also creating a public
performance of the Bloodaxe Archive as live. Liveness was being presented as
part of the public identity of the archive. In this presentation, we find
direct accord with other digital heritage initiatives. As archive catalogues
are aggregated into web services and interfaces, a number of interesting
points arise regarding the permanence and stability of archives and their
expression through catalogues and interfaces. Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs) such as dead
one (as complete, finished
and closed). The National Archives of Australia recently launched “SODA”
Similarly, Circus Oz maintains a Living Archive
stories
tab, they emphasize the connection of the
archive to the lives of the performers and audiences. By doing so they
suggest that the archive is also live in the sense that is engaged with the
daily lives of the people represented in it.
Earlier, we suggested that our work designing with and for liveness offered a response to concerns about the role of archives in institutionalising the past. In our case, the Marginalia Machine and the Twitter bot were ways of simultaneously investigating archival liveness and engaging our project participants and wider audiences with the archival process, with the work-in-progress catalogue interface design and with the project more generally. While our own work (so far) does not afford significant opportunity for users of the archive to intervene in the cataloguing process we believe that further potential for this exists.
To produce such design work has methodological implications as described but
also, we feel, indicates a role for a particular kind of researcher. Such a
researcher would have an interdisciplinary background, sensitizing her to the
value and interest of the archival materials while bringing a range of technical
and creative skills enabling different kinds of design intervention. She would
be in a position to quickly conceptualize, develop, and release work in an
opportunistic and occasional fashion, using the materials made available, early
and often. This particular kind of working practice (one that is agile,
responsive, opportunistic) may encounter difficulties at larger scales. As we
have suggested, one of the values of our way of working was in supporting a kind
of familiarity not only with materials and technical systems but also with the
working patterns and concerns of our colleagues in the library. Much of our work
was produced with what was effectively unfinished materials (the
work-in-progress catalogue particularly) and this access was negotiated on a
personal level. A future challenge for this work is to consider how some of the
rich temporal features of archiving may translate on a scale where such
negotiation is not feasible. One emergent design consideration here is how the
technical tools of archivists (such as archival data base software) might be
designed to reflect a variety of states of finishedness
rather than
simply being unavailable until the point of completion. It is interesting to at
least speculate on the possibilities for design if the default state of
catalogues in progress were accessible rather than closed. They could then be
used in a timely and experimental way taking advantage of the liveness of the
process of archiving.
Other aspects of our work are more broadly applicable elsewhere. Although
user-oriented processes for designing archival interfaces are not without
precedent e.g. in necessary
given the vital role such interfaces have in
mediating our cultural heritage. If we, as a society, are to encounter our
cultural heritage in digital forms online and elsewhere it seems appropriate to
engage ourselves in a conversation about not only usability but also aesthetics
and creativity informed by engagement with future users. With this inclination
however we immediately encounter future questions regarding the relationship
between presentation and interpretation in design work such as ours. Much of the
work we produced exemplified our particular attitude to archival materials in
which we see them as having value for future creativity. Although our particular
interventions were informed by our work with project participants it is
undeniable that in their presentation as (at least partly) creative works, we
injected our own interpretative stance into their presentation. The later
results of this approach can be seen online in our catalogue interface
One of the motivations for maintaining an ostensibly neutral catalogue based on
international standards for record keeping is to defer the interpretative moment
outside of the catalogue and its interface to allow for a plurality of
approaches later on. We sympathise with this position but it is hugely
problematized of course by the nature of any claims to neutrality. As Drucker
Archival liveness addresses a desire (and a need) for the archives and
collections to make their holdings publically accessible. Digital archives are
dynamic: continually expanding, taken up in larger aggregations, being
re-catalogued and described. Thus, a model of design that treats the archive as
static, whole, and complete is often not appropriate. With this research we have
demonstrated that design interventions before or during the cataloguing and
digitization process benefit from early access to a wider range of materials and
have the potential to engage audiences and future users of the archive along the
way. Above and beyond this though, we have demonstrated the use of archival
liveness in a particular kind of Research Through Design process. Archival
liveness encouraged us to treat the various temporalities of the archive as
material with which to design and provided us with a number of distinct ways of
gearing in
This research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under their Connected Communities theme.
research through design