Civic Community Archiving with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography: Double Binds and Design Challenges

Fortun, Kim; Fortun, Mike; Hitomi Skye Crandall Okune, Angela; Schütz, Tim; Su, Shan-Ya

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_3

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12795))

Included in the following conference series:

International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

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Abstract

Community archives serve an array of purposes and types of communities (fan clubs, scientists in particular disciplines, ethnic neighborhoods). We discuss here civic community archives; civic archives, like “civic science,” have expressly progressive political aims, question established order, and contribute to inclusive knowledge production and prosperity. Designing civic archives involves many types of analysis and poses many design challenges. In this paper, we share an analytic framework developed to guide the design of civic community archives, drawing on both cultural theory and our experience designing archives for different kinds of communities, with different purposes, within larger ethnographic projects. We question how to characterize “the community” in community archive projects, and the stakeholders in such projects. We ask what should be recollected in community archives and for what purposes. We also ask how, by design, community archives can connect diverse users, analog and digital components (including human and technological), and complicated pasts to creative futures. Throughout, we call out the double-binds of civic community archiving, delineating risks and possible pathologies as well as generative potential. We approach the work as cultural anthropologists and ethnographers involved in building the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (https://github.com/PECE-project/pece-distro), open source digital infrastructure for sharing and collaborative analysis of ethnographic data.

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Rethinking Cultural Probes in Community Research and Design as Ethnographic Practice

The Human Infrastructure of Civic Data: A Taxonomy for Participatory Infrastructuring of Civic Data

Article 03 June 2023

Identifying the Potential Users of Community Archives: A Case Study of the History of the Chinese 30 Years Project

Notes

1.
We recognize that “capacity” has become a widely circulated developmental “buzzword” (Cornwall 2007) which carries negative valences amongst many communities who have been frequent subjects of development interventions. We use it to signal the continued importance of building up individual and collective abilities to work together on a tangle of late industrial issues.
2.
The archive name remains preliminary and may be changed for strategic or legal reasons.
3.
See the Wikipedia entry on the courtroom sketch as a data type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtroom_sketch), and “Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustrations archive at the US Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/drawing-justice-courtroom-illustrations/about-this-exhibition/).
4.
In translating a description of the Quotidian Anthropocene Archive project into Turkish, for example, we were asked if “data collection” is equivalent to “data set,” with the translator oscillating between “veri seti” (data set) and “veri toplama”.
5.
Lauren Klein, for example, has worked with an archive focused on Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved people he owned, showing how creative modes of handling and displaying data can bring archival absences and silences to the surface and into memory (Klein 2013).

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Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA
Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, Angela Hitomi Skye Crandall Okune & Tim Schütz
School of Law, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
Shan-Ya Su

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Kim Fortun
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Mike Fortun
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Angela Hitomi Skye Crandall Okune
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Tim Schütz
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Shan-Ya Su
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Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Matthias Rauterberg

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Fortun, K., Fortun, M., Hitomi Skye Crandall Okune, A., Schütz, T., Su, SY. (2021). Civic Community Archiving with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography: Double Binds and Design Challenges. In: Rauterberg, M. (eds) Culture and Computing. Design Thinking and Cultural Computing. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12795. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_3
Published: 03 July 2021
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