Facing the Future workshop 3
17 September 2013, Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology, Oxford
Supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past programme
Convenor: Professor David Zeitlyn,
Introduction
This workshop, which took place on the 19th September, was the third and final Facing the Future event run by Professor David Zeitlyn. Organized as part of the AHRC’s “Care for the Future” theme, the workshop considered the relationship between past, present, and future. This workshop was concerned in particular with the processes, technologies, and consequences of the digitization of archives, in which physical records and objects are transformed into databases and online repositories. Drawing from a concern in the second workshop over how we should understand the social and moral consequences of digital archives, many of the discussions in this workshop centred turned round how concerns for the past, present, and future are mediated by digital technologies. Thus, the goal of the workshop was to situate long-standing discussions of “time” and “history” in relation to contemporary issues such as open access, big data, and the transformation of archives into digital objects.
Key Themes
While the second workshop focused on the perspectives on and effects of the past and future, this workshop focused on issues surrounding the theorization and interpretation of the “present” in relation to the past and future. Many of the discussions questioned how best we should generate and make sense of digital objects, generated through, for example, the cataloguing of museum artefacts in computers, or the generation of “future scenarios” from data about the past and present.
To begin the workshop, participants discussed the broad challenges faced by archives in relation to the increased use of and recourse to digital technologies and approaches to research. Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes (Université Paris Ouest) discussed her work in the French Labex project les Passés dans le Présent (laboratory of excellence: Pasts in the Present), a project focused on mediations of history in the digital age. As a project involving several academic and heritage institutions, the two main aims of the Labex are to: (1) to evaluate historical representations of the past over time, and (2) to see how the past comes to matter in relation to particular social groups. For Deschaumes, the project raises key concerns of how, why, and for whom we are digitizing records from the past.
Following Deschaumes, Haidy Geismar (University College London) discussed her efforts to define an “anthropology of the digital” in relation to digital technologies and practices. What, asked Geismar, is an “archive” in the digital age, and what do we mean when we talk about “the digital” or processes of “digitization”? In contemporary society, should we consider social media such as Instagram and Facebook, which entail the collection of large and varied types of data, as archives? Consequently, Geismar raised critical questions about the rhetorics of the digital in relation to the reality of digital technologies. Such an emphasis on the digital, said Geismar, needs to be considered relative to the social experiences and relationships encoded into technologies.
Following from Geismar’s focus on the experience of digital technologies, David Reason (University of Kent) discussed the need to view not only the past and future, but also the present in relation to interpretive and subjective frames. Drawing together a wide range of philosophical approaches, Reason discussed how we exist in a world with “multiple presents,” as reality can be construed from multiple perspectives. Though time can be thought of as something objective, as it is portrayed in physics, it is experienced by individuals as something subjective, as that which comes into being through actions. Here, Reason drew key thinkers in fiction (Marcel Proust) and science fiction (HG Wells, Kurt Vonnegut) to discuss the difficulties inherent in defining what we mean by “the now,” and how we might use fiction to articulate strange and alternative presents.
Taking up the multiplicity of past, present, and future, Shauna Monkman (Oxford University) discussed the example of “scenario planning,” a method of strategically thinking through possible situations, which originated in corporate and military organizations. Scenario planning, emphasized Monkman, is a way in which data about the past can be used to think about responses to a future that is inherently uncertain. Monkman discussed the particular case of The Ghost Dance, a Native American religious movement in the late 19th century, which resulted in intense conflicts between Native American communities and the US Government. An analysis of such past cases, emphasized Monkman, shows how accounting for multiple past perspectives enables us to plan for the future.
Focusing attention on case studies of the digitization of historical materials, Astrid Knight (Oxford University) discussed how Inuit model artefacts are portrayed and come to have meaning in museum contexts. Knight problematized the multiple meanings of historical objects, emphasizing how mundane objects in museum collections are presented as “objective” but might entail perspectives that differ from those espoused by local Inuit communities. To this end, Knight described her ethnographic project to bring accounts of model artefacts back to Inuit communities, which were not involved in the curation of, and had limited access to digital archives. Her account raised key questions about who designs digital archives and for whom, and what happens when historical records are confronted with present contexts. Providing another case study, Emilie LeFebvre (Oxford University) asked how visual materials, specifically photos and videos, can come to affect local knowledge in local contexts. Focusing on the el Nagab Bedouin society, LeFebvre emphasized that images can come to structure peoples’ lives, such that photos are not only visual but also material and physical things that affect lived experiences. LeFebvre’s work raised key questions about what happens when societies in conflict/transition come into contact with multiple forms of archival material.
In his concluding remarks, David Zeitlyn (Oxford University) placed considerations of the past, present, and future in the context of more general theorizations of time. Zeitlyn emphasized the relative lack of metaphors for thinking through the notion of time, and noted that there were disparate literatures on time which did not interconnect. These literatures included five main categories: works on the future, the philosophy of history, memories of the past, archaeology of the distant past, and philosophy of the physical sciences.
Future Considerations and Conclusions
At the end of the workshop, concluding remarks focused largely on the broader social and political issues at stake in discussions of the past/present/future in the digital age. Participants emphasized the need to situate an interest in digital archiving in relation to government-level policies and funding strategies, and to consider how movements such as “big data,” “open data,” and “open access” encourage the digital archiving of knowledge for the future benefit of society. Such movements require thinking about time and history at the level of institutions and political systems, and raise fundamental questions such as: who has the authority to speak about time, and what are the politics of talking about time?
Consequently, discussions revolved around how the digital era affords an opportunity to critically consider what might be the benefit of—and how we might demonstrate the “impact” of (broadly defined)—digital resources. Does the digitization of research, whether contemporary or historical, produce goods that are inherently beneficial to society? Technologies are not independent of the context of their creation and use, and digital archives of the past and present will not automatically enhance knowledge in the future. As one participant stated, “you can build it and people won’t come.” Discussions of the politics surrounding the development and use of digital archives are needed.