Session 6b (Digital Memories Track) Theories and Concepts in Digitizing Individual and Community Memory
5th Global Conference
Friday 12th March – Sunday 14th March 2010
Salzburg, Austria
Diverging Strategies of Remembrance in Traditional and Web-2.0 On-Line Projects
Heiko Zimmerman
University of Trier, Germany; English Studies
Social networks are the epitome of the Web 2.0. Users of these networks tend to spend a large part of their time on-line; they organise their life on-line; they present themselves, get to know other people, join discussion groups, publish their holiday pictures or share their opinions and “real life” experiences. Thereby, these communities acquire a quality that—in contrast to traditional, i.e. Web 1.0, on-line projects—enables them to discuss personal life, public life/politics and history. It makes these communities a place where active remembrance and the social construction of the past can take place (Halbwachs).
The principles prevalent on the Web 2.0 are novel for the internet only. Therefore, even older texts can serve to illustrate the individual, social and cultural dimension of memory and remembrance in this medium—an approach that positions the analysis in a tradition rather than postulating the total novelty thereof. In his epic poem, The Fairie Queene (1596), Edmund Spenser describes a library as a spatial memoria metaphor. The room is inhabited by a very old half-blind man (Eumenestes), who lives with his young assistant (Anamnestes). Spencer’s metaphor illustrates not only the distinction of memory and remembrance (Assmann) but also the specificities of the Web 2.0. The passive principle (Eumenestes / memory) can also be found in Web-1.0 projects. The active principle (Anamnestes / remembrance) needs communication, interaction between people, re-action to information and a perpetual evaluation, renewal and deletion, which is encouraged in typical Web-2.0 projects like social networks.
Starting from a definition of memory and remembrance, the paper will look at specific features of Web-2.0 applications (e.g. Facebook, Gayromeo and Find a Grave) and their aptitude for the negotiation of collective and cultural memory. Moreover, it will discuss the blurring of subjective and collective memory, the questioning of subjective memory as triggered by the exchange and discussion within a networked space as well as the concepts of memory in a field of plural interests. The paper will show strategies of on-line remembrance as a function of the differences of traditional and Web-2.0 projects.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Algorithmic Memory? Machinis Vision and Database Culture
Katrina Sluis
Centre for Media and Culture Research, London South Bank University
This paper takes as its starting point the processes through which memory has been made “machine readable” and examines the material structures which support the sorting, searching and filtering of digital memory. Whilst accessible tools and cheap storage provide new opportunities to “cache” one’s life, practices of editing and annotation are largely being replaced by passive accumulation. The problem of managing a snapshot collection which might number in the thousands has spawned the development of software interfaces where the paradigm of the album is reconfigured as a database with search field. Technologies such as automated image annotation and image retrieval promise to outsource the process of tagging, naming and organising memories to the computer, using complex algorithms to approximate a kind of “machinic vision” (Johnston:1999).
In parallel, the paradigm of Web 2.0 has re-imagined the web as a software platform which mediates our encounter with vast databases of user-generated content. Here, the database is paired with the search algorithm to determine what content is most relevant and accessible; metadata and contextual text provide a means through which visual matter is interpreted. Furthermore, the separation of content from interface which characterises Web 2.0 means that images and texts can be disassociated from their context and redistributed as information feeds or remapped onto different interfaces.
According to Harvey-Brown and Davis-Brown (1998) activities such as acquisition, classification and preservation are ‘technical’ activities associated with the archive that may become explicitly ‘political’ as they determine visibility and access. This paper argues that far from representing the dematerialisation of the object, digitisation represents a significant shift in the way in which personal memory is constituted. Drawing on the field of software studies, the relationship of materiality to memory is problematised through an analysis of software and algorithm in the construction of digital memories.
Fluid Memory on the Web 2.0
Paolo Lattanzio
Department of Communication Studies, University of Teramo
The digital memory is an artificial type of memory that contains data and instructions. With the evolution of web it became possible to access this platform as a mnemonic archive. The novelty of the web-based memory is linked to a memory that allows creation of multiple contexts.
This new kind can be called “fluid memory” and it gives heterogeneous answer and knowledge representation in different time: there’s not a synchronic view that is both static and replicable. This is why the memory, which is based on the knowledge representation that web gives, takes different shapes directly linked to the collaborative web’s nature.
Web 2.0 offers new ways to optimise this fluid memory. It enhances the process of memory externalisation and dissemination through the web. Users are not involved in univocal using of those objects because they realise content’s re-semantisation.
It enables a diversified memory based on the form of hypertext. Memory is molecular result by atomic components. A fluid semantic memory goes from a focus “individual-phenotypic” to a “genotypic-distributed” predominance, so we need a new way to manage the information. Web 2.0 leads to the birth of folksonomies, that are shape of managing information based on tagging that every user makes, different from taxonomy. This fluidity is possible thanks to the global web-based co-operation on the web 2.0.
Web 2.0 is directed towards the creation of hybrid systems where human specific skills have benefit and enhancement thanks to the close interaction with computational computer’s abilities and with the hypermedia interconnection, going to change memory.
The creation of memory in cybercultural age is therefore a human activity realised in interaction with digital machines inside an epistemological context that gives a new shape to the coupled systems that are able to draw fluid representation of the knowledge.
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