Problematics
The project
The research & design project consists in designing and realizing a website about the italian architect Luciano Baldessari.
The data on which will be based this website is an archive fund compounded of more than 20,000 documents (drawings, photographs, letters, technical documents). These documents are dispatched in three institutions, that have diverse annotation systems and annotation quality.
The project is driven by two purposes : the first, pragmatic, is to regroup all the archive of Baldessari into an online space - this should be done before this fall. The second, which is the design research one, is to work on the problematics of online archive visualization, in the global context of "digital humanities".
What can do digital design for online archives?
In a period in which the number of databases is expanding exponentially, there is a particular type of them that requires a particular attention : archives. According to Lee Ann Potter, an archive is "a place where people go to find information. But rather than gathering information from books as you would in a library, people who do research in archives often gather firsthand facts, data, and evidence from letters, reports, notes, memos, photographs, audio and video recordings, and other primary sources."
Visual browsing of a collection of heterogeneous documents
Thus, whereas most of contemporary databases are structured in a strict and normalized fashion, archives are made of heterogeneous and non-formalized elements. In consequence, they require a particular attention about how to access, research and navigate through documents. The art of archiving, indeed, is to developp ways to access to information and knowledge without cuting into the richness and the complexity of it. How to visualize the archive as a whole, and being able to navigate in this dense tissue of documents in a meaningful way? How to use graphic & interactive design to allow a fluid navigation into the document's fund? Would it be possible to allow some "drifting browsing" for users, based on similarity between documents and their content?
Telling stories with documents
The respect of the notion of complexity is the key to a good archive's experience,
because an archive gets meaningfull only by the relations made between its components (com-plexus, indeed, means "to weave together"):
an archive's element on its own tells nothing.
Browsing the database through a simple filling system based on "meta-criterias" is sufficient for "search & find" processes but not for the specific purpose of archive-browsing (creating knowledge from a group of raw documents),
because the main value of the pieces of an archive remains into the links that anyone can do between them.
How to allow a user to make sense of all these heterogeneous and raw documents?
How to tell stories based on the raw data of the archive, in this case tell a project's genesis based on the documents available about it? Or to allow users to make their own story about
the documents they are analysing?
Would it be possible to reinvent the famous "archivist's work-table" in the digital age?
Enrich archive's database with human sense of meaning and connexion-making
Besides the "archive access" side, we could also look at the "archive making" side, and question the way archives are made and managed at the digital age: in order to retrieve knowledge of an archive and take advantage of its complexity, wouldn't be possible to work on the structure and content itself of the archive? Aside automatic meta-annotation or centralized and expert meta-annotation made by archivists themselves, would it be possible to allow people to enrich archives by indicating connections between documents, add extra informations about their content, and so, year after year, make an archive's database richer and richer thanks to human understanding and experience?
These questions are the core of my Master internship's project.