Flat Archives: Or Promiscuity Unbound!!An introductory word of caution. Elli Mylonas of the then Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University once told me that if there are 10 pages available in an ACM template, I needed to use all 10. I have an unfortunate habit of editing things down into dense kernels and so I need to spend the pages or time I have to join the dots a bit more. !!Or, as my wife's friend observed recently "he doesn't do small talk, does he?" !!To make this worse this is largely speculative. A thinking as writing out loud.!!I also call this 'naive theory' to the extent that it wants to pause and wonder about simple things because they are interesting, and humanities academics are often in too much of a hurry building complex frameworks that lose sight of the thick complexity of what is.!!Finally, as if all this is not prevarication enough, what I'm talking about today are the ideas that have arisen from the research and development of a digital archive of circus performance video, and not a report on the project. I come to archives as a new media and some time digital humanities scholar, and certainly not as an archivist. This tap is about things more than archives.!!

Adrian Miles

history!When I attended what was then a DRH conference, possibly in 2001, in Edinburgh a key problem was the digitisation of material artefacts in archives. Much of this work concentrated on the problems of metadata and standards, and the rationale for these projects was largely about access to collections. It was what I would characterise as translating analogue into digital and a premium was placed on preserving as much of the analogue as possible.!!Their success in making collections available online has been extraordinary, as any glance at the GLAM sector reveals. However, while the digital humanities was grappling with, and arguing about, how to create archival quality digital copies of material media, the polymorphous beast of the social and mobile web arrived and, much like the web before, has changed much of what we do.!We now find ourselves with enormous online systems that, by indifferent stealth, are archive like. These systems, which operate and present themselves primarily as service orientated platforms are exemplary in relation to access and use. !!These platforms enable, facilitate, keep, store, index, transcode, tag, geotag, classify, and algorithmically engage with formal and informal metadata. This metadata is attached to the media artefacts that we now create and leave as soft, evidentiary trails of everyday experience. Unlike archives, these services are more concerned about exchange and communication than the archive's anxiety about provenance, preservation, and artefactual integrity.!

Adrian Miles

Adrian Miles

flickr!!I am going to use Flickr as the example for my argument. Flickr's well known, and one of the first platforms that developed the protocols for these networked, media specific, services. !!On Flickr an artefact -- a photo -- is not a material object that has metadata attached to it as would usually be the case in an archive. !In archive's the object is the object and metadata describes it in various ways, but I'm not sure that this metadata can do very much to the object itself. Things in archives more or less lie there, as is, untroubled by these textual accessories. This is NOT a criticism of the archive -- in fact I think it is one of its strengths -- but this indifference to metadata is not the case with Flickr. !!Now I'm not yet sure about what this difference is, or even if it is a difference that particularly matters, but the formal and informal metadata that is, and can be 'attached' to any image in Flickr doesn't hover around or over the material object, without ever quite doing anything, but deeply changes it all the time. !!An image on Flickr is awash in a sea of expanding, changing, fickle, ephemeral and largely messy metadata. This includes the informal tags added by others, its curation into collections (manually and automatically by algorithm), and also changes through modifications to compression and file formats, transcoding that the platform undertakes, and even changes through developments of its API. !!All affect these photos as things. While we might still want to think of photos as the centre

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of Flickr, in practice this really isn't the case. There is no single photo that serves as guarantor of object hood, and any individual photo routinely finds itself defined by the contexts provided by the other images that surround it as a result of tags, search, curation into collections, and so on. !!That photo of a tulip is a photo of a tulip, it is also an image of a particular red, a memento of a family holiday, an image of 'Dutchness', an example of a horticultural cultivar, a photo of a flower, an image taken on a Panasonic DMC-FX500, and so on. It is all of these things equally. The photo becomes this temporary way station, a pause, that coalesces around these terms that are always creating new series of photos, and this serialisation of the object makes the object itself mercurial in a way that physical photos in real archives can never manage to be. !This changes what each photograph is, so it begins to become less that particular thing and more like an object that finds itself being pulled this way and that by this or that whim. It is perhaps now no longer really an object in the archive's sense, for its object hood now seems to be very deeply dependent upon everything else around it. In Flickr photos then become more like relays, or Latourian mediators, formed by the terms that assemble photographs around themselves.!!!!

Adrian Miles

Adrian Miles

flat!!In practical terms there isn't any hierarchy between the ways in which photographs in Flickr can be labelled and organised -- user, date, location have no special privilege in relation to camera type, tag, or denotated subject. Flickr as a platform provides the affordances to enable this flatness, and it is this flatness that makes these objects not only porous, but able to be used in such a diversity of differing contexts. Not simply because they can be embedded elsewhere and reused, but because new relations can be applied to the objects in an ongoing way.!!It is a relation engine. Relations are external to things because a relation requires two or more terms and until a relation arrives that causes something to matter, there really isn't much going on. (There is a large slice of Latour in that last sentence.) For example, in a collection of costumes the buttons on a garment may be used to think about technical manufacturing, button design, colonialism, social rank, performance history, professional status, costume design, and no doubt many other things. For any of the items in that list to matter something else has to be present, quite outside of the buttons, to be asking this of these buttons. What the button comes to be understood as is dependent on these external terms, none of which are exclusive and certainly not exhaustible. It doesn't really matter how or if the buttons have been classified, these new relations can always be formed. !!Physical archives have always done this. They have always had this flatness. This has been possible because as material things objects in

Adrian Miles

an archive always stay outside of and quite separate from whatever is written about them. In this way objects in archives are largely mute, where the relations they are able to find themselves amongst are and cannot be known in advance, and so as any archivist knows, people are easily able to do interesting things with objects in archives.!!This is, with some conditions, what Bogost in other contexts has described as a flat ontology. The question this raises though is that if things are flat, and mute, how can we think about these relations?!!!!

Adrian Miles

facets!!Facets help us to understand these relations.!This is derived from my understanding of Bergson's Matter and Memory, and Deleuze's use of it in his two books on cinema. I understand it to be a material account of how things 'relate' to one another. The key points are that these facets are radically multiple and are not phenomenologically intentional. !For example, sugar 'sees' particular facets of the coffee as it is being stirred (temperature, viscosity, velocity), but not its taste nor the caffeine.!!There are affinities between this idea of facets and Latour's Actor–Network Theory, Bogost’s 'unit operations’ and Harman’s speculative realism.!!!!

Adrian Miles

faceted search!!Faceted search and navigation describes the provision of multiple attributes for users or systems to search for material. It is faceted as it allows multiple dimensions for search, rather than a single taxonomic order. For instance in Flickr camera type is a different classification of content than geolocation, which is also different to date, or photographer's name, and in the Circus Oz archive act type is not the same sort of thing as performance location or how many stories have been told about a show.!!

Adrian Miles

granularity!!Faceted search requires granularity.!Granularity I define as the smallest unit something can be broken down in to that still has coherence. !!Now when granularity is combined not with with faceted search but with the concept that things have facets, we can see that granularity expands the facets available by increasing the number and types of things there are.!For example, in the Circus Oz project the archive is video based so granularity is trivial to do. The archive's minimal unit is any demarcated duration of video, whether that coincides with the beginning and end of an act, or show, or not. Hence, I can curate collections of kangaroo characters in acts, the presence of trombones in the score, each fade to black in a show, or even every time something is dropped in juggling routines. Each are facets and are easily available because the platform has no quantitative minimal granular unit. !!!!!

Adrian Miles

promiscuity 1!!In the context of a digital platform if you are able to combine a high level of granularity, with a capacity to create new facets, then your platform enables, if you're lucky, playful and generative discovery. So, going online is not just the provision of access to material artefacts that are already thought to be adequately described and discoverable.!!Where there is system level 'faceted granularity' the platform affords the breaking down of things into smaller objects that are able to be addressed (tagged, curated, shared, and so on) as these smaller things. (This is very close to Nelson's notion of transclusion, and platforms that offer Flickr like embedding and tagging can be considered as primitive transclusion engines). !!With highly granular parts platforms like Flickr offer innumerable ways in which these parts can be addressed, which is another way to say that there are a lot of facets able to be made available. !!This is not the same as faceted search, though it might appear so. In the Oz project tags, collections, the 'interesting' algorithm and so on are unfixed and flat. I can pretty much apply any tag I want to any other thing, and this free form tagging, supported by search, dramatically alters the number of facets available. For instance, even if I restrict myself to text, then for all practical purposes there are an infinite number of facets available through which to create relations in the Oz archive.!!!

Adrian Miles

promiscuity 2!!This granularity, and tagging as the facets of things, creates a promiscuity of internal connections. This promiscuity is compounded by Flickr's porousness to the outside, where anyone can add their stuff, and so ever new facets and relations necessarily arise. !!This is a relational promiscuity that, to repeat, begins to shift from an artefact centred model -- the photo -- toward its role as relay and mediary amongst a variety of social, communicative, and technical networks. This is not what we generally value when we talk about digitising physical collections. Hence, in Flickr, and certainly the Circus Oz archive, there isn't really an archival 'object' as its media becomes relay and material for the series that they will always find themselves assembled by. !!This is also a relational ecology, though I think ecology risks being suggestive of something holistic and bounded. While there may be individual images that really matter, it is much more about the relations that happen between my terms and those images, and between those images and their manual and computed collections. Their silence as things in relation to what collections and relations they may find themselves within is the strength of a platform like Flickr and the Oz archive, and why its objects remain always porous and available to new relations. !!When we make physical things 'more' available via dissemination online they risk becoming more distant, not closer, in a way that we can never say of the born digital. No matter what technologies are used, when we digitise it is

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always a representation of some other 'original' thing and already then straitjacketed by a discrete set of facets. On the other hand, for digital only content, the language of original and representation is irrelevant -- which is why no one is ever concerned about transcoding on these platforms -- and this also applies to the Circus Oz Living Archive once it is understood to be not a video archive, but a record of performance that happens to be on video. !!

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By way of a hasty and inelegant conclusion that parries with closure:!!When we make online platforms the more facets that the platform can express and allow for, then the more it moves to a view of things as discrete that suggests autonomy amongst these objects. !!!Circus Oz Archive!http://archive.circusoz.com![This was a talk given at DRHA 2014, University of Greenwich, September 2014.]

Adrian Miles