The common goal of this project is to design a visual interface with machine learning-based tools to make it easy to annotate, contextualize, organize, and link both images and their meta-information, to deliberately encourage the participatory use of archives. In a series of workshops and interviews with both academic and non-academic users, along with archivists and database specialists, the project will analyze the new demands of digital (and process-oriented) knowledge production in order to achieve these goals. In their own rubric – Citizen Archive – academic and non-academic users of the existing Swiss Society for Folklore Studies SSFS’s (Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde SGV) networks and partners will receive a series of Calls for Images inviting them to upload and comment current photographs as comments on historical images; this will further foster the contextualization of the archival material. In turn, these digital additions will have to be supplied with metadata and contextual knowledge. Such analysis of the context of images and collections (crowdsourcing) will enrich the metadata of the material and thus also make image searching and information retrieval more effective.
Along with the design of the participatory digital image archive, this four-year research project will describe the transformation of analog archives into digital archives from the perspective of technology, communication, and the anthropology of knowledge. The common goal is the analysis and systematic description of historical and contemporary archiving practices: the generation, organization, storage, and communication of knowledge. The complex interplay of participants, epistemological orders, and the genesis and graphical representation of information and knowledge in such practices will be studied in connection with three collections from the photo archive of the Swiss Society for Folklore Studies. In previous research, these areas were mostly considered separately rather than from an interdisciplinary, cross-domain and application-oriented perspective that can capture such interplay. In contrast, the proposed project’s interdisciplinary collaboration between digital humanities, cultural anthropology, and design research will serve our goal of increasing, improving, and imparting knowledge of analog and especially digital image archives and of ways to use them.
As its common primary outputs, the project will produce not only the visual interface discussed above, a dynamic storage infrastructure, but also a handbook with guidelines for the future development of participatory archives as well as six dissertations and several scientific papers in the various disciplines.
