Archiving the present

Entire digital collections are hidden behind a search box. How can we engage with bodies of knowledges that we cannot see and browse?  With a growing focus in digitisation, it is urgent to think about how cultural libraries and historical archives become more accessible. While existing AI and machine learning are useful for commercial products, they don’t serve the non-commercial purpose of libraries and archives. In the root of a library system, we don’t want recommendation, we want navigation, browsing and discovery.  We founded Archival Consciousness to develop interfaces to radically increase the visibility of the collections of cultural libraries and archives through data literacy. We want to make semantic technologies available to non-technical people, to produce community sourced linked data in an ongoing effort with a participatory approach. It would create an interaction layer that is not so different of the first prototypes of the WWW back in the days.  In this talk I will share my recent work in the archive of de Appel, the Yiddish library at Casa do Povo and at the Stedelijk Museum Library. What I learned from librarians and archivists about the mediation between the physical space and the database. And share hybrid methods of archiving, using site-specific installation to decompose, reinterpret and perform algorithms in the scale of the body as a method to define ontologies, draw models, project our own tools and re-imagine the working environments of our digital future.