Blog Post 7 ‘It’s All About the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power and People’
I identified the key terms of this article and found standardised definitions for each. A collection is a group of things or people. Interfaces enable user interaction with hardware or software. The ability to have a strong influence on something or someone is power. People are human beings in general.
Like life, these definitions are subject to change, especially after reading this article by Tim Sherratt, It’s all About the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power and People. By discussing the processes of digital humanities projects, including the real face of white Australia (TRFWA) and Remember me, Sherratt explains what collections, interfaces, power and people are.
TRFWA is made up of collections of photographs that were extracted from digital copies published by the National Archives of Australia. The interface was made using open sources, which brought the collection to life. This project is the pathway to viewing, comprehending and desiring to analyse the lives of the people, rather than seeing them as the hopelessly oppressed population in 1900 Australia.
An archival interface “is a site where power is negotiated and exercised”. We think we build simple and straightforward projects that address whatever we want, when really we build projects that leave space for open interpretation and criticism from the audience we accidentally built. In general, digitisation and searching tools remove any forced perspective on any project. It is a finding aid that helps to bring power back to the people by providing an unbiased form of display. Building common ground between the author, the reader and the subject triggers the audience to, ‘do something, think something, feel something’. Power is also exercised behind the scenes of the interface, by the shift of who is in charge of that information. We no longer have to depend on the cultural institutions to display and analyse the history for us. We can display it how we want to whoever requests it, with an understanding that is our own. These records can therefore find new meanings, and reclaim the power that originally belonged to them; we can make new history.
Remember Me entails photographs taken during the aftermath of World War 2 of children who survived but were separated from their families. The project seeks public help to identify and trace the children. They find the oppressed, the vulnerable, the displaced, the marginalised and the poor. The new technology gives us once again the power to pursue our passions. They allow us to engage with records in new ways.
As digital humanists, we do not only work to pursue our passions, but we work so that others can, while new history is made in new and different ways. We develop research tools based on the questions we would like answered and provide unbiased collections via interfaces that are highly interactive. Users and subjects regain their entitlement and the people who matter connect other people who are curious or fascinated by them.
“It’s all about the stuff.
It’s all about the respect and responsibility we both have for our collection.
It’s about the respect and responsibility we both have for people like this.”
