Uncertain Archives: Approaching the Unknowns, Errors, and Vulnerabilities of Big Data through Cultural Theories of the Archive

Abstract

From global search engines to local smart cities, from public health monitoring to personal self-tracking technologies, digital technologies continuously capture, process, and archive social, material, and affective information in the form of big data. Although the use of big data emerged from the human desire to acquire more knowledge and master more information and to eliminate human error in large-scale information management, it has become clear in recent years that big data technologies, and the archives of data they accrue, bring with them new and important uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors, and, as a result, new ethical challenges that require urgent attention and analysis. This collaboratively written article outlines the conceptual framework of the Uncertain Archives research collective to show how cultural theories of the archive can be meaningfully applied to the empirical field of big data. More specifically, the article argues that this approach grounded in cultural theory can help research going forward to attune to and address the uncertainties present in the storage and analysis of large amounts of information. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, we reveal a set of different, albeit intertwined, configurations of archival uncertainty that emerge along with the phenomenon of big data use. We regard these configurations as central to understanding the conditions of the digitally networked data archives that are a crucial component of today’s cultures of surveillance and governmentality.

Investigating Curatorial Voice with Corpus Linguistic Techniques

“…Received: 19 June 2019 Finally accepted: 3 February 2020 of those organizing logics. And Agostinho et al (2019) and Safiya Umoja Noble (2018) caution against combining historical data and algorithmic systems to make predications on the basis that historical data always represent the racial and gendered oppressions of their own time. For us, this literature is united by a commitment to push back against notions that object description was or is a 'common sense' activity, and therefore provides a foundation from which to investigate curatorial voice.…”

WAKING TO NORMAL: Examining Archival Appraisal in Data-driven Society

“…"A consistent and compelling motivation for archivists has been the ever-increasing abundance of documentation and the resulting fear of being overwhelmed by the management of an increasingly voluminous, multimedia and documentarily complex, yet qualitatively diluted, record" (Gilliland 2014, 51). Agostinho et al (2019), however, point to the fact that appraisers are familiar with communing among disorder, and that is possible to view digital archives then as simply "the latest installment in a long negotiation … between control and uncertainty, order and chaos, and ultimately between power and knowledge. (423).…”

“…It is crucial to focus on the principles to which public archives should adhere, rather than on existing practices, since the preferred result might not be supported by current normative routines (106). Agostinho et al (2019) argue that there are advantages to integrating data science into archives. "Digital environments repurpose and refashion the logic of the archive under conditions of social, political, ecological, and technological uncertainty" (423).…”

On doing large-scale hydrology with Lions: Realising the value of perceptual models and knowledge accumulation

“…Indeed, it was customary practice at the time to show monsters rather than to leave spaces emptysuggesting that it is undesirable and dangerous to explore such places. Ancient Roman and Medieval mapmakers demarcated such unknown areas with the phrase HIC SUNT LEONES, "here are lions" (or alternatively with HIC SUNT DRACONES, "here are dragons") -thus populating unknown areas with creatures that would instil fear in the reader (Agostinho et al, 2019). Fewer than 100 years later the Salviati Planisphere map from 1525 ( Fig.…”