New Jisc Digital Media Toolkit

Jisc Digital Media have released a new toolkit to look at the various digitisation technologies in detail, outlining both the theory behind the technology, along with more practical insights. It looks at cameras and scanners in depth and provide the stakeholder with the knowledge required to make informed decisions when purchasing, what can be, very expensive items of equipment.

3D digitisation projects are also becoming more prevalent. The toolkit has a separate chapter on 3D technologies, looking at the three main capture methods, as well as considering some questions around purchasing equipment.

Read the new toolkit at:

http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/toolkit/digitisation-equipment/digitisation-equipment-home

BBC Things

Just launched today, BBC Things is targeted at members of the BBC's audience who work with or wish to work with the BBC's Linked Data at a Technical or editorial level. It uses Semantic Web technologies* that allow open access to the data and is built on top of the BBC's Linked Data Platform. The types of data the BBC maintain about things can be found in the Ontologies section.

Here's an example record for the National Museum Wales:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/things/fc2215aa-3414-4fc1-bca5-aa985a106a1f

More information about 'things' can be found here - lots of possibilities for museums with collections related to sports, politics, wildlife, etc.

* Semantic Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and write rules for handling data. Linked data are empowered by technologies such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL, and SKOS.

Foucault and Memory

Foucault’s project to analyse material representations and discursive formations relating to the problem of history is highly influential. The operation of discourse is implicit in the regulation of what statements can and cannot be made and the forms that they can legitimately take. Attention to discourse therefore moves the focus from the interpretive problem of meaning to questions of instrumentality and function. Instead of having meaning statements should be seen as performative of meaning; not as possessing some portable and ‘universal’ content but, rather, as instrumental in the organisation and legitimation of power-relations. Language embodying institutional processes and knowledge is key to subject formation.

In the work of Pierre Nora Foucault’s theory of discourses finds form in the study of cultural memory, which is interesting for my purposes. Isolating materiality as a principal feature of memory, Nora is indebted to both the genealogical method of Michel Foucault and the work of the sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, an early theoretician of social memory. Foucault is taken up in Nora’s writing and applied to his study of the rhetorical modes of memory and the politics of commemoration.  Just as important is Nora’s development of Halbwachs’ insight into the extent to which collective memory is socially determined, and of the interruption to memory that occurs in process of writing history. Nora’s treatment of the relationship between memory and history, a widely debated topic in the discourse on memory, is one of the more contentious aspects of his work. For him, history and memory are radically opposed in their purposes.

The study of material representations that Foucault's work elaborates is a key concern in the field of cultural memory. As Andreas Huyssen observes in Twilight Memories:

'Looking back and remembering has to confront some difficult problems of representation in its relationship to temporality and memory. Human memory may well be an anthropological given, but closely tied as it is to the ways a culture constructs and lives its temporality, the forms memory will take are invariably contingent and subject to change. Memory and representation, then, figure as key concerns at this fin de siècle when the twilight settles around the memories of this century and their carriers' (p. 2).

Likewise, Alon Confino's conception of cultural memory is formulated as follows:

'I would like to view memory as an outcome of the relationship between a distinct representation of the past and the full spectrum of symbolic representations available in a given culture. This view posits the study of memory as the relationship between the whole and its component parts, seeing society as a global entity-social, symbolic, political-where different memories interact. This approach also seeks to reconstruct the meaning of a given collective memory by using an intertwined, double move: placing it within a global historical context and a global symbolic universe, and analyzing the ideas, values, and practices embedded in and symbolized by its particular imagery'.

In a slightly different vein, the media theorist Wolfgang Ernst has applied Foucauldian archaeologies to the study of digital memory. Although he was influenced by Friedrich Kittler to begin with, Ernst started to develop a reading of media, history and archives based on Foucault (perhaps the initial appeal was related to the fact that Foucault had already turned the cultural theoretical emphasis from archives as concrete places to archives as more abstract (but just as real) conditions of knowledge). Ernst shifted the emphasis from archaeologies of knowledge to archaeologies of knowledge in media or even a sub-discipline of archaeology that that refers to the various media of archaeological excavations. However, media archaeology is less about telling stories or counterhistories (Foucault's model of genealogy insists on the political function of counterhistories), it is more about how stories are recorded, in what kind of physical media, what kind of processes and durations; its focus is on the archaeology of the apparatus that conveys the past as fact not just as a story.

For Ernst, it is the calculation and number logic-based ontology of technical (and especially computational) media through which cultural memory is articulated. This provides an alternative to literary-based narrativization that historians provide in their epistemological and ontological premises. The issue of digital memory, then, is less a matter of representation than of how to think through the algorithmic calculation-based ontology of a memory.

Foucault vs. Utopia

The trajectory of Michel Foucault’s theoretical work can be characterised broadly as moving from archaeologies to genealogies to technologies of the self. What these formations share is an underlying commitment to interrogating the structures of knowledge and power in societies. As Foucault stated in an interview from October 1982:

'All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made'.

In his later essay, Technologies of the Self, Foucault defines his interest in technologies of the self – ‘the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself’ – against the concerns to which the best part of his career had been devoted:

'I have attempted a history of the organization of knowledge with respect to both domination and the self. For example, I studied madness not in terms of the criteria of formal sciences but to show how a type of management of individuals inside and outside of asylums was made possible by this strange discourse. This contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self I call governmentality'.

What is described as the ‘history of organization’ in this extract refers to the different ways that humans develop knowledge. Foucault is clear that we must not accept this knowledge at face value, instead it should be considered as a set of ‘very specific ‘truth games’ related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves’.

This brief overview of Foucault’s work defines the key concerns of his project, which are crystallised in his comment about being ‘against the idea of universal necessities in human existence’. It is therefore unsurprising that he was skeptical about the idea of utopia, speaking of Habermas’ essay on Utopia in an interview in the following terms:

'The thought that there could be a state of communication which would be such that the games of truth would circulate freely, without obstacles, without constraint, and without coercive effects, seems to me to be Utopia. It is being blind to the fact that relations of power are not something bad in themselves, from which one must free oneself. I don’t believe there can be a society without relations of power […] The problem is not of trying to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give oneself the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination' – (1991) The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: an interview (translated by J.D. Gauthier), in J. Bernauer & D. Rasmussen (Eds) The Final Foucault, pp. 102-118. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Likewise, in ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Foucault warns that:

'We know from experience that the claims to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led to the return of the most dangerous traditions' – (1984), p. 46.

In contrast to utopias, Foucault proposes the heterotopias – ‘localisable’ instances of the utopian idea. This is discussed most extensively in The Order of Things and his 1967 lecture ‘Of Other Spaces’. Describing utopia as a space that represents an inverted analogy of society or society in its perfected form, the heterotopia is portrayed as its parallel in physical form, the closest equivalent or approximation of a utopia. Examples include cemeteries, gardens, museums and theatres. Because Foucault’s thought dismisses essential or primary notions, i.e. ‘universal necessities’, the break through to something else evoked by utopias (see Jameson) is not accommodated in the heterotopian model. However, heterotopias are still able to provide an alternative ‘reservoir of imagination’. Further, the concept works strategically to highlight and reflect upon changing cultural and historical relations, functions and the effects of specific spaces; heterotopias do not function fully except in relation to each other (work at a descriptive and exploratory level).

In this sense, a comparison with Fredric Jameson’s work on utopia, which highlights the failure to imagine the future in utopian texts (in order to explore the structural limits of these imaginings), may be productive. To some extent, both thinkers are concerned with undermining a form of historical enclosure. However, the theoretical implications and political ramifications of a commitment to utopia are, for Foucault, too great.

Foucault’s critical principle: - that one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality.