I’m slowly emerging from post-PhD (etc etc) burnout. In the month of June, I'll send an essay out each Friday, a link to a different fundraiser for Gaza, and any other small notes. To start, here’s a link to many fundraisers collected by Operation Olive Branch, and one for a woman and her family who needs to evacuate for a c-section.
Glaciologists as archivists?
Last Friday, I attended the first session of <Archiving the Present>, a free workshop put on by Archival Consciousness at Framer Framed in Amsterdam. To apply we had to send an email; this was mine:
I am a glaciologist and an artist. I am interested in this workshop because in many ways my role as a scientist who studies glaciers has become that of the archivist, and I am trying to understand this role from both an artistic research and scientific point of view. Much of what is in my archive is already data—like radar measurements from Thwaites Glacier—but some of it is visual and/or ephemeral—water samples from the glacier, vast amounts of open source imagery, diary entries, etc. A lot of my archive is digital and could be used again or changed, e.g. code. I am also thinking about the environmental cost of archiving, especially big data on energy intensive servers, which actively participates in the destruction of the glaciers we are trying to preserve (not so much save, as remember)1[^1].
Every measurement of a glacier is the saving of a small moment of the state of something that is actively being lost. I have been struggling with how to think and frame this point of view, as I (and most of us glaciologists) have no training in how to save, curate, or tell stories from, across multiple mediums from this place of loss.
I have been following Archival Consciousness (a duo, Mariana & Remco)’s efforts to visualize archives using metadata, connective edges, and mapping. Here is a screenshot of from Biblio-Graph, which digitally maps a physical library and actively adds to it screenshots of open pages using RFID chips, a mobile archiving unit, and a lot of metadata.
The workshop will take place over four afternoons. The first workshop pre-started with a lunch, so that the afternoon session could overlap with the morning session. I sat next to someone organizing a small archive of coal mine literature, ephemera, and stories from the southeastern Netherlands, where she is from. She recommended a book about the Ogallala aquifer, Running Out by Lucas Bessire. Okay, already an auspicious start.
At the beginning of the workshop, Mariana gave us an overview of the upcoming weeks and then moved straight into introduction to ontological mapping. The goal of ontological mapping is to categorize things into relationships: `subject → relationship → object`. It took me a while to understand that our goal was to make a map of object-types that could represent any specific object (or event, text, person, organization, etc) within an archive, rather than trying to map the archive itself.
Every ==book== **is** an ==object==.
Every ==book== **has** an ==author==, who **has a** ==birthdate==.
A ==birthdate== **is** a ==date==.
A ==character== **is part of** a ==word== **is part of** a ==sentence== **is part of** a ==page== **is part of** a ==book==.
A ==page== **is (also) a** ==photograph== **is an** ==image file== which **has** an ==image title== and **has** a ==date== and **is part of** an ==archive==, which **is an** ==organization==.
An ==image file== **is an** ==object==.
The afternoon was spent working on paper, and then using stickers on cloth, to map our own archives. I found it extremely difficult to stay general, kept finding specific objects (e.g., "radar”) sneaking into my archive. At first, our only available top-categories were organization, date, object, text, person, location. I think this works for an archive made mostly of books and events, e.g., that of a library. But for my datasets with scientific information, I eventually found that I needed different top-level categories: "Tool”, "Process”, and "Record”, and updated "Date” to "Timestamp”.
Here is a first go at creating a map for my paper on deglaciation in the Tetons using arrows.app, which is built on top of Neo4j2.
I also tried to build this in Obsidian, but couldn’t get edge relationships to show up in the map, and inheritance of object type, etc was tricky. I am making two for Thwaites Glacier, one with and one without "body” in it.
This work relates really serendipitously some of the work I’m doing as a member of Glacial Hauntologies, an artist-scientist collaboration focused on Thwaites Glacier. Here’s a poster we put together for a conference in April, whose structure came about as we tried to express the interconnected, non-hierarchical, conversational, non-linear mode of our collaboration. Click, and you’ll be linked to a higher-res version so you can actually read it. Our categories here were "Influences, Questions, Methods, Concepts, Raw Materials, and Outcomes”. I’m going to try to turn this into a concept map as well.
Have thoughts about mapping? Recommendations for software? Reading resources for categorizing relationships? Send them my way.
Until next week!
Cheers,
Elizabeth
Seeing this, I would edit it as: which actively participates in the destruction of the glaciers we are trying to preserve (not so much save, as remember) > which, ironically, participate actively in glacial destruction even as they preserve them digitially
Arrows.app is kind of neat, but I can’t figure out how to put the metadata to use in it, e.g., automate color from a property type. I think there are other tools, and also that Neo4j and the cypher language has a lot more to offer, so I’m looking forward to digging into that.
This is so good!! Also: the object mapping made me think of these two longtime-favorite design articles:
https://alistapart.com/article/object-oriented-ux/
https://alistapart.com/article/ooux-a-foundation-for-interaction-design/