Rose Butler takes part in ‘Archiving Care’ hosted by NeMe – September 2024

Traditionally archives perform abstractions, suggest connections and compatibilities, and offer a perspective. Although our call for speakers asked for a critical re-interpretation of archives as historically infected collections with “‘politically dubious biases, patriarchal, colonial agendas, and represent ideological modes of control,” and discuss their new challenges n the age of AI, no submission touched these themes. The call though posed more questions, some of which were addressed.

What does it mean to archive care? Does archiving re-enforce limitations of thought, interpretation, and/or action? We ask these questions in the context of more and more demands on digital archives by new big data and AI technologies that corrupt one of the basic functional necessities of the archives, to document and preserve. Now, the new paradigm poses a contradiction for researchers who are expected to yield validated outputs and extends the function of the archive beyond its historical context, transforming it into tools that generate a-historical content that emulates fiction rather than accounted factual information.

For this COST funded symposium we return to the beginning and scrutinise methodologies of archiving, the specifics of data, database, and content.

The speakers, Rose Butler, Amine Haj Taieb, Kaitlene Koranteng, Alessandro Ludovico, Rosa Menkman, Paul O’ Neill, Christos Panagiotou, Paula Perez-Roda, and Morten Søndergaard, were selected through an open call.