Beyond Three Dimensions: Managing Space, Time and Subjectivity in your Data

Why are we digitizing multimedia content of our heritage? Why are we spending important effort and money to create exact digital copies of our pictures, vases, manuscripts, historical archives, early movies and photographs, archeological artefacts, etc. Why is it important to capture not just the gist and the content of the artefacts, but every minute detail, the texture, the colors, every imperfection, every stain caused by time and handlers that have held and used them across centuries? One possible reason is that the gist and the content of the artefacts are not the only part of them that we are fascinated with. One possible reason is that the stories we want to tell and to be told on these artefacts are about their textures, their colors, their imperfections, their stains. It is the stories, not the artefacts, that are important. Digitized multimedia content and descriptive metadata are important as long as they allow and integrate derivative works: scholarly treaties, divulgation works, text books at schools, touristic guides, travel magazines, art magazines, cultural magazines, etc., are the means through which people access and enjoy our heritage. Without them, we would be left with boring lists of numbers and names and images. Stories not only represent how specific humans see and think about our artefacts: they are points of view that enrich data with context and interpretation, transforming the boring lists of numbers and names and images into interesting narratives that teach and entertain. As such, they are subjective, and they provide context. Getting ready to allow, support, expect and even encourage subjectivity and contextualization in our derivative works, in our stories, require that we also organize the data itself, and the descriptive metadata, to be subjective and contextualized and, more important, multiple. Technologies exist and are plentiful. Yet, few if any datasets and collections of digitized content and descriptive metadata over heritage artefacts are designed and structured from the beginning so as to support and accommodate or handling multiple independent, often inconsistent or contrasting, contextualized points of view over the same asset. We need to learn to embrace complexity and enjoy the disagreements and the scholarly disagreements and conflicts: they represent our understanding of our past much better than monolithic and synthetic points on view and make up for much better and memorable stories, which is what counts.