digital archive
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This article introduces the notion of evolutionary textual environment as the outcome of a digital experiment. The experiment consisted of transforming a digital archive of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet into a changing textual space sustained by role-playing interactions. As conceptual and technical artifact, this living archive expresses an innovative model not only for the literary acts of reading, editing and writing, but also for reimagining the book as a network of reconfigurable and dynamic texts, structures, and actions. The programmed features of the LdoD Archive can be used in multiple activities, including leisure reading, study, analysis, advanced research, and creative writing. Through the integration of computational tools in a simulation space, this collaborative archive provides an open exploration of the procedurality of the digital medium itself. The “unfinished machine” metaphor suggests the open-endedness both of the evolving textual environment and of the computational modeling of literary performativity that sustains the whole experiment.

This article outlines the research being undertaken to develop the Assembling Queer Displacements Archive (AQDA). This open digital archive is the central focus of a research project that will address the lack of understanding of LGBTIQ+[i] experiences of forced displacement. These experiences are unique but have not received adequate attention. The existing body of work on ‘queering archives’ has been focused on challenging the archival approaches and practices in order to either queer these practices and/or make them more inclusive. However, this work has tended to ignore LGBTIQ+ stories of forced displacement. One reason for this lack of engagement is the lack of direct knowledge and experience of such stories by the researchers and archivists themselves. My positionality as an LGBTIQ+ forcibly displaced person has motivated me to embark on the present research project and to demonstrate inclusive practices to address these gaps in archives. In this article I explore the role that positionality plays in creating an LGBTIQ+ forced displacement archive. I offer solutions for creating an inclusive practice to collect stories of LGBTIQ+ forcibly displaced people. These solutions have the potential to support a range of digital archival projects that engage with structurally marginalised and oppressed communities.   [i] It is important to acknowledge that LGBTIQ+ acronym is a Western terminology, which has become adopted in non-western countries for a variety of reasons (Anzaldua, 2009). These reasons include this terminology being a legacy of colonisation, a potential lack of respectful terminology in country languages and out of necessity to adopt commonly used language when engaging globally. These reasons are not limited to those above and may vary in different contexts. When using a term ‘LGBTIQ+’ in this article I am referring to the diversity of sex, gender, sexual orientation, bodies and relationships. The ‘plus’ sign in the acronym signals fluidity and further possible identifications.

The digital archive is often described in opposition to its physical counterpart. Media theorist Wolfgang Ernst has coined the term “dynarchive” to describe the former, a phrase that neatly contrasts digital archival remixability with the statis of the physical archive and its hierarchical fond structure. The article both uses and questions this characterization by examining the archive’s physical and digital document practices in three areas: (1) Hierarchical collection description versus individual document description; (2) Original order versus relevance-based results; and (3) Archival selection practices and the illusion of completeness. Archival structure and description have been central to the authority and evidentiary value of archival documents. Yet both the market logics of the internet and criticism from historically oppressed groups have challenged these connections. Using the dynarchive as a conceptual frame, this article examines archival digitization's potential for decolonization of the archive via its fragmentation into a non-hierarchical web of interrelated documents.

The preservation and analysis of tangible cultural heritage sites have attracted enormous interest worldwide. Recently, establishing three-dimensional (3D) digital archives has emerged as a critical strategy for the permanent preservation and digital analysis of cultural sites. For extant parts of cultural sites, 3D scanning is widely used for efficient and accurate digitization. However, in many historical sites, many parts that have been damaged or lost by natural or artificial disasters are unavailable for 3D scanning. The remaining available data sources for these destroyed parts are photos, computer-aided design (CAD) drawings, written descriptions, etc. In this paper, we achieve an integrated digital archive of a UNESCO World Heritage site, namely, the Borobudur temple, in which buried reliefs and internal foundations are not available for 3D scanning. We introduce a digitizing framework to integrate three different kinds of data sources and to create a unified point-cloud-type digital archive. This point-based integration enables us to digitally record the entire 3D structure of the target cultural heritage site. Then, the whole site is visualized by stochastic point-based rendering (SPBR) precisely and comprehensibly. The proposed framework is widely applicable to other large-scale cultural sites.

AbstractBipedal trackways discovered in 1978 at Laetoli site G, Tanzania and dated to 3.66 million years ago are widely accepted as the oldest unequivocal evidence of obligate bipedalism in the human lineage1–3. Another trackway discovered two years earlier at nearby site A was partially excavated and attributed to a hominin, but curious affinities with bears (ursids) marginalized its importance to the paleoanthropological community, and the location of these footprints fell into obscurity3–5. In 2019, we located, excavated and cleaned the site A trackway, producing a digital archive using 3D photogrammetry and laser scanning. Here we compare the footprints at this site with those of American black bears, chimpanzees and humans, and we show that they resemble those of hominins more than ursids. In fact, the narrow step width corroborates the original interpretation of a small, cross-stepping bipedal hominin. However, the inferred foot proportions, gait parameters and 3D morphologies of footprints at site A are readily distinguished from those at site G, indicating that a minimum of two hominin taxa with different feet and gaits coexisted at Laetoli.

In this article I will discuss the development and creation of the Tutuku digital archive. Tutuku is the name of the digital archive I have created as my nominated creative component for my PhD. Tutuku is coupled with my thesis “He Kohinga Kōrero: A selected group of Māori musicians and performers’ experiences of the 1960s through the Māori Showband movement”. Tutuku contains people’s narratives and experiences, which in turn each have their own mauri or life principle (objectspace, 2020). The narratives could also be described as mana taonga. Mana taonga is a specific Māori curatorial concept that taonga have their own status and power which must be managed and cared for in a culturally appropriate way (Mccarthy, Dorfman, Hakiwai, and Āwhina, 2013, 7). The concept of mana taonga creates the space for indigenous voices to be self-determining in history retelling. Tutuku creates pathways for expanding knowledge on many other subjects. Tutuku is available as an IOS App and web application located at Www.tutuku.co.nz. The second version will be available exclusively for Android devices in the Future. Tutuku will continue on into the future, to be a safe digital space for the sharing of indigenous experiences, culture and histories.