Archiving Conflicts

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Open assets—a growing category of mostly digital assets, often created communally, and open to everyone, such as Wikipedia and other open-source resources.

A lack of quality metadata is a key problem encountered with mass-digitization projects as institutions strive to "go digital." This paper reports on a pilot study of Metadata Games, a software system that uses computer games to collect information about archival images in libraries and archives as these institutions digitize millions of items across national collections. Games offer a unique advantage for collecting metadata because they can entice users who might normally be inclined to visit archives to explore humanities content and, in the process, contribute to vital records, and they can work in a wide-scale, distributed fashion to collect much more metadata than a typical archives staff member could contribute alone in the same time frame. Metadata Games can be used to enhance knowledge about images associated with particular disciplines and fields, or in interdisciplinary collections. This open-source system is easily customized to meet each institution's needs. By inviting mass participation, Metadata Games opens the door for archivists, researchers, and the public to unearth new knowledge that could radically enhance scholarship across the disciplines. Metadata Games expands what researchers, students, and the public can encounter in their quest to understand the human experience. Games offer great promise for humanities scholarship by uniting the culture of the archives with a diverse user base, including researchers,hobbyists and gamers.

Archives “are not passive storehouses of old stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed” (Schwartz & Cook, 2012, p. 1) and thus they are power devices that create realities by storing and making pieces of evidence accessible.

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Week 1_Notes

In an increasingly polarized world, existing in binaries, where conscious division on the basis of identity has become the norm, the Conflictorium stands for the in-between, beyond the black and white, where the shades of grey are acknowledged and celebrated for the cause of peace. In doing so, we at the Conflictorium envision ourselves as a medium that helps build bridges creatively; highlighting how social change is possible through innovation.

An example of cataloguing the archives in website

A resource centre that houses a physical archive of our past and present and helps build a body of work that inspires us for the future, this archival space is set to hold works ranging from literature to audio-visual material curated to bring together various disciplines like the arts, law, culture and behavioural sciences to facilitate conversations on peace and conflict within its walls. It will also include documentation of experiences involving exhibitions, events and other participants within the Conflictorium while making available know-how of these experiments that lie between the intersection of conflict transformation and art practice. The archival space is envisioned as such to establish ourselves as a space for facilitating meaningful discourse while providing the kind of resources necessary for the same, while also collecting work happening around the world on similar themes.