Matt Payne and Erin Karper are assigned as responders to this proposal.

What a fascinating project! I had to limit my time there lest I get sucked in and emerge to discover that my afternoon was completely gone. I'm just going to respond to what I saw as the key points:

But as we moved into the next phase of our project, editing the assembled archives, we quickly discovered limitations inherent in the software, which does not allow community participation in the organization of content.

This is a true point; each individual in a community can often organize content to suit him or herself, but there's no real way for multiple individuals to collaborate on organization. For example, on journal systems such as LiveJournal, each user can build an archive of "memories" which are categorized lists of posts. These "memories" can be the user's own journal posts, posts made by others, or posts made to community journals. Community journals can also have their own "memories," which many community maintainers use to archive the journal itself. However, these memories can only be edited by individual users or by community maintainers, not by an entire community. The same archiving-by-individuals can also be seen when people create collections of "favorite" photos or simply bookmark pages. Why has software never developed in ways that allow for community collaboration on archiving? Why is archiving available only at the individual level, and even then only in a scattershot fashion?

Programs like Flickr, created primarily as collection, storage, and sharing facilitators, do not set up useful editorial structures for understanding an archive.

There seems to be an expectation that the software will do all of the archiving work, and that all that's needed for there to be an archive is for someone to assign times, dates, and categories. However, archivists know that chronology and categorization are but the tip of the iceberg.

My questions (which I look forward to seeing answered in your paper) are these: What would a "useful editorial structure for understanding an archive" be? Would it require re-engineering or re-understanding our current methods for storage and sharing online? Are there ways that we can adapt existing technologies to suit our archival needs? How do the technologies shape our notions of appropriate editoral process and collaboration?

I look forward to reading more about this project.

Thank you for this thoughtful feedback. Your questions are excellent. I would like to respond briefly to a few of them.

Why has software never developed in ways that allow for community collaboration on archiving? Why is archiving available only at the individual level, and even then only in a scattershot fashion?

I have a few insights (but no definitive answer) for this ambitious question. I think the phenomenon of tagging is relatively new and it represents a paradigm shift in our thinking about information and authority. This is a bit of a digression, but it might be interesting to think about the word “tagging” and how it was last used in connection with the graffiti phenomenon of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Tagging was the individual making his/her mark on the complex urban landscape in an effort to be “seen.” I think this is the motivation behind the re-emergence of tagging in the context of the internet landscape, which is becoming increasingly cluttered and noisy in the same way that cities are. Tagging is a way to stand out and be seen, it is a way to connect, it is a way to make your contribution last a little longer and go a little further. It is also a way of representing ownership, and this gets back to my point about the paradigm shift, if we allow anyone to tag anything, that means that everyone owns everything (or at least owns access to everything), and that concept is not very friendly to capitalism. I’m suggesting that some of the roadblocks we are coming up against may have roots in the emerging struggle over ownership in the so-called information age. Take Flickr, for example, the individual is allowed to tag his/her “own” photos, and can give tagging permission to selected friends, but can’t give the item away to everyone for “open tagging.”

Are there ways that we can adapt existing technologies to suit our archival needs?

I'd like to point to a CNN article, posted Tuesday, May 3, 2005 'Tagging' helps unclutter data: Online search categorizes how humans label things. The article gives a good overview of how tagging and social software are being used to organize data. Here are a few examples of adaptations:

Brian Dear adopted tagging for EVDB, an events listing service he launched a month ago, so people can find things they might never know to seek. View a listing, and you see a list of tags it uses. Click on one to get events just like it.

Sites like Technorati not only let you search its own indexes, but also pull items from other sites. So a search for "tsunami" brings together Flickr photos and del.icio.us links besides blog entries -- creating a mini-magazine of sorts on the fly.

The blogging site LiveJournal plans to introduce tags in the next few months as an alternative to categories, and Rojo Networks Inc. launched a service last month for tagging news stories, so no longer are you limited to sorting items by publisher.

These are all interesting solutions, but only stop-gap measures. The problem is we don’t really know how big the digital archive is going to get or what new directions it might take. We are in treadmill mode, just trying to keep up with ourselves. Ostensibly, the output is not going to slow down, so we are going to have to devise software that adequately archives on the fly, using metadata, and somehow taking into account the idiosyncratic way that humans see things.

Archives have traditionally been set up hierarchically, according to categories defined by experts in the field. This is in direct opposition to the tagging system which is spontaneous, fluid, and unbounded. There are advantages to both. To quote the CNN article once again: Hierarchies "are more accurate, but they move less quickly," said David Galbraith, founder of a tag-based wish list called Wists. "It takes a long time for people to sit down and agree on them." I probably don't need to point out that the pace of internet information growth seems to preclude the “sitting down and agreeing” time required by a hierarchical system. On the other hand, the tagging system does not offer a definitive overview of the entire archives. It represents a kalidoscopic collection of viewpoints rather than the cohesive, panoramic vision we are used to.

I love this project and have a few questions about this, the part I find most intriguing:

questions the project raised about the role of the editor in a networked environment; and how social software might be modified to enhance the editorial process.

What exactly were the problems you encountered? The collective could not sort? How are you defining editing (e.g. Is it sorting only, how does shaping differ from sorting)? How were you looking to sort the archive? I think one of the key issues here is how much control you want to allow the masses for a project that you (Institute) began? The proposal seems to say that the collective could not understand the collection (nice phrasing, btw): but how much archival know-how can you assume—for instance, if you archive a certain way and then someone comes and messes with it, is that always a good thing just because it seems democratic?

I often wonder how much control I should grant my students, for example, in such group efforts and so I am really interested in this topic (and, okay, I am a bit hinky because I never could find my gates photo in the archive!).

virginia kuhn
http://www.uwm.edu/~vkuhn/

Virginia, thanks for these questions. They really help clarify the issues. I’ve got a few brief responses.

We are not actually deleting or altering anything in the archives. So editing, for this project, will be more of a sorting and re-assembling activity. The tagging system allows editors to collect photos and stories by giving them a specific tag. To eliminate something from your presentation, you simply leave it untagged. We are thinking of the editing process in as an ignoring process.

The problems were related to the software, which does not allow the collective to sort. We are trying to find ways to work around this. But for the moment, the archive is essentially trapped in the software.

How were you looking to sort the archive? I think one of the key issues here is how much control you want to allow the masses for a project that you (Institute) began?
We debated that amongst ourselves. I was an advocate for turning over as much control as possible. The objective is to create an electronic book with a formal structure that acknowledges the conceptual underpinnings of the Gates, whose creators purposely gave the meaning-making process over to the public.

When we tried to edit this ourselves, we found that the each of us had not just one, but several ideas that we wanted to express, but none of us had a definitive understanding of the archives. I imagine that will be the situation on a wider scale when we figure out how to extend privileges to everyone. We assume each person will invent his/her own approach, although this probably makes the task more daunting, perhaps unnecessarily so. I imagine that networked books will evolve formats or organizational templates that one can choose as a kind of scaffold. As far as someone messing with the work, maybe a versioning model would work to solve that problem. Group efforts are always interesting, sometimes the group really pulls it off, designs systems for self-governance and uses each insight to distill an interesting perspective, and sometimes it doesn’t.