Open public workshops with Wikimedia UK
DIGITAL ARCHIVE OF ARTISTS PUBLISHING
Sat. Dec. 7th 2-5pm at Wikimedia UK
Join us for an ongoing series of workshops to open up the strategies and software that the technological team are developing for the Digital Archive of Artists Publishing, with a focus on the software applications developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, and how these can contribute to a more ethically driven archival process.
Please come along and bring your own items ready for upload, data about the items and any anecdotal histories that you wish to share.. The workshops will involve software training and user testing sessions. These will in turn inform the design and development of the technological stack of the archive.
More details about the workshop: Attendance to the previous workshop from the series is not required. For the second workshop, members of the Wikimedia UK team will briefly recap the introduction to Wikimedia and its applications, presented in the first workshop, highlighting the key features of the Wiki software which facilitate community contributions, and effective sharing of knowledge across platforms, languages and communities. Members of the Digital Archive team will also describe the goals of the digital archive and how the development of the archive, itself, attempts to address traditional problems associated with the ethics of archival processes.
This workshop will focus on practical work with the archive database. A demonstration will present all the steps – from start to finish – necessary to start adding and editing materials in the database. Participants will have the option to work with their own materials or with sample materials from the Banner Repeater archive. Throughout the workshop there will be time for questions and discussions, particularly focusing on the ethics and biases which may be explicitly or implicitly embedded in database and archive infrastructures.
To reserve a place please fill out this short form: https://forms.gle/1YDmoyTGP2s253Vb6
Venue: Wikimedia Offices, Office 1, Ground Floor, Europoint, 5-11 Lavington Street, London SE1 0NZ.
more details about the Banner Repeater Digital Archive of Artists Publishing here
and below
Banner Repeater Digital Archive of Artists' Publishing
Inspired by the site of Banner Repeater: a hub of artistic activity with an Archive of Artists’ Publishing on Hackney Downs train station with over 11,000 passengers passing a day, we are building a Digital Archive of Artists' Publishing responding to the need for similar accessibility, in an online context, for a growing community of people engaged with Artists publishing. In tandem with this, the publicly sited resource of the Archive on platform 1, home to over a thousand Artists’ books and publications, is also undergoing refurbishment, to be launched alongside the digital archive, to celebrate Banner Repeaters 10th anniversary in 2020.
The digital archive has been in development for over 3 years, and over this time, increasingly sophisticated software has developed, which means we are now in a position to intensify our efforts, with the support of Wikimedia UK.
We are building an online platform that will provide an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of Artists’ Books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by artists, publishers, and a community of producers in contemporary Artists’ Publishing. Built to accommodate anecdotal histories and multiple points of view, it will become a real time index of practices of production, coupled with an important social history of networked culture. The wiki style approach will mean that users can upload their own material, single items, or entire collections, choosing appropriate sharing permissions at time of upload.
With an emphasis on inclusivity we aim to privilege anecdotal histories and multiple perspectives alongside factual data, establishing an important new precedent in digital, as well as analogue archival practice. The archive project is committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives that come of issues regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a post-colonial, critical gender and LGBTQI perspective. The project will work to ensure an equitable and ethical design process occurs throughout the archive development. Anyone participating in the landscape of Artists Publishing is welcome to join our user community as active collaborators and stakeholders.