Lindisfarne, Northumberland - the Bishop's Palace?

Notes from Michael Shanks on collaborative authoring, co-creation, wikis, blogs and agile data management

For some years my lab (http://metamedia.stanford.edu) and I have been experimenting with personal content management environments, cocreative and social software, collaborative authoring

• we have built web sites

• managed large research projects - Mobile Media 2015 Performing Presence The Three Landscapes Project

• run large classes - Human and Machine (this was the run in 2006) - part of the IHUM (Introduction to the Humanities) Program at Stanford

• composed "site reports" - dossiers on place-events - Monte Polizzo, Three rooms ...

I am fascinated by the kinds of accounts produced of the past, of things, fascinated by the emergent insights that come with collaborative research that operates with a flat management hierarchy - with no one effectively in charge.

See - Collaboration and research networks in the Humanities

My basic interest is in building rich encounters with sites, collections, materials, texts, narratives - rich empirical encounters that are open because they do not pre-order the object of interest by presuming categories, narratives, structures.

This is an heretical empirics

• empirics - the rich attention and retention of detail and texture

• heretical - because of the denial of orthodox categories and accounts

Premises and arguments for this heretical empirics -

• information is a verb - an argument for dynamic documentation [link]

• heretical empirics and historiography [link]

• agile information design and archaeological authorship - [link]

Elsewhere I describe some basic operating principles for blogs, wikis, and broadly for this heretical empirics -

Basic functions - wikis

Wiki guidelines

Design principles

also - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples

Wabi Sabi

It is also clear to me now that this new way of organizing data, encounters, writing, publishing involves a distinctive philosophy of design - one that relates in very interesting ways to "wabi-sabi" - the zen philosophy of design.

values

• impermanence

• transience

• imperfection

• the incomplete

• organic decay and ruin

• absence as much as presence

• negative space and void

• relational value - that things come to have value in their specific relation/juxtaposition (momentary and site specific) with other things

attitude

• attention to small details

• site specific, located encounter - and so self-effacing, denying panoptic control beyond the particular

• "I have nothing to say" - having no a priori pretensions to make grand statements

• listening to things and others

experiences

• actuality - the intersection of two local present moments

• getting lost in the details

• process and flow as much as the end destination

• connection and emergence

• agile adaption to local interest

• aleatoric encounter

• multiplicity and mutability

forms

• imperfect, unfinished

• irregular, inconsistent and asymmetrical

• corroded and contaminated

• mutable dynamic approximations

• repurposed forms - reworked for the local task - bricolage

• devolved and entropic

• blurred

• things not as bundles of properties and attributes, but relationally distributed

The irony is that such a design philosophy is far from remote and abstract, but profoundly grounded and holistic.

Links to wabi sabi

• http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WabiSabi

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

• http://www.art.unt.edu/ntieva/artcurr/asian/wabisabi.html

• http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/koren203.htm

• http://ana.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc//nontech/wabisabi.html

Have a look at Helen Shanks - ceramics

Chorography - noise - steps towards a regional archaeology