"On Archiving"
We just had a great conversation with @dusjagr @Ryuoyama and introduction by @agryfp_hack, aka Andrew Gryf Paterson, discussing the importance and practical preparations for being able to archive our collaborative process based and media related practices. He has a load of experiences from his commitments to pixelache, fermentlab and his own academic research, especially focusing on using the Internet Archive platform archive.org.
As this is also a topic we wanted to reflect upon and dig into for our activities during Oki Wonder Lab we are happy to welcome @agryfp_hack as a remote participant, which he already have done many many times over the last 10 years. Andrew mentioned some very practical tips on how to prepare in advance about the meta information for a new entry to archive.org.
We discussed the following practices and looked at the example of [2018] Ystävänpäivän hapankaali
- Think about a meaningful url descriptor, also called “identifier” (it cannot be changed afterwards)
- The person uploading the entry (call it the librarian) can be a project group
- The authors of the work are in the meta data, can be many
- Language has to be defined (sadly you can only choose a single language)
- Think and prepare beforehand which licences to use. eg. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
- One entry to archive.org can contain many files
- Be nice to archivers… it can be a boring and lonely job
- in the case of a document, an uploaded .pdf will automatically be confirmed into many other formats
- Use the description field, to copy from your project some texts, add links to other documentations.
- There will be a date when the entry was uploaded. AND a date for the publication of the work (think of being an archiver/historian of work done by people who lived and died 300 years ago)
- In our case the archiver and author can be quite often the same person
So… in fact the platform archive.org is mostly for archiving websites, books, now more and more video and audio. Using it for photo, is possible, but it’s not yet developed in the most userfriendly way.
Then we started to play around with the wayback machine from archive.org Hackteria has in the beginning very much focused on providing an online platform for sharing instructions and collaborating, mostly through the mediawiki platform hosted on our website. Let’s look back in time…
While the wiki already is an archiving platform it’s fun to look back. See our “plans” or call it “just a rumour” of hosting another edition of Hackteria Lab 2017, out of which mbe the Biohack Retreat Klöntal and the HUMUS.Spapiens retreats emerged and the HackteriaLab TW / HLabX shifted to what is starting now in Okinawa, Oki Wonder Lab.
And going even further back on our frontpage of Hackteria.org to “the first” HackteriaLab, happening in Dock18, Zürich Switzerland, 4-11. April 2010 (let’s celebrate the 10 anniversary soon), with @gaudi, @andy gracie, @stefan doepner, @mazon, @Antony Hall, @Verena Friedrich, @Alejo Duque, @Lisa Thalheim and many more local visitors…
"Islands and Isolation"
We then shifted to other topics, showing us around in our kitchenlabs and discussed life and love of being on an island, from Tarvo to Okinawa. As described earlier in the forum we have choosen the Theme of “Isolation” from the more trivial starting point of connecting the islands of Java, Taiwan and Okinawa, or the political island of Switzerland.
As we are now experiencing a very unique situtaion that tells us how “Isolation” (even more so on national boarders) seems to be purely political and cultural construct and an illusion, both conceptual human interaction, mindfulness, care and collaborative thinking, aswell as a viral pandemic, cannot isolate us from each other.
