Digital Materiality and Subjectivation: Methodological Aspects of Hybrid Entanglements in Processes of Bildung

This chapter explores possible connections among discourse analysis, materiality and biographical research in the context of subjectivation. The extant methodological/epistemological concepts linking the Foucauldian idea of discourse with biographical research do not provide clear openings for the incorporation of materiality, specifically those in digital form. This chapter proposes an adapted, modified approach to the analysis of material-discursive practices to the end of investigating the materiality and mediality of relationally understood processes of Bildung. In so doing, it identifies a need for a post-anthropocentric understanding of the biographical that focuses on the variety of socio-medial relational reconfigurations.

Affordance in Socio-Material Networks: A Mixed Method Study of Researchers' Groups and Analog-Digital Objects

In this paper, we argue that we can better understand the relationship between social interaction and materiality by linking qualitative analysis of analog and digital practices, adopting Basov's model of socio-material networks. Our research questions turn about the interrogation of how social links distress the usage of analog and digital objects by researchers. We consider scientific networks with the relationship between researchers and their tools as a three-level social material network. It sheds light on how different types of researchers position their engagement with analog and digital materiality over time and its affordance and emotional attachment. This study contributes to the understanding of researchers' practices that involve new and old techniques and specific and not-specific tools.

Special Issue Editorial: Digital (and) Materiality in Museums

The editorial provides a broad contextualization of recent and developing theoretical and empirical examinations of digital materiality in museums. This Special Issue includes seven papers, which cover a range of theorizations, issues and challenges that arise in the intersection of digital and materiality in museum and heritage contexts.

Building Shared Guardianship through Blockchain Technology and Digital Museum Objects

This article considers the notion of shared guardianship in the context of digital museum objects and blockchain technology, arguing that this technology can contribute to the production of value in digital museum objects that goes beyond the monetary. Shared guardianship is understood to be a process of prioritizing the experience of others and forming a diverse set of stakeholders that transforms understandings around ownership; meanwhile, a blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology which can be used to identify digital files and so make them feel ownable and authentic. As such, this paper argues that blockchain technology could create a new layer of materiality and value in digital museum objects which could support the formation of shared guardianship. This question will be analysed in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of digital materiality and a case study project at the National Museums Liverpool, UK, which investigated how to implement blockchain technology in the museum context in order to produce collective ownership and meaningful, connected digital objects.

Chasing Future Feelings: A Practice-led Experiment with Emergent Digital Materialities of Heritage

High-fidelity imaging methods such as laser scanning and digital photogrammetry have captured public and professional audiences in a flurry of optimistic discourse about their capacities as forms of preservation and of archaeological recording and interpretation. With technical finesse and mastery, endangered heritage can, it is argued, be captured, re-materialized, and recovered from the forces that threaten it. As the plot concerning our ‘digital futures’ thickens, we discuss here an experimental project that offers an oblique approach to the practice of 3D visualization, one that subverts the dominance of neutral, technical field engagements. We examine digital materiality by exploring digital heritage objects as both method and site of ethnographic encounter. Orbiting the ruins of Asinou, an abandoned village in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, with our ‘low-tech’ equipment, we sought to observe the conditions of the ‘in-between’ of two makeshift forms, each as ‘real’ as the other. We focus our thinking on the tensions of translation that play on the surface of our technically crude digital assemblages, as spaces of generative potential for speculations about encounters with emerging digital materialities, their affective capacities and status as future heritage objects.

The material world of digital fictions

This paper explores the interdependency between digital matter and the representational or mimetic layer of the digital game object. The main aim is to foreground the mechanisms by which the representationalelements of the game world emerge from the materiality of the process of play. These mechanisms are examined from the perspective of the ontology of the game object. The issue of digital materiality will be linked with the aesthetical explorations of Tadeusz Kantor, who emphasised the relation between the materiality of the theatre and its fictional elements. As the main example of this analysis, I will focus on Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015) as an example of a game that plays with the boundaries between the fictional world being presented and the elements of digital materiality that are usually hidden from the player’s sight.

Digital material value: Designing emerging technologies

In this article, we examine how the digital material value of emerging technologies is articulated in technology design contexts. We argue that here digital material value lies not in the monetisation of an artefact or product but in the opening up of possibilities for its use. Thus, to generate digital material value, a certain configuration of things and processes that enables its value to be relevant is required. We develop this through a processual theory of digital materiality, which attends to how the affordances of digital material things emerge in shifting circumstances, and a corresponding theory of value. To demonstrate how this happens in human experience and action, we draw on ethnographic research with drone developers in Australia. Studying digital materiality through emerging technologies goes beyond seeing technologies and data as finished commodities that are modified when consumed towards studying the incompleteness of the technology design process itself.

Editorial: Learning and Development

Learning and development are the focus of The Journal of Education and Selfdevelopment. In the computation era, the contexts and spaces for learning need to be reconsidered. In early learning, the child acts in an approximate environment interacting with parents and also mediated by artefacts. The child learns by sensing human touch and non-verbal communication as well as from the material world surrounding her. Interaction in this approximate environment affords a child in its learning and development through the socialisation process. In post-digital era, the environment is constructed in societal processes utilising physical and digital materiality. The proliferation of digital technologies is affecting socialisation and perception of reality (materiality of physical and digital and transmedia practices) and the child’s agency. How the interaction process takes place utilising a set of media is affecting self-development and self-conception. The environment is established by social practices which in post-digital era blur the boundary between physical and digital. In defining literacy, the terms online and offline activity are introduced (Sefton-Green, Marsh, Erstad, & Flewitt, 2016). The boundaries between physical and virtual are blurred (Marsh, 2010; Plowman, 2016).