Crowdsourcing historical photographs: autonomy and control at the Copenhagen City Archives

This study of crowdsourcing practices at Kbhbilleder.dk at the Copenhagen City Archives provides a rich description of how motivation and work relations are situated in a wider infrastructure of different tools and social settings. Approximately, 94% of the work is here done by 7 of the 2,433 participants. The article contributes insights into how these super-taggers carry out their work, describing and placing images on a map, through an extensive discursive effort that takes place outside the institution’s more limited interface in private discussion forums with over 60 000 participants. The more exploratory qualitative work that is going on in different discussion groups does not fit within the archive’s technical framework. Instead, alternative archives are growing within privately owned networks, where participants’ own collections merge with images from public archives. Rather than focusing on the nature of participants’ motivation, the article suggests a relational perspective on participation that is useful for analyzing a systems’ support for participation. Pointing out how people’s motivation in citizen science correspond with relational and intra-relational aspects enables an approach to system design that potentially supports or counteracts these aspects.

New approaches to dating intermittently varved sediment, Columbine lake, Colorado, USA

Annually laminated lake sediment can track paleoenvironmental change at high-resolution where alternative archives are often not available. However, information about both paleoenvironmental change and chronology are often affected by indistinct and intermittent varves. We present an approach that overcomes these and other obstacles by using a quantitative varve quality index combined with a multi-core, multi-observer Bayesian varve sedimentation model that quantifies realistic under- and over-counting uncertainties while integrating information from radiometric measurements (210Pb, 137Cs, and 14C) into the chronology. We demonstrate this approach on thin sections of indistinct and intermittently varved sequences from alpine Columbine Lake, Colorado. The integrated model indicates 3137 (95 percentile highest density probability range: 2753–3375) varve years with a cumulative posterior distribution of counting uncertainties of −13/+7 % indicative of systematic observer undercounting. The sedimentary features of the thin and complex varves shift through time, from normally graded couplets to couplets interrupted with coarser sub-laminae, to inversely graded couplets. We interpret the normal grading couplets as spring nival discharge followed by winter settling, the coarser sub-laminae as high rainfall events, and the inverse grading as hyperpycnal flows and/or pulses of dust related to human impact changing the varve formation mechanism. Our novel approach provides a realistic constraint on sedimentation rates and quantifies uncertainty in varve counts by quantifying over- and under-counting uncertainties related to observer bias and the quality and variability of the sediment appearance. The approach permits the construction of a varve chronology and sedimentation rates for sites with intermittent or indistinct varves, which are likely more prevalent than sequences with distinct varves, and thus, expands the possibilities of reconstructing past environmental change with high resolution.

More Lessons to Learn: Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology and Alternative Archives of Social Experience

Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology has been written with the intention to offer lessons from the historical trajectory of economic redistribution in societies the world over. Thereby, the book suggests learning from the political-economic history of ‘social-democratic’ policies and societal arrangements. While the data presented speak to the plausibility of looking at social democracy, as understood by Piketty, as an archive for learning about the effects of redistribution mechanisms, I argue that the book, or future interventions might profit from integrating alternative archives. On the one hand, its current line of argumentation tends to underestimate the significance of power relations in the international political economy that continued after formal decolonization, and thus form the flip side of social democracy’s success in Europe and North America. On the other hand, the role of the polity might be imagined in a different and more empowering way, not just-as in Piketty-as an elite-liberal democratic governance institution; for instance, it would be interesting to explore the archive of the French solidaristes movement more deeply than Piketty does, as well as much more recent interventions in economic anthropology that deal with ‘economic citizenship’ in the Global South.

Archives, Bureaucracies, Architecture: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

Editorial Summary In her text, Anna-Maria Meister focuses on the production and dissemination of norms, normed objects, standards, bureaucratic measures, and administrative processes as social desires in German modern architecture. She states that we must treat them as formal and political acts of »Gestaltung« and critically probe their ideological intent and human consequence since the regulations in place, the order imagined, or the systems constructed were as formative to what we now know as Modern Architecture, as aesthetics or so-called Avant-Garde architects. As a result, rules and codes are »aesthetic tools« rather than mere »bureaucratic impediments«. She claims that it is necessary to research beyond the beaten path to include those contents that are usually left by the wayside, thus revealing and constructing alternative archives and histories. [Ferdinand Ludwig]

The Poetics of Place and Expressions of Oppositional Memory

The Black Atlantic creation of alternative archives illustrated in Parisa Urquhart’s 2019 documentary Strike for Freedom, which chronicles the unveiling of a historical plaque in Edinburgh to commemorate Frederick Douglass’s activism while he was in exile in Scotland, has a long and meaningful history. People without control over—or even access to—papers of state, conquerors’ memoirs, or officially commissioned histories have carried out the work of recovering, remembering, and reimagining the past through creative deployment of the meager tools at their disposal: stories, songs, and other forms of expressive culture and decoration, including three-dimensional artifacts of material culture such as medallions, buttons, drums, coins, statues, and Masonic aprons. In this article, we survey past and present manifestations of countermemory, place making, and place marking to locate Strike for Freedom within a larger story of oppositional countermemory.

Born digital: The Black lives matter movement and memory after the digital turn

The dominance of traditional, institutionalized archives and memory platforms has been more and more challenged by the emergence of digital networks and “peer-to-peer” memory practices. This article argues that memory practices on social media platforms provide minority groups with affordances that established archives do not. Therefore, I will analyze tweets, Tumblr posts and a YouTube video in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA. Social media platforms can act as alternative archives to institutionalized archives and related systems of knowledge and power. While traditional archives focus on the representation of events, memory practices on social media platforms can also stress structural and slow forms of violence and their embeddedness in the everyday, point to historical continuities and make memories travel, thus establishing transnational and transcultural networks of mnemonic entanglements.