Affect, Algorithms, and Archives

Affect, Algorithms, and Archives: Reclaiming Emotions and Relationality in Digital Spaces

Archives reclaim lost narratives, solidify uncharted connections, and discover (yet) unknown futures for archival objects. Scholarship in Archival Studies and Digital Humanities has actively acknowledged issues around equity, diversity, and inclusivity as well as the socio-cultural privileges, which enhance/limit access to archival objects. Digital archives and aggregators represent a drive towards standardization of information discovery across collections, reflecting traditional and colonial methods for organizing and classifying the world. The current rise in algorithmically mediated artistic practices has further flattened the historical and geographical specificities of archival objects, and prevented everyday human reactions to archives from being recorded and legitimized.

This interdisciplinary project will explore how affective responses elicited from audiences of digital archives can be captured, in order to expand and/or modify the remit of an archival object. Through workshops in two sites in the UK and India (Leeds and Bengaluru), human affective responses to a digital archive will be recorded, using artefacts from the British Council’s Art Collection (http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection). The human respondents’ experiences will be purposefully juxtaposed with an AI-mediated reception of the collection and compared, to allow for the development of a new descriptive metadata field called “emotion/affect/response.” The project will challenge the archival logic predicated on the “what happened” approach to collections and focus on “how it matters” to individuals and communities. 

The project will have impact across three specific registers:  

Conceptual: Developing a comparative vocabulary of (affective vs. algorithmic) responses to art that enriches item records in digital archives; 

Public Engagement: Mobilizing a shift toward people-centred practices, through encouraging participation from minority and non-normative subjectivities; 

Capacity-building: Exemplifying how affective value can be recorded in digital archives, to facilitate relational and decolonized approaches to knowledge production.