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- Convenors:
-
James Leach
(CNRS - CREDO - Aix-Marseille Université)
Céline Travési (CREDO-Aix Marseille University)
Annapurna Mamidipudi (Deutsches Museum)
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- Stream:
- Evidence
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
What does responsible documentation look like today? We wish to explore forms for documentation that are responsive to different ways of knowing. What are the consequences, and the possibilities, when we understand documentation itself could be an exchange about what knowledge is and can do?
Long Abstract:
Assumptions about knowledge that have prevailed since the European enlightenment impel an alienated view of knowledge (as detach-able from persons and processes). In this mode, the gathering of information for documentation is responsible for constituting the positions of document-er and documented, data gatherer and data gathered, and the subsequent translation and transformation of the knowledge of the practitioner into knowledge about the practitioner.
This session seeks to explore whether we can reformulate the process of documentation itself to constitute different outcomes/positions for the people involved. The idea is to see how we could make documentation a process, a relationship, responsive to an understanding that there are different ways of doing knowledge, and different modes for value to accrue in those processes.
Two matters of concern are intended to shape contributions to the session. First, we are interested by 'incomplete' and 'material' practices of documentation and their relation to the effects of documentation.
Second the focus on relationships, on attempting to grasp not the document or the knowledge it represents, but the relation that documentation produces (or can produce) between knowledge and document, and between those involved. Participants are invited to engage debates around the history of craft knowledge, of professional practice, of indigenous knowledge, of material and artistic practice, the process and value of documenting cultural heritage, of writing and producing academic knowledge in experimental forms, and deliberately relational modes of documentation and writing.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Tools for visualisation are widespread for data collection in the sciences as well as in the humanities. Yet, these tools are employed differently, causing different ways of knowing and doing. This paper explores the relationship between media, tools, practices and the resulting kinds of data.
Paper long abstract:
During the process of scientific knowledge production, opaque as well as transparent surfaces are created. To examine this phenomenon and the related processes of data collection, an ethnographic study with evolutionary biologists has been carried out. Starting with analysing the partly manually performed practices during data collection in the field, like note-taking, drawing and video recording, the study aims to shed light on the transformations these data undergo from raw data to their presentation as scientific results in journals.
In this paper, it is first shown how the production of opaque and transparent surfaces of data relate to the different modes of observing and collecting. The role of the methods, tools and media employed are studied as well as the different steps of transformation from field-data into so called robust office-data. Secondly, the paper addresses how these surfaces act as thick and thin filters, what they help to filter out, what is added and what becomes visible through those transformations. Special attention is put on how these different kinds of data relate to and represent the researched and the researchers. It thirdly, allows drawing attention to the differences of data collection practices in the individual disciplines, namely natural sciences and social anthropology.
Lastly, this approach shall help to embark on a discussion on how the production of opaque surfaces, as I suggest it is the case in the case study, against transparent surfaces as they are more likely found in social anthropology, facilitate different ways of doing and knowing.
Paper short abstract:
Raga, composition, and notation form an important triad in knowledge processes in Carnatic music. Is composition a creative expression of the composer or documentation of raga? To what extent can notation, a written document, help in knowing the aural aesthetic of a musical composition, and how?
Paper long abstract:
In the Carnatic music system, two terms that are most significant are ‘raga’ and ‘composition’. Raga refers to the melodic material based on which any performance happens. While composition is a specific melodic structure that summarizes the characteristics and dimensions of the raga it is based on. Composition therefore can be a tool for documenting the form and character of a raga at a given context. It is at the same time a creative statement of the composer, at the instant of its expression. With time, this statement becomes a marker for tradition, sometimes, the only guide to understanding the raga, and sometimes, an archive for the raga’s history. Thus, becoming a guide to the knowledge of the raga.
In the context of documentation, another aid that has gained considerable prominence in the last two centuries is notation. The ways in which notation is thought of – as an aid to memory, as a documentational tool, or as a feature which could make melodic perception linear- makes for a multi layered relationship between composition and notation. This leads to interesting ideas about responsibility of the performer towards the composer, the composition and context; as well as using notation as a memory aid or a tool to melodic retrieval.
In this paper I will look at raga, composition, and notation in relation to each other, as well as, in combination with the musician, for whom they form a part of the process of ‘knowing’ the music.
Paper short abstract:
This talk will explore the possibility that dance is a field of expert knowledge that can be studied from the perspective of documents created by dancers and choreographers whose anticipated viewers/ readers are mainly other practitioners.
Paper long abstract:
That dancers know something is not in question in those places and networks dance artists work in professionally, the field in which they are employed to teach, create and perform. These activities are primarily associated with movement(s) of the body, and it is assumed much of what is known is acquired and transmitted through experience. This sets up the perspective that dance as a form of knowledge is of the know-how variety, tacit, intuitive (a felt sense) and embodied. The idea this knowledge can be transmitted through its documentation is generally resisted. Therefore dance documentation is often associated with a culture of fixation, validation and evidencing. However, during the last 20 years, a number of dance practitioners have been involved in making documents with the intention of sharing what they know with others, inside but also outside the dance field. The study of these efforts has tended to focus on the individual practitioners involved and the implications for dance knowledge being circulated in some kind of explicit form. Thinking of these documents as 'trade literature' (created by dancers for other dancers) introduces a space to consider the value of what cannot be made explicit and in support of the bodily entanglement of different ways of knowing.