Paper short abstract:

An exploratation of involuntarily intentional data loss, which reflects the biases, often unconscious, of the person/s gathering and/or interpreting the information, rather than wllful action. This relates to artistic practice and digital curation conducted at Malta's National Museum of Archaeology.

Paper long abstract:

Intentional data loss seems anathema in the context of the work of the Digital Curation Lab (DCL), where the impossibility of archiving everything regularly informs work on archival retention policies. Nevertheless, retention and preservation policies are not adopted widely and consistently in the heritage sector, where the DCL is engaged. One recent project with Heritage Malta, revealed creative possibilities when working with data loss, specifically data loss that is involuntarily intentional. By this we mean data that reflects the biases, often unconscious, of the person/s gathering and/or interpreting the information, rather than wllful action. This is one aspect of the intentional data loss discussed in Data Feminism (D'Ignazio & Klein, 2020), where challenging binary gender norms involves questioning hierarchical classification systems.

DCL work through Wikidata on the conventional data about prehistoric female figurines captured at the National Museum of Archaeology in Malta, has provided an opportunity for art making, which is as much an interpretation of lost data, mishandled data, and data that has actually been captured for official purposes (Sant & Tabone, 2023). The artist creates data art (visual and/or aural) to interpret both what is and what is not present in the data. The subjective description of what an archeological anthropomorphic object depicts thus becomes a medium for the creation of new art interpreting the involuntarily intentional data loss.

In this presentation, DCL Director Toni Sant and the artist Enrique Tabone continue to explore the work initiated by Tabone in 2019 on exploring Wikidata as an artistic medium.