Short abstract:

This talk focuses on the sociotechnical challenges and ethical considerations associated with creating an open research database and digital archive documenting the pioneering open practices of 90’s digital knowledge infrastructures.

Long abstract:

“THEswissTHING,” established in 1994 in Basel by media artist Barbara Strebel, was a community-organized digital infrastructure to create social connections, share knowledge, and collaborate on artistic projects through open-source practices in the emerging Internet.

In the context of the research and archival project “Sharing Knowledge in the Arts” (2023-27), we create an open research database and digital archive documenting the pioneering open practices of 90’s digital knowledge infrastructures such as THEswissTHING.

Drawing on Linked Open Data (LOD) practices, and a participatory community-approach, we capture and describe complex networks of relationships to develop ontologies of care using the open-source tool Wikibase and the Records in Contexts archival standard (RiC-O 1.0).

This talk will analyze the hands-on creation of the digital archive and delve into ethical questions of collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics in creating such digital archives. We will discuss our technological and conceptual decisions and their social and political implications. Doing so, we will shed light on how data feminist LOD approaches can intervene and contribute to the collective needs of the communities being described and how they can help build towards activating archives.