GraphSince its inauguration in 1975, de Appel presented 1131 events and exhibitions, made in collaborations with 29.682 people, 945 collectives, and 4.134 institutes from 436 cities and 68 countries. It had 6 directors, and 5 interim directors, and occupied 7 different addresses in Amsterdam and had at least one nomadic period. The Archive of de Appel today has around 13.188 books, 3.043 magazines, 469 videos and films, 266 audio recordings, 221 posters, 191 artworks, 113 articles and innumerable photographs.
De Appel Archive tells a multitude of stories about De Appel’s living past and lively present through books, ephemera, video, audio, manuscripts, correspondence, witness reports and art.
The documentation centre that the founder of De Appel, Wies Smals, started in 1975 is now known as De Appel Archive. The archive is constantly being expanded with records like books, ephemera, video, audio, manuscripts, correspondence, witness reports and art works of exhibitions and performances, but also of lectures, symposia, informal presentations, conversations and other events.
Biblio-graph is an application intended for cultural libraries. It works as a tool to create a digital representation of fragments of their physical collections. It is a community sourced environment for data aggregation, mapping and visualisation of the collection.
Biblio-graph works as an interaction layer, consisting of a semantic layer and a graph database that sits on top of the existing databases of libraries. Through Biblio-graph readers, researchers and staff will be able to interfere, manipulate, share and reuse data without affecting the original database.
Prior to appearing on Biblio-graph, publications receive an RFID tag. Once placed on a RFID-table, our software pairs the object with the corresponding record in the database. The reader can then capture one or more pages, and they will be added to the record of the object, and thus enrich the database.
There are two views available. The Timeline view offers a history of all pages added by the community. This view gives an idea of what people are reading in the library over time. It shows new pages in real time and lets the viewer browse back. The Graph view gives an overview of all the objects.
Next steps:
Biblio-graph will allow people with domain specific knowledge, but who are not necessarily technically skilled, to contribute by adding linked data to the database. As a result of aggregating data, Biblio-graph will offer a menu of functions that allow for ongoing mapping, visualisation, navigation and browsing of the entire collection.
Disclaimer:
Biblio-graph is a work-in-progress and an art project. It promotes digital literacy and is intended for research and educational purposes only, without any commercial interests.
Archival Consciousness was initiated by artist Mariana Lanari and graphic designer Remco van Bladel to collaborate with libraries and archives in cultural institutions. We work in close collaboration with archivists to implement methods and infrastructure to turn their collections into data. We are interested in the long term preservation and dissemination of physical archives, in connection with the digital archive. The digital component of archives, their databases, are the starting point of our work. We are developing a shared and community driven graph that acts as an interaction layer on top of the existing databases of libraries and archives. In this way, we bring linked-data aggregation to the application layer, to serve the user in the frontend, subverting its current use intended for search engines. This will facilitate browsing and navigation through explorative features of graph algorithms.
Data Architecture • Mariana Lanari
Design • Remco van Bladel
Design assistants • Julia Waraksa, Mathijs Affman
UI/UX and front-end development • Joes Koppers, USE.media
Back-end development • Paul Jongsma, Webtic
Curator de Appel Archive • Nell Donkers
Technical Support de Appel • Jan Jaap Spreij
Thanks to:
Staff Archive de Appel: Mohamad Dib, Jacquine van Elsberg, Jan van Geem, Judith de Bruyn, Matt Hinkley, Artemis Christidi, Lynn Salentijn, Harald van Eck.
Curatorial Program: Monika Georgieva, Chala Westerman, Ka-Tjun Hau, Melissa Appleton.
RFID tagging: Lotte Donkers, Thomas van den Hoorn, Annepiet Nouwen, Elle Horsselenberg, Jade Poolen, Emma Vermeyerek, Edith van Kan, Danai Giannoglou, Liza Nijhuis, Lucie von Eugen, Clara Tibery.
Contact:
info@archivalconsciousness.org
Archival Consciousness is part of ACKnowledge, Art Routes from the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA), 2020 and supported by Creative Industries fund NL, Digital Culture program and MediaFutures. This project has received funding from the European Union’s framework Horizon 2020 for research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 951962
