One of the most profound recent tendencies in museums (especially in Western societies) has been the digitization of their collections. Most museums present their digitized collections as databases, which are becoming widely accessible via web pages (Hughes, 2012). To illustrate, the National Library of Wales has been digitizing millions of pages of historic local newspapers and journals. Other digital material is also born-digital like, for example, the Twitter archive in the Library of Congress and might prove useful to history and research (Hughes, 2012, p. 5).

The digital turn has affected people’s relation to archival content. Acts aiming at getting to know the past through the study of the physical items on-site have been replaced by digitized collections and catalogues accessible from any location on earth. Turkel (2011) recognizes that traces from the past associated with the “original” physical object (e.g., the smell of the item, the chemical composition of ink or paper) carry valuable historical and cultural information, although accompanied by costs such as inaccessibility and fragility (p. 288). Material properties of an item can indeed provide social, cultural, historical, and economic understandings.

Up until recently, the narratives around digital technologies highlighted their immateriality (Shep, 2015). Of course, saying that digital artifacts such as software have material properties might not seem to comply with anticipated norms that would require materiality to have physical substances like metallic and wood. Nevertheless, there is the term digital materiality which draws a lot of scholarly attention nowadays (Leonardi, 2010). Several researchers have touched upon the topic of virtual exhibitions and the online digital display of archival content, talking about their materiality. 

Scholars like Kirschenbaum (2008), Dudley (2012), Hayles (2003), and Forlini and Hinrichs (2017) rethink such statements about digital objects and archives arguing in favour of their real materialities. Drucker (2003) talks about “performative materiality” that refers to the importance of interactions and relations between the onlooker and the digital object (para. 4). In this post, I will present the scholarly debate around the materiality of digital artefacts and describe how Drucker’s “performative materiality” helps in understanding the potential of these objects as means of narratives and heritage carriers.  Then, I will examine a case study of the 3D collection of the Smithsonian Institutions and most particularly the 3D representation of the Apollo Command Module 11.

What is a Collection? 

Collections, in general, are sets of objects that have a representational value and together create narratives. However, the content of collections depends on subjective assessments of those who put them together (Pearce, 1994, p. 157). This means that it is up to the person who collects the items or ideas to decide what is to be collected or not according to what is considered relevant and valuable enough to be included (p. 157). 

Digital collections refer to collections of either digitized material or born-digital material (Watkins, Sellen & Linley, 2015). These collections can include books, paintings, 3D objects, sounds, and posts. Furthermore, they often enable access to multiple users worldwide and can prove useful for educational, research, and other purposes (Murell, 2020). Digital collections are often considered valuable to libraries, archives, and museums since representations of fragile and rare materials can be easily preserved and curated. Digital collections development, not only enables cataloguing and sorting of material and metadata in a more effective and user-centred way, but also facilitates “reunification” of virtual parts that are physically destroyed or apart (Hughes, 2012, p. 6). However, both physical and digital collections require constant preservation and curation (Cohen, 2018).

Literature Review

Cyberspace and the world of bits and bytes was considered “intangible, invisible, ephemeral, unstable, and virtual” up to almost two decades ago when the digital objects started acquiring a material sense in scholarly debate (Shep, 2015, 323). Scholars make use of three, among others, terms/factors to explain aspects of perceiving materiality: the “forensic”, “formal” and “performative” (Kirschenbaum, 2008; Drucker, 2013). 

• Forensic: e.g. ink, paper, etc
• Formal: codes and structures of human expression (e.g. image-text, organization of the layout, design, etc).
• Performative: creation of events, meaning through performance, describe possible meaning making

Indeed, digital media are not immaterial abstract concepts, independent of any type of “degradation” (Manoff, 2006, p. 318). They consist of particular traits of hardware and software that are prone to change and modification over time and this indicates their materiality and need for maintenance of their content (i.e. sound, images, hyperlinks) (pp. 318-319). Drucker (2013) adds on this assumption by using the term “performative materiality” to ground it to the process of meaning- and knowledge-making out of the onlooker’s interaction with either digitized or born-digital objects. In this essay, this last term (performative materiality) will be used to understand the digital materiality of digital content.

The rise of technology in modern societies has paved the way for the distribution of multimodal texts in digital environments (Serafini, 2014, p. 3). Manoff (2006) uses the example of texts, highlighting their importance in the creation and communication of meaning. Not only the content (i.e. what is written), but also the context (i.e. the medium, the ink color, etc.) together shape the meaning conveyed. The term “text”, however, is now used as “cultural objects including databases, software programs, video games, hypertext novels, film, television, radio, and e-mail” rather than simply printed documents, since “verbal, visual, numeric, and oral” cues can be used in digital environments to shape the content communicated to the audience (2006, p. 312). What is important, according to Manoff (2006), is that by “changing practices of knowledge transmission” (e.g. digitalization) we influence the way material, information, and metadata are presented and communicated to the audience, and this is something we need to be aware of in the age of digitization  (pp. 322-323). 

The “maker-producer”

Drucker (2013) places importance on the existence of materiality through cognitive interaction with an object and suggests that “what it does, how it works within machinic, systemic, and cultural domains”, rather than what it is, is what actually matters during this intellectual  interplay (para 4). Similarly, Leonardi (2010) notes as “material” the relationship of the “artifact” with the people who engage with it, regardless of whether it is physical or digital itself. Drucker (2013) contends that “The idea of a user-consumer is replaced by a maker-producer, a performer, whose performance changes the game” (para. 36).  

Forlini and Hinrichs (2017) touch upon the multisensory experiences and explore synesthetic approaches to visualisation in digital environments. This interaction between the digital material and the audience happens both in an intellectual and in a sensorial way (p. 3). To add on this argument, Lester (2018) uses the term “dualistic performativity” meaning that both the physical characteristics and the content of an item combined provoke “intellectual understanding and sensory engagement” and contribute to the material manifestation of the item in the digital environment (p. 78). 

In both print and hypertext documents, the structure of the content and the medium through which it is presented, is crucial to the meaning conveyed and to the way it is communicated, as being “part of a work’s signifying structure” (Hayles, 2003, 264). Hayles (2003) argues that by changing the medium (e.g., from physical to digital) there is always something lost and gained in the meaning of works and objects. This leads to the assumption that the physical and electronic objects are not totally equivalent nor is one substitute of the other. Therefore, the way all attributes (physical, context) of a digital object are presented by means of a user-centered interface (e.g. “catalogues and research tools that acknowledge the material properties of archives, and outreach events and activities which are shaped around different forms of engagement”) plays an important role in how the user experiences the materiality of the archives as carriers of information (Lester, 2018, p. 83).

As a solution to this, the changing means of knowledge transmission calls for awareness of the different application of “knowledge making” (Manoff, 2006, p. 322). In order to achieve a successful transformation, “preservation, and curation” of embodied experiences with physical objects of cultural heritage into digital environments, the maximum amount of metadata needs to be provided, so as to describe the features, story, and context of the objects as much as possible (Forlini & Hinrichs, 2017, p. 3). This improves the engagement with the audience and increases the appreciation towards both the physical, and the digital form of the object (p. 3).

In a comparative study of user experience between physical and digital items, Varnalis-Weigle (2016) highlighted the importance of the digital resources in inspiring users’ engagement with the physical objects. The interface of the digital collection, which was required to navigate through the digital objects, proved to be an important tool to attract attention to the content more than the object itself (Varnalis-Weigle, 2016, p. 17). It also encouraged users to acquire a deeper and more profound understanding of the context, before experiencing the object in its physical form (p. 17).  

Case Study

This section provides an example of a digital collection and, more specifically, a digitized object, in order to reflect on its physical and digital affordances through which digital materiality is manifested. The example used is the 3D Smithsonian Collection and more particularly the 3D visualisation of Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia. 

 

Since its founding in 1846, the Smithsonian has been open and accessible to all people worldwide. In the last year at his post as Secretary of Smithsonian Museums, Clough (2013) questioned “why should such an experience be limited to those who can visit in person?” (p. 5). Clough noted that the digitized collections started out in 1970 and some of its digital catalogues such as the “Inventory of American Paintings” in the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) are still publicly available as an “early example of the potential of digital technology” (p. 46). The Collections Search Center gives access to “eight million digital records, including more than 800,000 images”, and continues growing, proving to be a useful tool for learning and research (Clough, 2013, p. 55). 

However, the simple transfer of material to the digital cloud is not enough. The interest in offering interactivity, connection with other sources, and plenty of metadata over a surface-level approach, when it comes to digital collections, is evident in recent years, and has proven necessary for the implementation of Drucker’s “maker-producer” ideal of user. Indeed, the Smithsonian digital collection connects to external resources like the New York Times archives and Wikipedia (Clough, 2013, p. 49), thus providing more material, content, and transparency to its audience.

3D Collection and Interface

The “Three-dimensional scanning technology and distribution” platform is also part of the digitization program of the Smithsonian Institution, used by curators, educators and conservators, for research and knowledge sharing. Whitelaw argues that “generous interface would also enrich interpretation by revealing relationships and structures within the collection”, talking about the complexity of digital collections (2015, p. 1). The search mode of the website provides a generous number of items categorized by topic, museum, location, and media and metadata usage. This functionality provides a rich way to manage, organize, and share the large amounts of data and metadata collected and encourage users to acquire a profound understanding of the content (e.g., where certain items come from). This falls in line with Lester’s (2018) arguments about the importance of the interface for the structuring of a collection.

How does the interface convey the materiality of the object?

It is important to preserve materiality of objects, especially after their digitization, as this is what gives meaning to the interaction and experience with the items to ultimately create knowledge. To achieve this only through digital platforms, however, requires a lot of effort.

The website of the Apollo Command Module 3D conveys the materiality of the item in multiple ways. What Drucker (2013) terms ‘performative materiality’ can be found in the interface of the Apollo Command Module 3D website and the opportunities provided for real-time interaction between the audience and the medium. Besides, the medium (i.e. the interface and the content of the website) affects most of the meaning-making procedure (Hayles, 2003). More particularly, the website consists of:

Click for more information below:

_{The interior and exterior 3D representation and the options users have (top-left side)}

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Conclusion

In this blog post, I discussed how digitisation influences the remediation of the materiality of physical objects. After describing the terms “collection” and “digital collection”, I presented the scholarly debate about digital materiality. Then, I provided a case study of the 3D collection of the Smithsonian Institute to exemplify the theoretical concepts and indicate how the interface and the content of a digital collection help convey the materiality of an object. Through the presentation of the physical and digital affordances of the collection and the 3D object page, it can become clear that the plethora of metadata and the combination of interaction elements, videos, stories, and scanned files create a narrative around the digitized object. At the same time, the collection-visualization approach moves beyond the conventional search methods, which require pre-existing knowledge by the user and contribute to a user-centred catalogue, enhancing user’s engagement with the digitized collection and metadata. All these affordances are aimed to preserve the materiality of the physical by enabling real-time relationships between humans and machines (Drucker, 2013, para. 32).

Now it’s your turn to try and fill in the gaps. Read the story in the link and test your knowledge on the story behind Apollo 11 Command Module:

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References

Clough, G. W. (2013). Best of Both Worlds. Museums, Libraries and Archives in a Digital Age. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

Cohen, A. (2018, December 21). Everyone’s a Curator. That’s Not (Always) a Bad Thing. ArtSy. Retrieved from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-everyones-curator-bad-thing

Drucker, J. (2013). Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 7(1).

Dudley, S. (2012). Encountering a Chinese horse: Engaging with the thingness of things. In S. Dudley, & S. H. Dudley (Ed.), Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things (pp. 1-15). Abingdon: Routledge.

Forlini, S., & Hinrichs, U. (2017). Synesthetic visualization: balancing sensate experience and sense making in digitized print collections. Proceedings of the conference on Digital Preservation for Social Sciences and Humanities, (p. 4). Brighton.

Hayles, N. (2003). Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality. 16(2), 263-290.

Hughes, L. M. (2012). Evaluating and Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections. (L. M. Hughes, Ed.) London: Facet Publishing.

Kirschenbaum, M. (2008). Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. London: The MIT Press.

Leonardi, P. M. (2010). Digital materiality? How artifacts without matter, matter. First Monday, 15(6). doi:https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i6.3036

Lester, P. (2018). Of mind and matter: the archive as object. Archives and Records,, 39(1), 73-78. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2017.1407748

Manoff, M. (2006). The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 6(3), 311-325. doi:10.1353/pla.2006.0042

Murrell, G. (2020, January 30). So…Question: What Are Digital Collections? Gleeson Gleanings. Retrieved from https://gleesongleanings.wordpress.com/2020/01/30/so-question-what-are-digital-collections/

Pearce, S. M. (1994). The Urge to Collect. In S. Pearce, Interpreting Objects and Collections, London (pp. 157-9). London: Routledge.

Serafini, F. (2014). Multimodal Ensembles. In F. Serafini, Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (pp. 11-19). New York: Teachers College Press.

Shep, S. J. (2015). Digital Materiality. In A New Companion to Digital Humanities. (S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, & J. Unsworth, Eds.) doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118680605.ch22

Smithsonian. (n.d.). 3D Digitization. Retrieved from https://3d.si.edu/object/3d/command-module-apollo-11:d8c6457e-4ebc-11ea-b77f-2e728ce88125

Smithsonian Institution. (n.d.). Smithsonian Institution Digitization 3D. Retrieved from https://legacy.3d.si.edu/apollo11cm/index.php#story

Turkel, W. J. (2011). Intervention: Hacking history, from analogue to digital and back again. Rethinking History, 15(2), 287-296.

Varnalis-Weigle, A. S. (2016). A Comparative Study of User Experience between. Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 23.

Watkins, R. D., Sellen, A., & Lindley, S. (2015). Digital collections and digital collecting practices. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (pp. 3423-3432). doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702380

Whitelaw, M. (2015). Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9(1).

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