Project:About
About: Digital Archive of Artists Publishing | DAAP
The Digital Archive of Artists Publishing (DAAP) is an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of Artists’ Books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by artists, publishers, and a community of producers in contemporary Artists’ Publishing, developed via an ethically driven design process and open-data methodology.
Introduction to the project
A collaborative project, with the support of Wikimedia UK, DAAP is inspired by the site of Banner Repeater’s public Archive of Artists’ Publishing on Hackney Downs train station, with 11,000 people passing a day, in response to the need for a similarly dynamic approach to archiving in an online context.
We have drawn upon the working knowledge of users and archivists alike, to develop a database with sufficient complexity, whilst remaining searchable, that affords multiple histories to develop, confronting issues of authorship and representation, whilst addressing the challenges of cataloguing often deliberately difficult to categorise materials. With an emphasis on inclusivity from the start, we aim to privilege anecdotal histories and multiple perspectives alongside factual data, whilst the wiki style approach means that users can upload their own material, single items, or entire collections, choosing appropriate sharing permissions at time of upload.
DAAP is committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives that come of issues regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a post-colonial, critical gender and LGBTQI perspective. The project will work to ensure an equitable and ethical design process occurs throughout the archive development.
Introduction to the project
A collaborative project, with the support of Wikimedia UK, DAAP is inspired by the site of Banner Repeater’s public Archive of Artists’ Publishing on Hackney Downs train station, with 11,000 people passing a day, in response to the need for a similarly dynamic approach to archiving in an online context.
We have drawn upon the working knowledge of users and archivists alike, to develop a database with sufficient complexity, whilst remaining searchable, that affords multiple histories to develop, confronting issues of authorship and representation, whilst addressing the challenges of cataloguing often deliberately difficult to categorise materials. With an emphasis on inclusivity from the start, we aim to privilege anecdotal histories and multiple perspectives alongside factual data, whilst the wiki style approach means that users can upload their own material, single items, or entire collections, choosing appropriate sharing permissions at time of upload.
DAAP is committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives that come of issues regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a post-colonial, critical gender and LGBTQI perspective. The project will work to ensure an equitable and ethical design process occurs throughout the archive development.
Introduction to the digital infrastructure
DAAP brings together scholars and practitioners in the field of art, artist’s publishing and creative technology to set a precedent for modelling bespoke and non-standardised artist publications as linked data. Linked open data is data that is machine-readable, published online following specific interoperability standards, and published with an open license thus enabling others to connect to it.
Utilising the open-source software Wikibase, DAAP brings to the surface new and unexpected data connections across diverse collection artefacts, providing a resource to link to other archives, and communities, whilst visualisation tools offer exciting visual diagrams for in-depth research. DAAP implements a custom frontend interface on top of the Wikibase database, which follows familiar user interface metaphors, increasing accessibility across a broader audience.
Wikibase is part of a family of applications maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, an international non-profit supporting public knowledge platforms such as Wikipedia and Wikidata. DAAP’s installation of Wikibase benefits from the technical affordances of the public platform Wikidata:
- storing structured data;
- using a flexible linked-data-compliant model for developing bibliographic data about publications;
- capacity for multiple users to contribute to the database;
- version control;
- sophisticated querying options and visualizations provided via Wikidata Query Service tools.
In addition to the structured data in the database, DAAP takes advantage of the possibility to connect archive records held in Wikibase to regular wiki text pages, so that long-form anecdotal narratives can sit alongside factual data. At the same time, due to its independence from Wikidata, DAAP also serves as a space of more open experimentation – where data is modelled and tested with active users within a community of subject specialists (artists, self-publishers, librarians, academics, students, etc).
The development of the technical infrastructure draws heavily on the PhD Research work of our Technical lead Lozana Rossenova, conducted at digital arts organization Rhizome, who have been using Wikibase as archival platform since 2015.