Life on the outside: connections, contexts, and the wild, wild web

Invited keynote presentation for the Japanese Association of Digital Humanities conference in Tsukuba, 20 September 2014.

What’s important is not training users to understand the context of our collections, but helping them explore and understand their responsibilities to the pasts those collections represent. Let’s remove technical barriers, minimise legal restrictions, and trust in the good will of our audiences. Instead of building shrines to our descriptive methodologies, let’s create systems that provide stable shareable anchors, that connect, but don’t constrain.

Contexts will flow and mingle, some will fade and some will burn. Contexts will survive not because we demand it in our terms of service, or embed them in our interfaces, but because they capture something that matters. The ways we find and use cultural collections will continue to change, but questions about responsibility, value, and meaning will remain.