The hunt for data

Our most recent sessions in the always intriguing Digital Information and Technologies (DITA) module have continued our study of how the outpouring of digital information in our society today is stored, described, structured, managed and shared. What is usually the natural, unthinking act of hunting for that simple something online – presidential election coverage, latest cricket scores, the location of that particular book – has been taken apart piece by piece.

Our look under the bonnet of information retrieval is taking us places one step (or more) back from what the average user in the modern digital environment would confront. Even this simple blog post, as I write it now, has a different interface from the one in which you are reading it. I can add the metadata through labels (listed below), see the coding around italicised fonts, and add details about location. In DITA we have looked at the ways data can be organised and made accessible online, and the rise of linked data and the semantic web through RDF, the resource description framework.

It is, it must be said, a world of many initialisms. The data file formats CSV (comma separated value) and TSV (tab separated value), DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, a vocabulary of terms used to describe web resources making them easier to find), URIs (unique resource identifiers, which identify the name of a web resource), SQL (Structured Query Language, the standard language for relational database management systems), and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, which hide the complexities of a system so that third parties can build on and develop applications). QEI: quite enough initialisms.

In the circular way that this course often throws up (the problems of getting information about getting information, to put it crudely), the session Searching for the Data was of immediate practical interest. Instead of the default course of action of resorting immediately to a simple Google search, it armed us with more focused and nuanced ways of revealing the data that we are looking for, and even what we didn't know we were looking for. With December approaching and four assessments to be completed by early in the new year, these are practical information retrieval skills that will be tried and tested in the weeks to come as we hunt for the books and journal articles that will help us on our way.

Left in Sehgal's darkness

When the Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal has a new exhibition, it can be hard to find out what is going to take place. He forbids any of the normal digital or paper trails of exhibition marketing and publicity: there are no videos of the work, no catalogues or wall texts. Even contracts with the exhibition organisers are verbal only.

Sehgal's name came was mentioned in The Future of Documents: Documenting Performance, a symposium at City, University of London on 31 October 2016. Yaron Shyldkrot, who is working on a PhD at the University of Surrey, was talking about documenting darkness in theatre and dance, and the disorientation and uncertainty it creates for viewers. "You can't be in the same picture as the dark," as the writer and performer Chris Goode puts it. Sehgal has used darkness in some past works, which usually involve performers interacting spontaneously with spectators, leaving no physical residue once they are finished.

The darkness of Sehgal's non-documentary approach shone out for me during the day. It is an approach that "minimises discourse to maximise the experience", the curator of his new show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris says. The question of just who performances are being documented for was a recurring question through the day of the symposium. While many performers, choreographers and archivists recognise the importance of retaining at least some tangible form of memory of a fleeting moment, Sehgal turns that on its head, leaving us, metaphorically and sometimes literally, in the dark.

This way of working, it seems to me, is less about the artist leaving documented legacy (his approach is very well documented, if not his work), and more about his anti-market views and myth constructing. (Would he be as well known if he did allow his work to be documented?) But even in our age of the ubiquitous camera, he encourages us to focus on the moment of the performance rather than see it through a lens or discuss it to oblivion. And it certainly frees up time for archivists to get on with other things.

It was a great thought-provoking day – thanks to Lyn Robinson and Joseph Dunne for organising it.