Dear all,

we are sending still just a provisional description of our activities. These are not final as we would like to explore further possibilities of collaboration with partners in this project.

More specifically, we'd like to have your feedback on the following:

1) Research Activity - as part of developing our course on decentralized archiving at the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka, we will most likely carry out a preliminary research into existing practices and relevant literature. This process is for the moment described as a phase of the course development. We wonder if it could be a good idea to develop this research into a separate activity, potentially expanding this with interviews to the other partners and, again potentially, feeding into the Archivos del Comun gathering that Reina Sofia might host as part of their contribution.

2) Workshops - we would gladly provide some of the expertise we have acquired in digitising, creating digital collections and learning/writing processes on top of collections as forms of intervention. This process usually would take the form of 3-4 day workshops that we could organize together around your collections and with your constituencies. If you are keen on developing a workshop along those lines, please let us know and we'll talk.

3) Project focus - as others pointed out, we feel that in our discussion yesterday we are yet to come up with a focus for the project, as it seems to be split between the forms of intervention that start from the archive and the subject matter in the archives (mental health, social movements,...). Those are not irreconcileable, but we need to come up with a more concise formulation of that how and that what. Maybe the mission statement of the Archivos project would be a good place to start from (https://www.internationaleonline.org/research/decolonising_practices/62_archives_of_the_commons_knowledge_commons_information_and_memory/). Certainly something that we could discuss in our next meeting.

# Academy of Applied Arts Rijeka (APURI)

## Activities

1) Development of a university course in digital archiving
2) Experimental publication in collaboration with Social Cooperative La Collina
3) Workshops in activating archives in collaboration with other project partners (seeking partnerships)
4) Development of Sandpoints experimental publishing platform to suit the needs of the project

## Description

<!--## 1) Investigating and mapping digital archiving in arts

* In order to prepare and investigate digital archives in arts, we propose a multimethod research design, i.e. methodological triangulation. The idea of the methodological triangulation is to approach the same phenomenon from multiple methodological perspectives allowing us to gain in-depth knowledge and understanding of the digital archives in arts. For the purpose of defining digital archiving in arts and its formal articulation we suggest triangulation both through sample and through method. Sample triangulation: to gain a full view on digital archiving in arts, we propose to examine different actors in the digital archives in arts:
1. Artists
2. Art experts and scholars
3. Art students
Methodological triangulation: In order to increase validity and reliability of research findings, as well as to adapt the methods to the target audience, a combination of four methods is proposed:
Desk analysis – Mapping, collecting and decorticating relevant digital archives in arts, various resources, and structured PhD in Art studies. It serves as an entering point to the empirical research, providing a clear overview of the context and condition of doctorate in art at the moment.
Individual interviews, i.e., expert interviews – A semi-structured conversation with key actors of the art world archiving. The individual interview format is the best option in case we have target audience with demanding schedule, and when we are in the need for in-depth exploration of the topic.
Focus groups – A semi structured group discussion which brings rich content, stimulates groups dynamism, and is well-working for people with shared interests or experiences (i.e. university teaching staff).
Online quantitative survey – A structured survey covering wider audience, structured on the basis of findings from previous qualitative research methods (individual interviews, focus groups), thus complementing it. It is used with a goal to check how wide spread are the attitudes/problems detected in the qualitative phase. It also serves as the control study to prove the validity of qualitative insights and to additionally test the hypothesis.
Proposed design is exploratory sequential, meaning that empirical research phases will follow one another, each deepening on the findings of the previous one, and serving as an additional hypothesis check.--->

### 1) Development of a university course in decentralised digital archiving, potentially in collaboration with l'ERG

Digital networks have transformed archiving as a social practice and cultural technique. Communities aggregate and share ephemeral traces of collective memory, social justice movements digitise and make available online their precarious archives, archives are performatively used in artstic practices. Archiving has thus escaped the limited remit of archival institutions and transformed into a widely democratised, distributed and collective practice. In turn, memory institutions — museums, archives, galleries and theatres — have come to acknowledge the practices around non-institutional archiving as significant mediatic, artistic and social interventions into their own collections, policies and exclusions inscribed into their collections and into the larger politics of collective memory.

In order to prepare the syllabus for the course and in order to support other activities in the Uses of Archives project through research, APURI's researchers will conduct a survey into decentralised digital archiving practices in the arts. To gain a full view of the gamut of decentralised digital archiving practices, we will examine critical archiving practices and positions of different stakeholders:
1. Artists
2. Curators, art experts and scholars
3. Art academies

Methodologically we will rely on qualitative methods of interviews, direct observation in partner organisations and a desk analysis of primary and secondary sources.

Through an exchange with Ecole de recherche graphique, APURI and the Pirate Care project team will develop a syllabus in critical archiving. The syllabus will be written, readied for accreditation and tested within the project in a form of a week-long workshop (equivalent of a semester course) with the students of the Academy who will start to build a digital archive from the physical archives of the Academy (student theses, lecture notes, required readings…). The course will teach students both the practical and theoretical aspects of critical and decentralised archiving. While providing a pedagogical experience for the students, the course also becomes a living collective archive that one generation of students will be able to pass on the next cohort, thus contributing to the democratic engagement of the student body with the functioning of the Academy. The syllabus will be developed on the experimental publishing platform Sandpoints developed in the project.

### 2) Experimental publication *Machine sistering*, in collaboration with Social Cooperative La Collina

Social cooperative La Collina in Trieste will in its Centro di Documentazione host partners from Rijeka to facilitate a process of activation of their archive, continuing previous work carried out with constituencies (consisting of over 11 different groups of users and workers of the Basaglian mental health services in the Trieste area), and expanding such work in the realm of the digital, a previously untackled dimension.

Through s series of workshops, groups of users of the Centre di Documentazione will become familiar with processes of digitising and digital archiving of documents selected from the archive. In a second step, these will become the basis of an experimental publication realised with the purposly built free software platform Sandpoints. Participants will be introduced to the software tool and to the methodologies of collective writing. The experimental publication will aslo include graphics and audio and video interviews realised with and by participants in the expanded community of Basaglian meantal health services. A third and final step will see participants involved in the printing of the experimental publication via a riso-graph machine to disseminate the archival materials and commentary written in the workshops for the larger community in the city of Trieste. The activity 'Machine Sistering' will thus work as a bridge across many domains that often remain divided in archival contexts: digitization and materiality; experts and amateurs; authors and readers.

While the staff at Centro di Documentazione will host and provide expert knowledge on the archvial documents and also act as a broker of the relationship with local constituencies in mental healthcare, members of the APURI will provide specialist know-how around digital archiving, experimental publishing, as well as the software development of the dedicated platform Sandpoint.

### 3) Workshops in activating archives in collaboration with other project partners

With partner organisations APURI and the Pirate Care team will conduct workshops that will include their collaborators, users and artists in exploring how their archives can be activated with a specific performative purpose. Activation covers a range of practices in critical archiving: already creating archival collections or creating subcollections can be performative interventions in the social context, but so can be writing annotations, learning packages and experimental publications on top of the existing archive. Workshops will transfer some of our practical knowledge, developed through our work on the Memory of the World, Pirate Care Syllabus and Sandpoints experimental publishing platform, to help partner organisation activate their existing archives in collaboration with their constituencies. Each workshop will last for three days, at the location of the partner, and include up to 5 people with whom we would work on exploring practiceses that might best work for specific purposes the partner organisation wants to achieve by their intervention.

### 4) Development of Sandpoints experimental publishing platform to suit the needs of the project

Throughout the project we plan to continue developing the Sandpoints experimental publishing platform, so as to be able to serve specific needs of various applications of experimental writing on top of the archives in the project (annotations, syllabi, experimental publications).

On the technological side, Sandpoints is written on top of a Git repository and compiled into a static HTML web site (which means the whole website even works offline if copied to a USB disk, useful for situations when groups do not want to rely on cloud computing, or have no access to internet, like summer camps or prisons for example). All of the quotes and references used in the web publication are also made available through a dedicated library catalog. Sandpoints also makes the whole website ready to be printed at any given moment in the form of a well-paginated PDF, which makes it a great tool for producing printed zines and on-demand publications in real time as the project evolves.

The logic of organising the content in Sandpoints is that it is structured in a simple hierarchy of 3 levels (such as ‘syllabus’ > ‘topics’ > ‘sessions’, for instance, or 'journal' > 'issues' > 'articles'). The written text is accompanied with a library of all references, which are automatically referenced in the Chicago Manual of Style format. The library can also incorporate audio and video and embed them into the pages. A feature currently in development is the possibility of getting video and audio materials searchable/browsable via keywords, just like one would do with a text.

Besides the Pirate Care Syllabus (https://syllabus.pirate.care) developed for the flagship project of the European Capital of Culture Rijeka 2020, projects already developed on the Sandpoints platform include the Machine Listening curriculum (https://machinelistening.exposed/) and a special issue of the Nubian studies journal Dotawo (https://pages.sandpoints.org/dotawo/issue/).