Creating digital artifacts for future historians and archeologists

This project is part of the future making research network. It is a funded MSO professorship to epxlore and fostering innovative methods for preserving digitally-­‐mediated lived experience of 21st Century events.

How do people make sense of intensely local but digitally mediated and heavily networked events in the 21st Century? How do individuals deal with the enormous amounts of data they generate and accumulate in their everyday digital lives? What stories are dictated in this data and how much of the story does an individual actually control? At broader levels, how can institutions creatively design techniques to capture, and in the future revive, the digitally complicated experience of events such as Aarhus2017?

This project will tackle these questions through the lens of information & communication studies, ethnography, and participatory culture. Extending an internationally recognized body of research to develop innovative and ethical methods for exploring digital culture, this project intends to:

Contribute methods and frameworks to the RethinkIMPACTS2017 evaluation efforts;

Build epistemological frameworks for thinking differently about the complexity of everyday social experiences in the digital age;

Facilitate participatory workshops to enable citizens to explore and understand their own ‘big data’, and;

Learn methods to better control and tell the stories that otherwise will be produced for them by social media algorithms.

This interventionist project addresses an urgent concern about regaining control of our future cultural histories.