| Designing for Forgetting and Exclusion
OverviewIn the paper-and-ink world, the sheer cumbersomeness of archiving and later finding information often promoted a form of institutional forgetfulness. Deeply embedded in an almost ubiquitous technology, this forgetfulness was little considered, and when evaluated was typically seen in the negative. This is unfortunate, for in some ways the possibility of forgetting, and of the consequent forgiving, has been at the heart of the American experiment.Today the rapid spread of information and communication technologies has been accompanied by a redrawing of the boundaries between the forgotten and the remembered, between that which is included and that which is excluded from the permanent record. As storage technologies have gained in practicality and dropped in price, the shift to an electronic medium has changed the default position from one of forgetfulness to one of remembering. The importance of this shift can be seen in recent policies that mandate that telecommunications operators, for law enforcement purposes, preserve data for increased periods of time; in technologies that, in order to provide businesses with sharp pictures of consumptions patterns and fraud, mine extended time series; and in the attention paid to metadata schemas whose goal is to increase the long-term value of these electronic memories. Commentators have typically portrayed the protection of forgetfulness as a matter of balancing individual privacy against such social goods as law enforcement, government efficiency, or national security. But in this form of analysis such social needs almost inevitably overpower the need of individuals. In an attempt to redress this imbalance, this project will proceed within a framework where collective needs for forgetting are explicitly balanced against collective needs for accountability. It will thus further an understanding of forgetting as a positive social good, one that may promote the development of the kinds of individuals necessary for democracy, rather than as a failure of memory and inclusiveness. It will provide intellectual tools by which it will be possible to investigate this largely undertheorized and unexamined shift, tools that will inform the practices of archivists, record managers, and conservators. This project is support by the Human and Social Dynamics program of the National Science Foundation, Award #BCS-0622957. GoalsThe goal of this project is to establish an intellectual agenda, identify a community of researchers, and develop a research program on the design of socio-technical infrastructures enabling forgetting and exclusion. The project will lay the groundwork necessary for submitting a full research proposal to the Human and Social Dynamics program in 2007. An important component of this process will be an invitational interdisciplinary two-day workshop where researchers in the fields of policy, law, cognitive science, sociology, communications, and geography will discuss and delineate the contours of future research, theoretical, methodological, and empirical, in this area.
Primary Investigators
Graduate Students Researchers
Workshop ParticipantsAnita Allen, University of Pennsylvania Law SchoolRebecca Baron, CalArts Liam Bannon, Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick Ian Brown, Department of Computer Science, University College London Ron Day, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University Martin Dodge, Department of Geography, University of Manchester Mark Hansen, Department of Statistics, UCLA Peter Lunenfeld, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design Thomas Mullaney, History Department, Stanford University Ken Thibodeau, National Archives and Record Administration Karen Till, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota Workshop Pictures
Workshop ResourcesPosition papers (password required) |
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