Acousmatic Sound

Acousmatic sound is sound that is heard without an originating cause being seen. The word acousmatic, from the French acousmatique, is derived from the Greek word akousmatikoi (ἀκουσματικοί), which referred to probationary pupils of the philosopher Pythagoras who were required to sit in absolute silence while they listened to him deliver his lecture from behind a veil or screen to make them better concentrate on his teachings.

Archivism

The act of moving something from the everyday to the space of archive.

Affective Computing

Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognise, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science. One of the motivations for the research is the ability to give machines emotional intelligence, including to simulate empathy. The machine should interpret the emotional state of humans and adapt its behaviour to them, giving an appropriate response to those emotions.

Aufhebung

In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing, and eventually advancement (the German verb aufheben means “to cancel”, “to keep” and “to pick up”). 

Authorised Heritage Discourse

The creation of lists that represent the canon of heritage. It is a set of ideas that works to normalise a range of assumptions about the nature and meaning of heritage and to privilege particular practices, especially those of heritage professionals and the state. Conversely, the AHD can also be seen to exclude a whole range of popular ideas and practices relating to heritage.

Brick and Mortar Archives

A rather more elegant term for archives that are stored in buildings. Because it is important to note that digital archives are also very physical.

Content Drift

When the content of a page has been moved around on the internet causing certain links to no longer be attached to that specific page.

Counter-reading

Counter reading is when you identify the gaps in an archive, analyse why they are exist and combined this with further contextual history in order to fulfil your research.

Data Degradation

Data degradation is the gradual corruption of computer data due to an accumulation of non-critical failures in a data storage device. The phenomenon is also known as data decay, data rot or bit rot.

Disciplinary Upbringing

The separate lenses through which individuals from different fields of work view and approach things like: problem solving, language, and general practice.

Drive By Collaboration

Collaborating but only a trivial amount of time and often to fulfil a funding requirement.

Ego Documents

The word ‘egodocument’ refers to autobiographical writing, such as memoirs, diaries, letters and travel accounts. The term was coined around 1955 by the historian Jacques Presser, who defined egodocuments as writings in which the ‘I’, the writer, is continuously present in the text as the writing and describing subject.

GAFA

Acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. The tech giants.

Historical Imagination

A tool use by historians to put themselves into the shoes of the historical figure they are investigating or imagining themselves in the streets of a certain historical setting. It can be helpful to bring together separate ideas and bring the history back to life as such.

GLAM

GLAM stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museum.

Link Rot

When the webpage attached to a link can no longer be found when you click on it and instead offers you the message “Page not found”

Liquid Architecture

Liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes, pulses, leaps as one form and lands as another. Liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is contingent on the interest, of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome me and closes to defend me; it is an architecture without doors and hallways, where the next room is always where I need it to be and what I need it to be.

Marcos Novak in “Liquid architecture in Cyberpace”

Media

Originally coming from the word mediator.

Media Archaeology

Media archaeology or media archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media such as film and television. Media archaeologists often evince strong interest in so-called dead media, noting that new media often revive and recirculate material and techniques of communication that had been lost, neglected, or obscured. Some media archaeologists are also concerned with the relationship between media fantasies and technological development, especially the ways in which ideas about imaginary or speculative media affect the media that actually emerge.

Media Literacy

Media literacy encompasses the practices that allow people to access, critically evaluate, and create or manipulate media. Media literacy is not restricted to one medium. Media literacy education is intended to promote awareness of media influence and create an active stance towards both consuming and creating media. Media literacy education is part of the curriculum in the United States and some European Union countries, and an interdisciplinary global community of media scholars and educators engages in knowledge sharing through scholarly and professional journals and national membership associations.

Multivalence

Multi-valents, many values, the holding of different values at the same time without implying confusion, contradiction, or even paradox. (Term coined by Michael Frisch.

Open Access

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.

Participatory Action Research (PAR)

Participatory Action Research (PAR) has been defined as a collaborative process of research, education and action explicitly oriented towards social transformation. Participatory Action Researchers recognise the existence of a plurality of knowledges in a variety of institutions and locations. In particular, they assume that ‘those who have been most systematically excluded, oppressed or denied carry specifically revealing wisdom about the history, structure, consequences and the fracture points in unjust social arrangements’. PAR therefore represents a counter hegemonic approach to knowledge production.

Post Private

The age of high surveillance which we live in now.

Reference Rot

When links in footnotes on longer are attached to the reference. This is often due to link rot or content drift.

Software Rot

Software rot, also known as bit rot, code rot, software erosion, software decay, or software entropy is either a slow deterioration of software quality over time or its diminishing responsiveness that will eventually lead to software becoming faulty, unusable, or in need of upgrade. This is not a physical phenomenon: the software does not actually decay, but rather suffers from a lack of being responsive and updated with respect to the changing environment in which it resides.

Taxonomy

The science, laws, or principles of classification.

Vox Pox

Coming from the latin vox populi, it refers to a short interview with a member of the public.

Wikidata

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license. Wikidata is powered by the software Wikibase.