Digital Futures in the Making: Imaginaries, Politics, and Materialities. 8. Arbeitstagung der dgekw-Kommission „Digitale Anthropologie“ am Institut für Ethnologie, Universität Hamburg, 14.–16. September 2022

Abstract

What is digital future-making? How do we understand theoretically and ethnographically digital processes surrounding our fieldwork and research problems? How should anthropologists deal with digital futures played out in front of us? These are questions that I will address from my trajectory in technological design, imagination and future of work understandings. I will draw in the ethnographic projects that I am currently involved in on the ‘digitalization’ of work in service platforms and the health industry. This paper focuses on moral experience and materiality in an innovation context. Whereas most innovation studies focus on optimization and process management, this study investigates the relations between sociotechnical change through innovation, and how people experience meaning and purpose in their work throughout this change. Through an ethnographic fieldwork study with participant observation and in-depth interviews, I analyzed the everyday practices in an ‘innovation unit’ at the Dutch military organization. In this unit, sociotechnical change is designed and tested with technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics. I observe that everyday practices in the unit evolve around the co-production of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’. Despite a shared imaginary of an ‘innovative military future’, there are conflicting perceptions, expectations and experiences on what technological innovation looks like, between military personnel at the policy level, the strategic level and the operational level of the innovation unit. Focusing on moral experience at the operational level of the unit, feelings of disappointment and frustration were leading topics in interviews. I argue that these feelings are exemplary of deeper sentiments of loss of meaning and purpose. As a result of conflicting perceptions, expectations and experiences, the military personnel slowly lose their faith in the imaginary. Therefore, their everyday practices become meaningless and purposeless – they no longer feel as if contributing to an ‘innovative military future’. I describe this process as ‘disillusionment’, which is a moral experience characterized by a value conflict between personal and professional values. It has a temporal and disruptive character, and could further develop into more severe symptoms of moral disorientation or moral injury if not being taken seriously by the organization. This paper integrates a focus on moral experience; materiality; sociotechnical change; imaginaries; (conflicting) perceptions on technological innovation. This paper will address the ethically-charged aspects of digitizing human death for museum publics and source communities, treating the digital as a novel but problematic space where new forms of exhibition, archiving, ethnographic research, and collaboration are possible. It will survey the landscape of new technological practices from 2019-2022 and review the range of new ethical issues that are bound up in the use of digital platforms for participatory media projects, archiving, exhibition, and immersive storytelling about human remains and death at heritage sites and cultural institutions in the United Kingdom. The ethical quandaries of digital projects at museums are often addressed at the outset, but unexpected ethical issues often arise as the project is being completed and digital and real-life publics engage with the final product. For example, many digital archives replicate existing power dynamics within older archival taxonomies that reflect colonial and other problematic histories rather than using the digitization process as an opportunity for developing new taxonomies. The deployment of new and exciting technologies is argued by most cultural institutions to be necessary to address socio-culturally complex ideas and histories. In some cases, digitizing the dead and victims of trauma (as avatars or other elements of storytelling) can cause further trauma. We will examine case studies from the UK (drawing from Hiepler’s current research) employing mixed methods of digital ethnography of museum websites, on-site media, and interviews with museum curators, directors, and other personnel. Many museums are re-evaluating their display of human remains that includes removing or recontextualizing human remains. As the pandemic has forced a greater move to the digital realm, museums and cultural institutions are currently negotiating whether or not to include photos of human remains online, and their curatorial goals and intentions of exhibiting death, and the risks, challenges and opportunities of exhibiting death. This introduction to the panel addresses processes of digitalisation of cultural heritage and heritagization of digital culture from an STS perspective, highlighting the relevance of concepts and analytical prisms of infrastructures and re-agencings. Thereby it offers a framework of crosscutting challenges which will be discussed through the papers. In the conclusion, contributions from the papers are discussed so as to move forward toward a sociology of digitalisation and heritagization. Studying digitization in action within a Science&Technologies Studies (STS) perspective provided empirically based studies of heritage digitization (for example, Beltrame, 2012; Camus, 2019a; Tanferri, 2021). These works offered several crucial moves to understand digitization practices, such as the epistemic changes they produce in collections (Beltrame, 2013); the arbitrages they call for to delineate a cultural entity (Camus 2019b); or the local, contingent productions of quality criteria to make copies deemed good enough (Tanferri, s.d.). But studying digitization practices to uncover their mechanisms and consequences is not the same as using these results to design digitization projects. In this presentation, we will provide an account of an experiment in teaching heritage digitization project design to engineering students from different backgrounds. The course relies on the possibility of collaborating with real-life heritage institutions in their school area to design a digital heritage project. The course aims are two-fold. First, to provide a basic understanding of participatory research methodologies, the students will need to carry out their project. Second, to offer workshop-like content to create awareness of specific dimensions of heritage digitization proposed in several lines of research (Cameron Kenderdine, 2007; Latour and Lowe, 2011; Vinck 2018; Lewi Navarro and Appiotti and Sandri, Contemporary cultural heritage knowledge production is a dynamic arena of agential interactions. It is influenced by the diverse processes by which actors from various communities of practice determine in which ways digitised items or digital reproductions of cultural artefacts can be used and reused. This contribution attempts to revisit the processes behind the scenes of knowledge production. It reveals the noises, ambiguities, and uncertainties in the collections management and documentation work of two institutions: Swedish Historical Museums, and National Museums in Berlin. Based on ethnographic data, the paper conducts an in-depth analysis of day-to-day, behind the scenes work in museum knowledge production. It places an analytical focus on the peripheral actors – both human (staff members) and non-human (cataloguing tools). Firstly, staff members tasked with caring for collection objects are peripheral actors in the sense that, despite their work realities having a significant impact on the institution’s daily operations, they do not participate significantly in the discursive construction of their immediate working environment. The work of collections management should integrate diverse data structures, content, and exchange standards into employees’ daily routines. Existing infrastructure necessitates ongoing reflection, tinkering, and maintenance due to the ‘imperfect tools’ that have been incorporated. Second, tools for cataloging objects are also peripheral actors; despite their inherent imperfection, they are necessary for improving object representation in knowledge management systems. und Datentechnologien, Covid-19-Krise Datenpolitiken The proposed paper investigates the formation of social, legal and ethical norms in the development and use of artificial intelligence within financial markets and the banking sectors. The research is part of the ongoing, interdisciplinary project called “Regulatory theories of Artificial Intelligence”, funded by the Centre Responsible Digitality of the state of Hesse, and is situated at the intersection of law, technology, and the financial market. A.I. has become an established component of financial markets and the banking sector more broadly. However, regulatory, and legal frameworks lag far behind technological developments in the field. For example, the introduction of so-called robo-advisors, partly autonomous systems that take on the role of human portfolio managers and pursue passive long-term investment strategies. While some decisions and market interactions have been automated, the human remains firmly “in-the-loop”. Through these assemblages, of human and non-human actors, new forms of expertise emerge alongside more traditional economic knowledge producing and engaging with new kinds of data to make and un-make markets. Concepts such as risk , responsibility , and accountability are re-negotiated and situated within new kinds of digital practices and infrastructures. With this paper I also aim to make visible how new processes and technologies of governance are employed to define and manage potential risk of automation and A.I. To examine these more-than-human interactions and entanglements, this anthropological study engages in a cross-scale analytical framework that draws on ethnography as well as a range of transdisciplinary methods. The proposed paper draws on work in progress and as such invites further discussion and com