As part of the Media Futures programme, Archival Consciousness developed Bibliograph.
Bibliograph is an environment for collective data aggregation for the GLAM sector [galleries, libraries, archives, museums].

Bibliograph combines two micro tools for collective linked data aggregation, text annotation and voice recording. As a result, it offers Play, a menu of functions for mapping, browsing and visualization of annotated and recorded data in different levels of granularity, within the context of a specific collection as data.

The text annotation offers 6 different labels that may vary according to the library, such as Place, Period, Entity [person, organization], Objects [works, books], Events, Terms and Phrases, in the case of the Archive of de Appel.

The voice recording is intended for recording fragments of texts. From a sentence to a paragraph at a time.

The Play function plays the library in different views:

• The Spine’s view offer an overview of the entire library holdings and it’s based on metadata and on the original architecture of the library.
• Covers offer a view on the books that are being read by the community of the library. The selection comes for a table that is powered by RFID and identifies books that are taken out of the shelves. This view gives an idea of what are the trending topics of the library through time. It collects data daily and lets the reader browse back, and access individual items any time.

Through these two views the reader can enter the Page view, and read specific fragments of books. It is in this view that the annotation and recording tools are available.

Every item annotated adds to the next view:

• The Graph view shows how the objects in the library are related. The relations start through the metadata, events and entities, and continues with the aggregation of data from the content of books.
• The last view is called Drift. It is a combination of the last 4 views in random order that can be affected through the navigation, including audio with the recorded items.
• The datasets will be available for reuse through linked open data.

Annotation and voice recording with text recognition are not new technologies, on the contrary there plenty of offers in the market that allow us to test and experiment to further customize a tool that fits our specific needs. We are proposing the use of this tools in a non-technical digital environment suited for independent research, autonomy and digital literacy.

During these six months, we worked closely with the Archive of De Appel, and the Archive of Casa do Povo, as well as a group of researches and a Yiddish study group.

About

Studio Remco van Bladel is a multidisciplinary design studio in Amsterdam focussing on, publishing tools, identities, typefaces, interactive applications and websites. He is co- founder of publishing house Onomatopee and online platform WdW Review.

Mariana Lanari is a performance artist, researcher and, PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Heritage and Memory / University of Amsterdam. Her research is about the interaction between politics of reading and reading infrastructures.

Websites: Archival Consciousness, Studio Remco van Bladel, Mariana Lanari, Rainbowpeel