In 1947 and 1948, UNESCO undertook an innovative survey on human rights that was intended to shape the philosophical content of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This short period is interesting for several reasons. First, because the end of the Second World War created liminal conditions in which new institutions, political alignments and moral visions could be forged. Second, because, despite the end of the war, a series of profound conflicts and global challenges remained, including colonialism and global economic inequality. This chapter examines how participants in the UNESCO survey analysed the question of social and economic rights as a response to the challenges of reshaping the post-war world. It focuses on contributions influenced by leftist social and political thought. As will be seen, leftist thinkers were not hostile to the idea of a new declaration of human rights, but the way in which rights were conceptualised in relation to social and economic problems was radically different from the form that socio-economic rights eventually took in the UDHR and in subsequent decades.

This chapter is concerned with the experimental nature of media archaeology, an aspect of the discipline that is receiving a growing amount of attention. Since its inception, the study of media archaeology has encouraged a diversity of approaches, practices, and voices. Erik Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka describe this variety of perspectives and range of debates as ‘polylogues’ (Huhtamo and Parikka, p. 2). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, seen as founders of media archaeological thinking, talked about the practice of ‘nomadology’– the adoption of multiple narratives that are, in effect, the ‘opposite of a history’ (Deleuze and Guattari, p. 24). Meanwhile, Siegfried Zielinski petitions for discovering ‘fractures or turning points in historical master plans’ (Zielinski, p. 7). His ‘variantology’ project (2007) is built on the urge to ‘be different, to deviate, to change, to modify’ (Huhtamo and Parikka, p. 12).

In 2013, Fickers and Van den Oever published an essay entitled ‘Experimental Media Archaeology: A Plea for New Directions’ (2013). The authors noted and praised the achievements made by the previous methodologies based on discourse, but at the same time stressed that ‘the materiality of media technologies and the practices of use need more attention’ (Fickers and Van den Oever, 2013).

This collection of essays highlights innovative work in the developing field of media archaeology. It builds on the conference Archaeologies of Media and Film organized by the editors in collaboration with the UK National Media Museum and Royal Television Society in September 2014. The volume includes essays by some of the contributors to that conference and it focuses, in particular, on the relationship between theory and practice and the contribution that experimentation can make to our understanding of media archaeology.

In the last decade, a growing number of volumes dedicated to the topic of media archaeology have been published, notably Siegfried Zielinski's Deep Time of the Media (2006 [2002]), Jussi Parikka's What is Media Archaeology? (2012), Erkki Huhtamo's Illusions in Motion (2013), and Wolfgang Ernst's Digital Memory and the Archive (2013). We would highlight here two very recent and notable contributions: Thomas Elsaesser's Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema and Wolfgang Ernst's Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity (both 2016).

In Sonic Time Machines, Wolfgang Ernst argues that media archaeology needs to be understood not only as a way of understanding media technology, but also as ‘a form of technical perception in which the technological device itself turns into a listening organ’ (Ernst, p. 31). This ‘sonic’ dimension of time-based media allows the media archaeologist to access the past in ways distinct from the interpretative methods of historiography, because these media preserve ‘technological knowledge of the material past’ (Ibid., p. 113). This technological knowledge can be analysed using tools quite distinct from those of traditional hermeneutic interpretation. Fourier analysis can be used to break down sound into its constituent waveforms. Computational methods equally allow us to break down and understand audio in new ways. For example, the algorithms developed for music recognition software may lead to new forms of searching and sorting audio archives. Ultrasound monitors provide the metaphor here: they emit, measure, and manipulate human inaudible sound into an image that is legible to the human eye (Ibid., p. 31). What Ernst calls ‘sonicity’ is not confined to the audio domain, but opens up time-based media technology in general to new forms of analysis.

Introduction

This statement describes two aspects that make access to cultural heritage information challenging: the heterogeneous nature of many cultural heritage collections and the growing need to provide non-specialist users with access to cultural heritage content. Cultural heritage institutions (libraries, museums and archives) hold an enormous and rich variety of digital content covering a broad range of subjects, such as natural history, ethnography, archaeology, historic monuments and fine and applied arts, which often cross national and linguistic boundaries. There is strong motivation to bring together content from different cultural institutions into centralized portals, which have typically offered access services based on traditional catalogues used in libraries, museums and archives. For example, Europeana provides online access to over 32 million digitized cultural heritage artefacts provided by a range of European institutions. However, the size and lack of organization of these collections can be overwhelming for many users, who are provided with little or no guidance about how to access, interpret and use the information in them. There is a risk of ‘overload’ when users are presented with vast collections of information (Patterson, Roth and Woods, 2001).

This chapter discusses techniques to support information access to digital cultural heritage collections and, in particular, helping users explore and use the information they contain. In this chapter ‘use’ relates to assisting users with creating paths or trails with the items they find. To ground the discussion we focus on a particular system called ‘PATHS’ that aims to support multiple user groups with varying degrees of domain knowledge through the provision of state-of-the-art functionalities, such as recommendations and visualizations. A central theme of the system is the integration of ‘paths’ (sets of artefacts from the collection organized around a topic) into the system to assist users with navigating and interpreting the content. These paths may form access points to the collection, and the pathway metaphor is an effective way of guiding users through online digital collections (Shipman et al., 2000), as well as artefacts displayed in physical museums (Van Hage et al., 2010; Grieser et al., 2011).

Introduction

To begin, let me provide an immediate opening to the chapter’s principal claims. As the anthropology of the practice of human rights demonstrates, even in terms of an explicit understanding of “progress,” it is very difficult to sustain empirically the conclusion that human rights has been a force for progress in the contemporary world. On the one hand, the postwar human rights project is intensely teleological; the movement toward a better, more advanced, more civilized future is implicit in the construction of “human rights” as the primary “symbol to all of victory over those who sought to achieve tyranny through aggressive war” (UNESCO 1949, 258–259).

To ask conceptually, that is, about whether or not human rights is progressive is to push right up against a tautology, since “human rights” and “progress” are mutually implied from the very beginning. But on the other hand, even if we were to devise a set of indicators in order to measure the impact of human rights in certain areas of concern – political freedom, torture, access to justice, etc. – we would immediately confront two problems. First, as Sally Engle Merry is documenting in her ongoing research on the use of quantitative indicators to measure human rights compliance (see, e.g., Merry 2009, 2012), there is a problematic degree of dissonance between the statistical techniques and assumptions that animate indicator research, and the multiplicity of processes that get radically condensed into “data.” She argues that the broader impact of human rights – the kind of impact, that is, that would speak to the question of “progress” – is likely to prove statistically unmeasurable for purposes of the diverse group of constituencies involved in human rights enforcement and activism.