We will demonstrate the platform, showing some narratives and explaining the technological background. We designed the platform drawing on frameworks from the ecology of images, post-colonial, intersectionality, and critical media studies within the scope of the project Breaking the Code: Algorithmic Non-Normativity in Creative Digital Humanities.
In this archive, we have data that includes textual, geographical, temporal, and audiovisual information on the history of image ecology. We designed this archive from the digital humanities perspective, in which the data is treated as capta, a narrative aligned with specific issues. We have four exploratory axes to develop these issues: Historical, Laboratory, Artistic, and Educational. The axes function as categories we can cross to extend the narrative plan. For instance, the Laboratory axis contains information such as molecules that act in photographic development; the Educational axis has teaching material such as exercises for sustainable image production; and the Historical axis includes information, for example, on the environmental consequences of the photographic industry, from the extraction of silver in analog photography to the resources used in digital imaging.
We initially developed this platform to structure and visualize data related to photography's material and ecological history, digital imaging, and visual media production.
We began by developing a data model in wikibase.cloud, capable of supporting structured research into the socio-environmental dimensions of image technologies. After initial experimentation, we deployed a custom Wikibase Suite instance https://wikibase.echoimages.labs.wikimedia.pt/ with a Docker decoupling architecture and with a React-based frontend https://echoimages.labs.wikimedia.pt/ designed to prioritize narrative and spatial engagement.
This frontend allows researchers and students to explore structured data through a series of interactive tools:
- A leaflet-based map for geolocating intensities and relationships;
- A graph visualization interface for exploring connections among entities;
- A filterable timeline and property-based search engine, enabling layered dataset exploration.
Together, these digital tools form a dynamic interface for narrative data exploration, allowing researchers and students to engage critically with the history of technological development and its material effects on bodies, labor, and ecosystems. Thus, the platform serves as a knowledge environment and a space for proposing new modes of storytelling, situated knowledge, critique, and speculative world-building. In this space, capta, rather than data, becomes the unit of epistemological engagement.
This architecture may be generalized to other domains and themes, supporting the creation of new archives, pedagogical models, and critical visualizations. It is an interesting and fun way of using and inserting data in the Wikimedia ecosystem. We also use the platform for thinking in situated knowledge and using the Wikimedia ecosystem in a decyclopeding mode (not universalist, normative, or encyclopedic mode). Even in this situated knowledge, we engage entirely in the free software, FAIR principles, and Linked Open Data (LOD) spirit.