NubuWeb – Nordic online archive for avant-garde and experimental literature and art
NubuWeb will function as an academic, pedagogic and public digital archive, aiming to making public material from and related to Nordic experimental art and literature from the mid 1900’s and onwards. With UbuWeb (founded by Kenneth Goldsmith) serving as a model we want to present texts, visual material and sound recordings, but also (and unlike UbuWeb) offer academic and more popular articles shedding light on and discussing the material.
The purpose of this grant application is to produce a functioning, attractive and available prototype of this archive. Vi have obtained rights to publish materials from a few key collections and archives that above all represents the Scandinavian Avant-Garde of the 1960’s. These are: the archive of the Swedish journal Rondo (1961–64); the extensive literary remains of Danish writer Hans Jørgen Nielsen (1941–1991); the archive of Swedish journal Ord&Bild (1892–). We are also engaged in a dialogue with Umeå University Research Library about securing rights to the tape recordings that Swedish writer Sara Lidman made during her research for her “reportage book” Gruva (1969).
NubuWeb will cooperate with Gothenburg University Library, The Swedish Literature Bank, and Centre for Digital Humanities at University of Gothenburg, with regards to digitizing, server space and technical competence. The aim is to have a fully functioning prototype of NubuWeb in the spring of 2019.
Final report
Projektets syfte samt utveckling under projektperioden.
Kort om genomfo¨randet samt en diskussion om projektets ma°l na°ddes. Erfarenheter och la¨rdomar.
Webbsidor och eventuella publikationer, samt la¨nkar till OA-publikationer.
The primary purpose of NubuWeb is to test the grounds for a non-commercial Internet based resource for avant-garde documents. The online archive UbuWeb served as inspiration and model for what we wanted to achieve with NubuWeb. Nevertheless our aims differed from the existing platform in a few significant ways:
• The scope of NubuWeb is limited to the Nordic countries.
• NubuWeb will not publish anything without having cleared the rights to the material. This might seem as a given, but it is important to make clear when drawing inspiration from the “anarchistic” publishing ideology of UbuWeb.
• NubuWeb is not primarily focused on (re)publishing artworks, but a plethora of material associated with avant-garde and artistic experiments, i.e. avant-garde documents in a broad sense. E.g. editorial documents, manuscripts, correspondences, sound or image documentations, contracts, as well as supplementary texts, research, essays, etc.
• NubuWeb is conceived as both a research structure and a curated pedagogic platform. This implies that the material published on NubuWeb is not intended to speak for itself, in the sense that as much as possible should be commented, annotated and contextualized. One could understand this in terms of historical research that displays itself in the form of a curated exhibition available to the public, while the research process is ongoing.
Our ambition was to produce a pilot for how a platform or environment like this could be presented, and at the starting point of the project we narrowed the available material down to two case studies: the archive of the Swedish literary journal Rondo (1961–64), and the tape recordings that served as raw material for Sara Lidman’s literary report Gruva (Mine, 1968). Both of these cases were exemplary with regards to the quantity of the available material, its historical significance, and its hitherto rather exclusive and inaccessible status.
To sum up: the project was successful in part. Beginning with making an inventory of the material it soon became obvious that we had underestimated how much effort would go into the preparatory archival research, identifying and selecting documents/material suitable for both digital reproduction and scholarly/pedagogical commentary. In the end, the curatorial decisions and production of contextualizing texts appeared far too crucial and time consuming for the project to actually result in a fully fledged and original digital publication platform.
As an alternative solution we turned to our collaborators Litteraturbanken, who decided to include us in the development of their new “Ljud och Bild” platform launched in September 2019. We have been promised a dedicated section of the website, which can easily be expanded and tailored to our needs depending on future projects. As of now we are still working out the technical, legal and curatorial and details. The collaboration with Litteraturbanken has significantly simplified, and to a large extent made unnecessary, the technical and logistic aspects of the NubuWeb project. It also became clear that spending resources on developing a separate platform was redundant and actually counterproductive in terms of dissemination, context, accessibility, and visibility.
Regarding reproduction and digitizing of archival material, the situation was different. The service provided by Gothenburg University Library (regarding the Rondo documents) seemed in the end less cost and time effective than acquiring a scanner capable of producing high quality images on our own. Especially so with regards to the prolongation of the project and the fact that there are several archives in the pipeline to be subject for NubuWeb presentation. We are allowed to bring our own equipment to the manuscript department of the library for scanning, and are thus also able to digitize archival material “on loan” from other institutions.
We have thus been able to (1) secure and provide a platform for NubuWeb’s presentations; (2) to partly secure the technical means for a continuation of the project; (3) and produced contextual and pedagogical text to accompany the publication of the documents. Nevertheless the project has been less successful in actually communicating its results – in order to publish the accumulated material all parts has to be brought together. We estimate that everything will be in place for the first parts of the case studies to be presented during spring 2020.
Important experiences and insights from our work with NubuWeb project can be summarized as follows:
• Many existing digital archives of documents of cultural historical significance are characterized by a lack of contextualization, as well as predominance of quantity before quality.
• The fact that there is an infinity of potential material to work with, combined with what we experience as an oversaturation of archival digital platforms, does not contradict our assessment that there is a need for curated resources.
• One cannot overestimate the time needed for contextualization, curatorial and editorial processes, and production of complementary pedagogic and scholarly commentary.
• Expanding existing digital resources, taking advantage of technical development already made, and platforms already in use, is for the most part more desirable than building new frameworks.
• Being dependent on external services for digitizing is mostly unavoidable, but having access to your own tools for digitizing will significantly speed up production when you have the opportunity to do it yourself – it might even be less costly in the long run.
Kort om genomfo¨randet samt en diskussion om projektets ma°l na°ddes. Erfarenheter och la¨rdomar.
Webbsidor och eventuella publikationer, samt la¨nkar till OA-publikationer.
The primary purpose of NubuWeb is to test the grounds for a non-commercial Internet based resource for avant-garde documents. The online archive UbuWeb served as inspiration and model for what we wanted to achieve with NubuWeb. Nevertheless our aims differed from the existing platform in a few significant ways:
• The scope of NubuWeb is limited to the Nordic countries.
• NubuWeb will not publish anything without having cleared the rights to the material. This might seem as a given, but it is important to make clear when drawing inspiration from the “anarchistic” publishing ideology of UbuWeb.
• NubuWeb is not primarily focused on (re)publishing artworks, but a plethora of material associated with avant-garde and artistic experiments, i.e. avant-garde documents in a broad sense. E.g. editorial documents, manuscripts, correspondences, sound or image documentations, contracts, as well as supplementary texts, research, essays, etc.
• NubuWeb is conceived as both a research structure and a curated pedagogic platform. This implies that the material published on NubuWeb is not intended to speak for itself, in the sense that as much as possible should be commented, annotated and contextualized. One could understand this in terms of historical research that displays itself in the form of a curated exhibition available to the public, while the research process is ongoing.
Our ambition was to produce a pilot for how a platform or environment like this could be presented, and at the starting point of the project we narrowed the available material down to two case studies: the archive of the Swedish literary journal Rondo (1961–64), and the tape recordings that served as raw material for Sara Lidman’s literary report Gruva (Mine, 1968). Both of these cases were exemplary with regards to the quantity of the available material, its historical significance, and its hitherto rather exclusive and inaccessible status.
To sum up: the project was successful in part. Beginning with making an inventory of the material it soon became obvious that we had underestimated how much effort would go into the preparatory archival research, identifying and selecting documents/material suitable for both digital reproduction and scholarly/pedagogical commentary. In the end, the curatorial decisions and production of contextualizing texts appeared far too crucial and time consuming for the project to actually result in a fully fledged and original digital publication platform.
As an alternative solution we turned to our collaborators Litteraturbanken, who decided to include us in the development of their new “Ljud och Bild” platform launched in September 2019. We have been promised a dedicated section of the website, which can easily be expanded and tailored to our needs depending on future projects. As of now we are still working out the technical, legal and curatorial and details. The collaboration with Litteraturbanken has significantly simplified, and to a large extent made unnecessary, the technical and logistic aspects of the NubuWeb project. It also became clear that spending resources on developing a separate platform was redundant and actually counterproductive in terms of dissemination, context, accessibility, and visibility.
Regarding reproduction and digitizing of archival material, the situation was different. The service provided by Gothenburg University Library (regarding the Rondo documents) seemed in the end less cost and time effective than acquiring a scanner capable of producing high quality images on our own. Especially so with regards to the prolongation of the project and the fact that there are several archives in the pipeline to be subject for NubuWeb presentation. We are allowed to bring our own equipment to the manuscript department of the library for scanning, and are thus also able to digitize archival material “on loan” from other institutions.
We have thus been able to (1) secure and provide a platform for NubuWeb’s presentations; (2) to partly secure the technical means for a continuation of the project; (3) and produced contextual and pedagogical text to accompany the publication of the documents. Nevertheless the project has been less successful in actually communicating its results – in order to publish the accumulated material all parts has to be brought together. We estimate that everything will be in place for the first parts of the case studies to be presented during spring 2020.
Important experiences and insights from our work with NubuWeb project can be summarized as follows:
• Many existing digital archives of documents of cultural historical significance are characterized by a lack of contextualization, as well as predominance of quantity before quality.
• The fact that there is an infinity of potential material to work with, combined with what we experience as an oversaturation of archival digital platforms, does not contradict our assessment that there is a need for curated resources.
• One cannot overestimate the time needed for contextualization, curatorial and editorial processes, and production of complementary pedagogic and scholarly commentary.
• Expanding existing digital resources, taking advantage of technical development already made, and platforms already in use, is for the most part more desirable than building new frameworks.
• Being dependent on external services for digitizing is mostly unavoidable, but having access to your own tools for digitizing will significantly speed up production when you have the opportunity to do it yourself – it might even be less costly in the long run.