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Ecosystems of Collective Intelligence in the Service of Digital Archives

1.1. Digital archives

The management of digital archives is crucial today and for years to come. It is estimated that every 2 days, humanity produces as much digital information as was produced during the two million years that preceded our existence. In addition to this human production is the information that machines continuously produce. With the cost of digital memory becoming ever cheaper, most of this information is stored in vast databases. In 2025, all of these “big data” will constitute nearly eight zettabytes (trillions of gigabytes) [SAD 15]. In our age, there are very few human activities that do not generate digital archives; each day we feed digital workflows even outside our use of computers, telephones or other digital devices. It is enough for us to turn on a light, run errands, take public transport or watch television to produce digital traces that, for the most part, will never be accessible to us, but which are compiled, indexed and calculated in server farms and management centers.

The status of these digital archives is obviously not the same when dealing with the tweet sent automatically by a cow, the digitization of a course by Gilles Deleuze or the 3D modeling of the Citadelle Laferrière near Cap-Haïtien. Even if these archives are ultimately composed of a set of 0s and 1s and are therefore formally comparable to one another, their importance is not equivalent and they particularly vary according to space, time and actor contexts that are faced with this information. The tweet sent by a digital device in relation to a cow’s activities1 is probably not important for most of us, but for the milk producer who wants to follow his herd’s movements to correlate the milk composition with the pastures grazed, it is important to know that a certain pasture has an influence on the amount of fat in the milk. Similarly, a certain passage in Gilles Deleuze’s courses where he speaks of the importance as a fundamental criterion seems to some people like an almost meaningless phrase while it takes on very great importance for the researcher interested in the relationship between ethics and ontology, but also for the reader of these lines who at this very moment is thinking about this concept just by the fact that they are reading it:

“What does that mean, this category? The important. No, it is agreed; that is aggravating, but it is not important. What is this calculation? Isn’t it that? Isn’t it the category of the remarkable or the important that would allow us to establish proportions between the two intransigent meanings of the word proportion? Which depends on and results from the intensive part of myself and which rather refers to the extensive parts that I have2.”

These proportions between the inner-being and the outer-having are quite easily transposed into the domain of digital archives. Due to their dynamic, upgradeable and interactive characters, digital archives are ecosystems where each element can be analyzed in terms of existence made up of “intensive parts” and “extensive parts”. The example of the digitization of the fort at Cap-Haïtien sheds light on the importance of digital archives that illustrate this “intensive/extensive” double dimension that Deleuze emphasizes to show the correlation between an exterior dimension connected to having and the material, and an interior dimension connected to being and the immaterial. In the case of this historic monument classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, digital archiving is the chance to develop both a material and immaterial heritage in one of the poorest countries in the world. The creation of an international research program focusing on the issues of augmented realities, the teaching and education of students on these issues, and the mobilization of artists for the innovative use of these technologies are three examples of immaterial heritage development. At the same time, these activities allow for consideration of material heritage development through the implementation of an economy that uses these digital archives to create new services aimed at tourists on cruises passing by this country. Here, the impact of the digital archive goes beyond the scope of a company or that of knowledge by having repercussions on the whole economy of a country through a joint development of material and immaterial heritage.

Consequently, the fundamental issue of digital archives consists in examining their importance at both the material and the immaterial level in order to estimate their relevance in terms of balance between the finality of the digitization process and the uses made of it. Given the breadth that digital archives take on today and their impact on our lives, we must examine the importance of these archives at both the personal and the collective level. These investigations can only be done through long-term collective work that must take place through a pooling of analyses and the constitution of a collective intelligence capable of lending humanity the means to avoid handing over to machines the full responsibility of semantic choices necessary for the interpretation of archives [CIT 10]. Solutions already exist or are being developed as initiatives taken by the W3C to harmonize information management practices; others remain to be discovered from a technical, epistemological, political or ethical point of view.

1.2. Collective intelligence

It is rather trivial to explain what collective intelligence is through the anthill analogy [FER 97] or all other insect societies [PEN 06]. This conception leads to a very partial vision of the phenomenon of collective intelligence and brings about a questionable ethical position in the case of human organizations. The conception of a collective intelligence modelled on insect societies tends to reduce the human participant in this intelligence to a simple and basic being, whose entire complexity must be removed to make each individual react like the whole. As Bernard Stiegler remarks, therein lie the stakes of a war for control of societies through symbols [STI 04]. Furthermore, it is one of the recurring criticisms vis-à-vis collective intelligence that would only be intelligent in name, and would only serve to centralize memory to better control it without allowing new knowledge to emerge [MAY 06].

What sets humans apart from ants is their ability to reflect on the information flows in their interior and thus express a reflective conscience [LEV 11]. As Yves Prié explains, reflexivity is the ability to get back in touch with oneself in order to construct from memory representations allowing the regulation of one’s actions [PRI 11]. This definition, which places reflexivity in an individual context, can nevertheless be understood in a collective framework as well, where individuals share their reflexivity to work collectively in accordance with the consciences of each individual. There we find the basic principles of a science that aims to elaborate a consensus and allows us to define collective intelligence as the sharing of reflexivity in order to complete an action that could not be done by a single person.

But before they can benefit from this collective “ability to act” [RAB 05], the actors must agree to direct their personal interests towards an altruistic sharing of their will. This is possible by formalizing and sharing knowledge while also accepting their validation by collective constraints in order to make the task interoperable and reusable for a community. All of the difficulty of collective intelligence remains in this ability of individuals to agree to restrain their own expressions through formalism, for it quite often challenges habits of reflection. They must not deceive themselves about the primary motivations of humans, which do not necessarily go in the direction of the ethical development of harmonious collaboration. As Yves Citton states, sometimes it is necessary to use tricks to make practices evolve and to anchor them in new social organizations [CIT 08]. It is rather indicative to see that research conducted by Anita Woolley to define a collective intelligence factor confirms that the abandonment of selfish interests in favor of an altruistic approach increases a group’s capacity for collective intelligence. In fact, it shows that each individual’s intelligence has far less impact than the social sensibility of a group’s members, allowing them to listen and not monopolize the discussion in particular [WOO 10].

The issue of restraining individual intelligence in favor of completing a collective action today goes through technical devices and particularly through graphic interfaces that will formalize semiotic systems whose goal is to facilitate individual expression in correlation with the constraints necessary for sharing that expression. The use of a computer language like WIKI is a clear example of going through this constraint to facilitate the interoperability of an individual expression and completing an encyclopedia’s project. These collective intelligence projects do not stop at one computer language; they bring with them an entire knowledge ecosystem at the heart of which these projects will be able to develop through the successive completion of the individual actions.

1.3. Knowledge ecosystems

These are the solutions to these issues that we are going to analyze by taking concrete examples in domains as diverse as corporate innovation or personal archives, but...