Project Description:
The Traumwerk project is to design, build
and evaluate a web-based collaborative authoring environment
to explore, experimentally, some classic issues in
the humanities.
 For
example:
- What are the dynamics of group cultural creation?
- how is social memory defined?
More specifically:
- How might an anthropologist work with a
community to explore their sense of cultural memory?
- How might an archaeological team, in a site report,
retain the multitemporal and cultural complexity
of a place, its remains and the different disciplinary
approaches adopted in an archaeological project?
- How might a family or community produce a creative
scrapbook of their lives and memories, without reduction
to stereotypes?
Some technical questions:
- How might an archive be constructed collaboratively
in order to allow patterning and connections to
emerge and change, rather than be built into the
categorization of a methodology?
- What are the forms of new digital media, how do
they work, and what are the implications for new
interdisciplinary interests in the humanities?
- What are the implications of open source web environments
for authorship?
The Traumwerk project builds on the latest initiatives
in reflexive anthropology and cultural theory. It
has immediate and direct relevance to the development
of landscape studies, to the understanding of web-based
virtual communities, to anthropological, archaeological
and historiographic projects that aim to work with
rather than upon the communities they study.
A uniqueness lies in the collaborative and emergent
character of its output.
Core personnel:
- Michael Shanks (Professor of Classics, of Anthropology,
by courtesy, the Hoskins Scholar, Stanford)
- Sam Schillac (Software Architect, Teamleader,
Macromedia Incorporated)
- Steve Newman (Software Architect, Teamleader,
Macromedia Incorporated)
- Chris Witmore (doctoral student, Stanford Archaeology
Center)
Visit the Traumwerk
website.
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