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# Methods of active documentation

What's the active part of documenting Relearn? What does it mean to re-activate a collection of files? Does it mean to execute them again? To read them again? To simply look at them again? Does the material change while we observe it? Do we change while observing the material?

Relearn is intentionally self-reflective. Almost every year there have been attempts to re-examine and redress itself. 2017 was no stranger to that. In the Networked Archive track of that year, the word *rumination* came up a lot. The track participants had the image of a cow's stomach in our minds, the four different chambers that it consists of: Rumen, Reticulum, Omasum, Abomasum. The first two chambers are the major site of microbial activity that break down digest the material. After the cud is regurgitated, then swallowed again, until completely mixed (or activated) with saliva, it is then sent to the omasum, where it's broken down into the smallest elements possible to be pushed into the abomasum, the 'real' stomach of the cow. Further digestion takes place here. If Relearn were a ruminant, what would these chambers look like? Would the material ever reach the 'real' stomach? Is there any 'real', 'final' stomach? Do we ever finish digesting what happens during Relearn or are we stuck in a kind of gastric purgatory?

The files and traces that are left after every Relearn could be seen as extensions of a collective memory: notes that were taken in passing are now the only marks left by the thoughts that passed through, snippets of code that lay dormant in the repository, pictures of unidentified gestures which now seem alien, or group photos reminding of who was there. They sit in different hard drives: the hard drive of the server hosting the Gitlab repository and the hard drives of the participants' day-to-day computers. They are in that sense not passive at all. But you could say that they're not active either, as nobody is paying attention to them or remembers that they exist.

How to approach the Relearn 2017 *dump* of images, scripts, etherpad traces and more? We are in a kind of chicken-and-egg situation: how to introduce Relearn while taking into account what Relearn is, or better yet, how Relearn works, in the very way of doing this? Our intuition is that a lack of "essence" might be a defining feature of Relearn. As the diversity among the various editions demonstrates, Relearn can be seen as a process more than as a "thing". A radical anti-essentialist approach to Relearn can be formulated as a question: what's the process of describing a process?

With this question in mind, we started looking at the traces left in various hard drives, servers, and online pages… We took an investigative, forensic approach. We started tagging, looking at metadata and producing more of it, conscious that while the material is unable to speak for itself, it is also a trigger for us to recall memories stored somewhere in our wetware hard drives.

One of the consequences of activating a previous event is that we spend time together again. Reading the *call for tracks* is a way for us to pick up conversations where we left them off in 2017, thus activating/reframing the question of learning/relearning in a collective setting. It turns it into a reroam-over-time (where *reroam* has been a recurring name for moments of meta reflection on Relearn, during Relean). What were the motivations, curiosities or urgencies that led us to organising and initiating Relearn in 2017? Are they still the same? How different are they now?

[to ingest and to regurgitate]

We believe the act of activating can also be an act of mediation. An important element to describe Relearn with is its temporality: short bursts of togetherness anticipated by longer periods of organisational work. There is no stable institution or structure behind Relearn to mediate between people or over time. When there is no one to organise, the spam emails grow in numbers, like wild weeds in an unkept garden. We hope that activating and mediating Relearn through this document format enables thinking about it in a perspective of years instead of a perspective of weeks. By activating a previous edition of Relearn we hope to continue the conversation around collective practices, of which rumination is one.


There are three kinds of addressees for this document: diving into the files lets us take into account what permeated Relearn before 2017 and what was passed on afterwards. We hope this will reignite the subjects within our own networks, including the Relearn network, where it can be read as an extended email to the mailing list.

At the same time, we felt excited to revisit the Relearn 2017 conversations and inscribe them into a document that could speak to people with similar affinities, who may decide to organise their own experiment. 

And last but not least, one of the constants of many editions is the difference in the way participants experience this time together. Like any process of joining a new group, for first-time relearners it can often be a bit intimidating, a bit awkward, to understand what are the habits of said group and to share your process with someone else. We hope that this document might feel like having a conversation with a previous relearner, while being outside in the sun, waiting for tea to boil.


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[Something that is not touched upon is the role of learning in our practices? Or the relation between learning and our practices.]


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text writing notes that need to be ported in or left aside ↓

During Relean, finished outputs are not required. This is very clear in the materials we analyzed, that can be seen as threads, which extend out of relearn. Were we trying to connect the threads more than following them to see where they lead to. 

where is the data stored? What does collective memory mean? various hard drives, but also physical traces, "souvenirs", mental images, oral anecdotes, etc. that reactivate each other. Active archiving means incentivizing such "activation". ware, hardware, software and wetware. 

what does activating mean? (A spectrum of activating) [i would keep this]
1. activating convo between relearners 
2. making the archive legible to non-relearners or wanna be relearners
3. providing access and foster distribution
4. ????

How does the activation happen?
conversation between things and people, inter-activation, inter-enactment

passive data, info > activated by looking at it
"“situated knowledges”. The idea, developed in conversation with feminist philosophers and activists such as Nancy Hartsock, concerns how truth is made. Concrete practices of particular people make truth, Haraway argued. The scientists in a laboratory don’t simply observe or conduct experiments on a cell, for instance, but co-create what a cell is by seeing, measuring, naming and manipulating it." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/donna-haraway-interview-cyborg-manifesto-post-truth

files are constantly active? technically speaking?

multiple levels of activation (interrelated) [i would keep this]
0. material that sits somewhere, but nobody knows were, nobody looks at it
1. looking at the material
2a. annotating the material 

• - injecting annotations (images [in the files], call for tracks [in the text])
• - organising, adding order, making sense (etherpads)

2b. making it legible (introducing, design, playfulness in the way we do this to reflect relearn?)
3. producing new material (oral histories etc.)
4. picking up conversation / producing situation that is new and old at the same time
5. give it to others
6. connecting to other experience that are out there (articulate position)



A little too active documentation: mistakenly adding the hidden bashrc files when too rapidly commiting files to the git before taking offline the complex.local server at the end of Relearn 2017.

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