Expanding the Triptych - PECE as Archive

This essay reflects on what it means to be an archive: how PECE is acting as an archive, and introducing the additional layers to “archive” that sit between analysis and communication.

The design logics PECE’s site contrast between traditional archives and PECE as a “living” archive. Traditional archives are characterized as stagnant: they provide a “house” in which the data lives as artifacts. Although the “house” model allows for everything to have a place and it is easy to locate what has been stored in the archive, this requires that the artifacts be highly codified. On the other hand, PECE as an archive is meant to be flexible and emphasizes randomness and noise— since both putting artifacts into the archive and searching through the archive for artifacts are recognized as parts of the analysis that can help form new connections. 

As a part of their motivation for putting artifacts onto PECE, interviewees hoped to ensure equitable access to materials that may otherwise be behind a paywall or region-locked to collaborators in different locations. Another motivator was the hope that users’ data would be available for other researchers to use; opening access to data would not only help researchers answer new and different research questions, but also enable novel use of data outside of its imagined use at time of data collection.

Rather than a lonely storage place for a researcher’s own data, interviewees saw PECE as a place they could find others’ data while storing their own, and curate their material alongside that of other PECE contributors.