Anthropological Archive

An archive can be considered as a store of artefacts, whether digital or physical, but here we look to describe something more organic, more "present" and evolving in terms of structure, and more psychosocial in terms of content.

Relevant here are topics of Personal Identity, of Documentary, Personal Archiving and Personal Data. We anticipate a future where we are able to access a rich set of media regarding individual and social views of a group of people at any given time, and ask how such a body of information can be structured.

So why do we need to explore this new form of writing? What does it serve? Writing with strangers is a form of writing that enables us to collect our own personal thoughts quickly, and organise them in the way we like, while at the same time enabling us to collaborate and write together with other people.

As such it is the only platform I know of that makes it possible to combine our own individual understanding, with that of a group of other writers.

It is a slower more thoughtful form of collaboration, one based around the speed and practice of writing rather than that of sharing or promoting what we have already thought of and written through say blog posts or tweets. It encourages sharing of the thought process at an early stage.

The second aspect of this "writing" is the ability to document and capture this thinking in time and place.