The wearable past: Integrating a physical museum collection of wearables into a database of born-digital artifacts

Abstract

This paper describes the collaborative process involved in the novel creation of The Wearable Past: A collection of physical museum artifacts, presently on display at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, digitally re-presented in the context of the Fabric of Digital Life (or Fabric), a database of born-digital objects run by the Decimal Lab at Ontario Tech University. We discuss the multiple stages involved in integrating a physical exhibit of wearables within a database of born-digital artifacts. We argue that the inclusion of historic artifacts in Fabric effectively connects the past to the future, creating a dialogic relationship between digital artifacts rather than a hierarchical schema, facilitated by Fabric's metadata. Fabric provides a means to explore the cultural turn in wearable technology adoption, contextualized through a complex range of artifact representations. Following Bakhtin's notion of "dialogic interaction,"we argue that the historic artifacts become dialogically entangled, and weave "in and out of complex interrelationships"(Bakhtin 1981, 276-277). We use Carole L. Palmer's thematic research collections framework to explain the overarching structure and intent for Fabric's born-digital collections. We then proceed to explain how The Wearable Past weaves historical cultural narratives from material artifacts into Fabric. We argue that they persist amid technologies that are proposed for future bodies to wear, reframing the conceptualization of wearables as lived phenomena. We draw on the work of several writers, including Lai Tze Fan (2018), Moynihan and Putra (2019), and Johanna Drucker (2009) to interpret The Wearable Past's contribution to Fabric's content, metadata, and ontology.