記録のパフォーマティヴ・パワー

The performative power of records

By cultivating archives through successive activations people and communities define identities. In these activations the meanings of archives are constructed and reconstructed in cognitive, affective and conative modes. Archival documents are not exclusively information objects, but components of a communication process. In that process documents can have performative power, they can accomplish something, make a difference in status before and after. Archives are thus not a static artefact imbued with the record creator's voice only, but a dynamic process involving an infinite number of stakeholders in time-space. That is why archives are never closed, but open into the future. Digital archives will always be in a state of becoming, being created and recreated by technologies of migration and reconstruction, and by the use of social media applications.