ABSTRACT
Tremendous amounts of time and resources are spent on digitizing and reorganizing collections. This chapter discusses digital culture, big data, user-generated content, and presence theory. It reconsiders methods for organizing and visualizing large data sets, in particular audio-visual collections, by addressing sense-making, nonsense-making, and no-sense-making in the work on mapping and representing these collections. Visualizing collections of art and other artifacts forces us to consider methods of sense-making and nonsense-making as a desirable byproduct of crowd-sourcing. Images of networks have become common-sense models for representing complex structures. Mapping and making sense of the collection was twofold. On one side, the categorization and visualization should allow researchers and other users to study the particular piece, and outsiders and museum guests should be able to browse the collection. On the other side, the categorization and visualization should allow researchers to study the relation structure – the network or meshwork – in order to study the mail art network as a historical phenomenon.
