A New Website
[post updated : 10/19/2015]
Dear co-inquirers,
This is the first message that we have sent you since the official end of the financed phase of the project. It goes without saying, that the print version of the book, the website, the face-to-face meetings, conferences and workshops will carry on albeit in different manner. However, in order to continue with the project and before doing anything else, we need to address the matter of the website.
As you will have no doubt noticed, the AIME project has been experimental in every sense of the word. This includes its digital dimension that we had to completely invent from scratch – not to mention the host of problems such as errors, backtracking, modifications, and bugs that are all inherent to this kind of adventure. By the same token, actively participating in the domain of the Digital Humanities, that is itself in full swing, has been a real learning experience – one that we have described in the forthcoming special issue of Visible Language: ‘Critical Making: Design and the Digital Humanities’. That said, it is now time to offer you an object that is stable and above all, durable. For the past five months, we have busily working on doing just this, even if it has all being taking place in back in the kitchen where you have not been able to see anything.
Over the summer break, and thanks to Science Po’s Medialab, we have been able to completely overhaul the site and fix one of its major issues: its slowness. Whatever other problems the site may have had, slowness was the issue that discouraged visitors. So, now that we have fixed that issue you can explore the site to your heart’s content without seething with impatience. The new software is much more stable, better documented thus guaranteeing the longevity of the site for much longer. After all, software has its own mode of existence that we must learn to respect. For this, a big thank you to Paul Girard, and the team at Medialab.
The second big change has been to simplify the page layout by merging the third and fourth columns. In other words, the contributions are now totally integrated into the site’s documentation. This allows not only for better readability but also for a more extensive integration of documents regardless of their authorship, that is indicated on the home page each time. Here too, the experiment, despite a few initial stumbles, has been it has to be said, quite successful. 60 published contributors, 206 published contributions, (134 in English, 72 in French) is quite something. Moreover, we are still receiving contributions. Of course, we have been working with them a little more slowly since we no longer have ERC funding and the AIME staff has become, well, just one person. So, if you would like to make a contribution and are not in too much of a hurry to receive a reply, you can send in your contribution proposals to this email address: contact at modesofexistence dot org
One of the advantages of this site overhaul is that we now have a tool that can be used by other researchers. This is why we have published the source code for the entire digital project licensed under LGPL-v3 and you can download it here: https://github.com/medialab/aime-core.
If we have spent so much time and energy getting the site running faster and making it easier to use it is because we need some of this energy left over so that we can launch ourselves into the exposition Reset Modernity! This will be keeping us busy until April 2016 and will allow us, through the catalogue, visits, and by setting up installations to deploy, once again in another form, the inquiry’s protocol.
We hope that you will find the new site more pleasant to use and will take advantage of the mass of documentation that has been accumulated. In this way, you will be able to keep the inquiry going in your own manner. On behalf of the team, I would like to thank you for your patience, confidence, participation, and contribution.
Bruno Latour
(kindly translated by Cormac O'Keeffe)