Robotics narratives and networks: Conceptual foundations for a non-linear digital archive

Abstract

This paper introduces the conceptual foundations and motivation for creating a digital archive to display developments in the field of robotics over the past 50 years. The archive is meant to represent robotics as an evolving “ecology of knowledge” (Akera, 2007b) and contains interviews with robotics researchers accompanied by other related documents, such as videos, photos, and online resources, and by visualizations of bibliometric analyses of co-authorship ties, citation networks, common keywords and concepts, etc. Rather than representing a unified and unilinear view of “the history” of robotics, the archive is designed to allow users to explore and navigate the available materials guided by their own interests, thereby constructing multiple narratives about robotics. We describe the project as involving multiple “memory practices” (Bowker, 2005): robotics “pioneers” narrating their lived experiences in the field, publications that inscribe the results and practices of scientific research, social scientists collecting and presenting these materials to further understand scientific practice, and users from the public navigating the archive to develop their own understandings of robotics over the years. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of new information technologies such as digital archives for memory practices in science studies and the sciences.