IASA 2018 Annual Conference

"The Archive," that collection of organized data, suffers from a tragic scientific plot. "The Archived," "The Recorded," "The Preserved," "The [UNESCO] Enlisted" are the multiple faces of "The Valued." The officers of this new (too powerful) ideology, "The Archivists," are, in fact, gatekeepers, who have a critical impact on future representation. The act of "collecting," "registering," "archiving," "documenting," "studying"; and the act of writing, of speaking, of telling the story, of representing, and of displaying has been the privilege of a cast of officers, manipulating their technical expertise and/or theoretical tools. This fact has been assumed (and "published," another instance of power) by the social sciences since mid-80s: the celebrated "poetics" and "politics" of social sciences. Still, this tragic machine of social construction of scientific facts and heritage has kept far too many people away from those power tools: stakeholders, entire communities, and musical practitioners.

With Heritamus, a three-year European project that gathered a transnational consortium, we tried to overcome this problem by bringing democracy into the "archive," connecting users with tangible (historical sound recordings) and intangible materials (practitioners knowledge), contributing to democratic access, not only to information, but specially to the production of the information itself.

This paper will introduce the theoretical framework of the project, the archival tool designed, and the digital sound archive of Museu do Fado, the archive that will first experiment the Heritamus tool for the democratic archive, giving the right to curate sounds and knowledge to all, in particular to the ones who make them.