Collecting

Hybrid labs are often homes to various kinds of research and teaching collections. As outlined briefly in chapter 2 on lab apparatus, research collections can be traced back at least to 16th-century cabinets of curiosities and their subsequent incorporation into modern research spaces, including those in universities. Besides the library, which is largely a research collection of books, collections of objects such as mineralogical or biological specimens or scientific instruments and models were an important aspect of the infrastructure of academic knowledge practices. In disciplines such as archaeology and ethnology, research and teaching collections have long provided essential infrastructure within the social sciences and humanities. Though the visibility—and funding—of these collections diminished over the course of the 20^th century, with the rapid proliferation of labs dedicated to, for example, so-called ‘vintage’ or ‘obsolete’ technologies, it appears that collecting is re-emerging in the twenty-first century as a key technique in contemporary hybrid humanities labs.

Research and teaching collections are primarily for academic uses, but, as we mentioned in our discussion of the Media Archaeology Lab in chapter 2, these collections may be a form of public interface. As something that resembles (but is not quite) a museum, a research collection may become a privileged access point that allows various publics to come to a new understanding of the university as an institution that also makes sense of the world by collecting things. Given that research collections are not quite museums, they are also not necessarily exhibition spaces, as contemporary lab collections are not curated according to the same principles as museum and archive collections. Cara Krmpotich points this out when articulating the work that goes into a collection before it becomes ready for academic study. In many ways, it is this process of handling that constitutes the research collection itself: “applying an acryloid base layer, then an archival ink number, followed up by a top coat. We experiment with numbers on a smooth clear and colored glass surfaces, grainy plastic surfaces, cardboard boxes, shiny metals, ceramic teacups, and figurines. In each case, students think through storage positions, and the vulnerabilities of each object.”25 One could add to this list the work that goes into cataloguing and metadata, content management systems and records, but it is already implied in the above description of an anthropological collection. The same process is necessary to constitute a humanities collection (like an author’s working library) or a media collection (like the Media Archaeological Fundus at Humboldt University).

While there are often special protocols around the access to and the handling of archival objects in such collections, the hands-on principle is an important component of the technique of collecting. Objects in the collections of hybrid labs are handled constantly and sometimes altered which is why sites such as the Trope Tank at MIT are careful to avoid the perception of being an archive and instead they attempt to connect with the legacy of experimentation. Trope Tank Director Nick Montfort says, “By explaining that we’re not an archive, I mean to stress that the materials we have are for use, not to be preserved for decades. The Trope Tank isn’t a library in that the main interactions are not similar to consulting books. And we aren’t mainly trying to produce artworks, either. There are aspects of these, but the main metaphor for us is that of a laboratory where people learn and experiment.”26

The research and teaching collection is also a mode of placement. It takes objects out of circulation—or perhaps in some cases rescues them from obsolescence—and literally re-places them into methods and narratives of contemporary research. On the subject of media archaeology labs, Jesper Olsson argues that this re-contextualization of objects in a lab collection produces “new knowledge” about the objects. The collection shifts and situates, sometimes even transports objects and instruments (say, an oscilloscope which ends up in a video game collection), allowing one aspect of one part of a history of science to be placed into investigations of other fields entirely, for example media theory or the history of technology: “the transport of methods, operations, and the very conceptual and material framework of a lab from the history and practices of science to the field of the humanities might turn out to be epistemically productive in itself.”27

Hopefully it is clear by now that collecting is not merely a passive infrastructural activity that acts as a support mechanism for research. Our assumptions about what constitutes research need to include any research activity in modern universities that takes place amongst a variety of mechanisms that are commonly considered administrative. Budgetary constraints, institutional decisions about use of space, conversations about relations with the library, purchase orders and metadata, cataloguing and organizing—all of this administrative and policy-related activity organizes the space of the collection in ways that needs to be accounted for.

It is also worth noting at this point that many collections remain pre-emergent because of budgetary constraints. Collecting and maintaining comes at a cost that is not necessarily recognized and understood by contemporary institutional structures that still often rely on a division of labor that sees collections as the task of the library unit. Collections are thus valuable and useful as objects of study because they relate to multiple levels of processes that academia frequently fails to capture as part of the critical analyses it produces: labor of maintenance, administrative structures as part of intellectual infrastructure, the relevance of links between libraries and other forms of collections that in our case also link to the function of contemporary humanities labs.