Thursday, 10 March 2016

Creata: a multi-voiced exploration of a forgotten concept


In this lecture we explore the concept of ‘creata’ and ask what happened to it. We write ‘we’ because the story of the lecture will be told by several different voices, who seek to jar rather than harmonize. The concept of creata was on offer in the late 1990s as a substitute for and a challenge to the concept of ‘data’. Some argued that we needed a different concept for materials formerly known as data to highlight that these materials were created by someone(s) from somewhere(s), and that they never again could be referred to, used, engaged with or sensed into in an ahistorical way. However, the concept did not gain much traction and the lecture investigates why that might be. The lecture also addresses the particular forms of forgetfulness around these issues under the contemporary material and ontological turns in social research. We advance the argument that it may be particularly timely to un-forget the concept.