Abstract:

With this communication, we intend to present the project CREAT_ED: The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education with a particular focus on its online archive platform. The project is in the development stage, however, its platform already allows for establishing strong links between education and research. With the CREAT_ED project, we intend to understand historically how the idea of the child as a creative subject was produced. For this, within the project, we built a web archive platform where we load different materials and references to examine the discourses that produced this child.

Research in Arts Education presents needs in terms of web platforms that go far beyond conventional ones. It is not only about the specificity of education and artistic practice in its problems and singularities that are reflected in multimedia manipulation, but also, due to the need for multiple forms of data processing that are not restricted to mere indexing and require new forms of manipulation, intersection, and visualization. The investigation and processing of data thus become a space for criticism, speculation, experimentation, and research of the digital platforms themselves, in various aspects, from the infrastructure itself to the design of interfaces.

It was in this context that the team of researchers started building the platform in a framework of participatory design within action-research cycles. A back office was established as the 1st objective for the inclusion of a series of references (texts, images, videos) that could be filtered, crossed, and mapped in different categories and tags. The categorization criterias are discussed in periodical meetings during the development of the project. In a 2nd objective, the chronological mapping of these data in a timeline was intended with adequate readability for the amount of data we work with. However, the timeline is mostly used as a form of imperial representation that activates in itself the violence of a history of the dominant. As a project that starts from an anti-colonial lens, it became necessary to develop other forms of conversion, mapping, and visualization of information that allow different types of interaction and experience of researchers, both in terms of insertion, manipulation, and visualization of data. So we developed also an exploded representation of the timeline that allow to work with removable content and graph relations display. This way, students and researchers can dispose the data in many ways interpolating with diferent resources in the same view. Right now, we have about 650 entries in our timeline that feeds other projects in arts education beyond the CREAT_ED. In this way the platform becomes a seed for an Online Archive of Arts Education project with research and pedagogical materials.

The research project does not end within the team, on the contrary, it promotes public moments of debate, dissemination, and construction of the project itself in the search for collaborative, aggregating, and critical extension processes. In this sense, the online platform became an object of questioning for new projects by other researchers and students of arts education. This communication thus focuses on the archival platform, the ways of archiving and unarchiving, their possible scales, and the articulation of artistic research with arts education. The unarchiving gesture is connected with unlearning archival rules and powers.

Keywords:

Arts education, web platform, data visualisation, archive.