Worlding, as the WPC project has sought to articulate, is an embodied process of being and knowing. Our collective goal sought to reflect this embodiment through a relational database that would allow us to surface interconnections in the data collected, and observe significant nodes where transcultural dynamics and socio-political concerns on a global scale met with public discourse in the arts. As discussed above, a relational database also allows for collaborative work, co-authoring, and consensus-building. As the team came to understand through the process of building a database, different positionalities, geographies, languages, and frames of reference emerged as points of divergence, of disagreement, and of contradiction. However, “to world,” is not necessarily to agree. As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has written in her text on knowledge relations:
As far as knowledge relations are concerned, if there is conflict in agreement (to dramatize creative hopes for knowledge exchange), there can also be exchange in disagreement (to dramatize creative hopes for scholarly criticism). [There are] many ways, different or divergent, in which relations are a means to knowledge. None of them matches completely onto the others, although they are here strung together to bring out certain continuities in people’s aspirations and how their self descriptions position them. (Strathern, 2018: p.44).
Where the WPC database may be limited in scope as interrogated above, the process of developing a relational data model through collaboration and dialogue, which allows points of contradiction to emerge from this process, invites us to consider what possibilities can be found through “worlding” data.
We offer the WPC database, not just for its dataset, but as “an imagination of the process/critique of what databases could be” (Paul Goodwin, WPC data committee internal workshop, 10 September 2024).
Works Cited
Strathern, Marilyn. “Opening up Relations,” in A World of Many Worlds. Eds. Marisol De La Cadena and Mario Blaser. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. pp. 23-52.
EP