Abstract – The digital city (De Digitale Stad) started in 1994 as the first community platform targeted to the general public in The Netherlands. DDS had as its mission to enable the general public to explore the possibilities of the then-new internet. As stated by the founders the interface was supposed to be user-friendly to such an extent that even people with no computer experience would be able to use it. But looking at the history of DDS, some of these initial values hardly came to fruition because others like innovation were prioritized. The ideological commitments of the founders arguably predetermined which values would win out in practice.

In this article I will illustrate how DDS can be analysed as charismatic technology to explain how underlying values influenced the design and how this impacted the community. Understanding how conflicting values, ambiguity and doubt were handled by the management of this early online community is an important lesson for preservation. We need to know how to inform our designated community about these conflicting values as available in the representation information on this important UNESCO heritage collection. What do we want our users to understand about it? At a deeper level we can see parallels between the community of DDS and our own community: the designated community. Lessons learned through analyzing the historical struggles of trying to make the DDS community more diverse might still be relevant if we aim to understand more about how to apply the concept of the designated community within our own institutions.

Keywords – Web archiving, representation information, understandability, diversity, community

This paper was submitted for the iPRES2024 conference on March 17, 2024 and reviewed by Patrice-Andre Prud'homme PhD, Sibyl Schaefer, Elizabeth Kata and 1 anonymous reviewer. The paper was accepted with reviewer suggestions on May 6, 2024 by co-chairs Heather Moulaison-Sandy (University of Missouri), Jean-Yves Le Meur (CERN) and Julie M. Birkholz (Ghent University & KBR) on behalf of the iPRES2024 Program Committee.

Introduction

Since 2023 the National Library of the Netherlands (KBNL) is proud to curate a digital collection that has become UNESCO world heritage: the Digital City (De Digitale Stad, henceforth: DDS). This project should not be new to the preservation community: the reviving of DDS has been presented at iPRES1 and even won a Digital Preservation Award in 2016. Now that the data is stored and curated by KBNL, new questions arise on how to provide access and ensure long-term accessibility. While thinking about a suitable way of making the legacy software presentable to the general public, we also need to work on the question of how to make it understandable. What context information should we link to the data itself? In OAIS the term representation information is used for all information needed to make the data independently understandable. The idea is that making this information available to the designated community will ensure that users can understand the data without having to defer to an expert who has to explain how to open the data or how to understand the content. The concept of representation information is recursive: you might need representation information to explain how to open the document containing the representation information. This recursivity will ensure that no matter what technological developments may occur, users will be able to understand the object and its context information without needing outside help. The concept of knowledge base determines what the designated community is supposed to know and therefore what other information should be added to the archival object as representation information to make the object understandable. Simply stated, all information that is needed for understanding the objects that is not considered to be part of the knowledge base of the designated community, should be available as representation information. OAIS even goes as far as to state that in case a language is not part of the knowledge base anymore, presenting a language course along with the material could be an option.[1]

It is clear from the latter example that representation information implies more than just information for technical understanding. It can also be semantic information needed for understanding the content itself or knowledge about the environment in which the data was created. When thinking about representation information we have to relate to the idea of knowledge representation. The quality representation of knowledge is based on some sort of collective agreement on what the best terms are to represent a specific object. But consensus might be difficult in some domains due to differences in theories, opinions, worldviews and beliefs.[2]

Historical Sources as Representation Information?

The way representation information is described in the standard seems to suggest that the concept of understandability is somewhat of a binary issue: either one has understanding or one doesn't. Either one knows a language or one doesn't. Even when only considering technical understandability things might not be that simple. A PDF can be opened with Adobe software or with other software. Arguably, there is no 'right' choice here. But when we consider understandability of the content, things become even more complex. What is the right way of understanding the contents of a legacy webportal from the 90's created by a group of people who were very open about endorsing public values? What if people disagree on the correct interpretation of its meaning, history and development? As preservationists we do not want to enforce a one-sided understanding of the history or meaning of our objects. It is therefore all the more important to store representation information that provides diverse perspectives. The idea of representation information seen through the lens of objective truths has limited expressivity for describing complex cultural heritage material. Only when we use this concept to allow for diverse, and possibly conflicting, perspectives will it prove its value. One might argue that preserving historical sources on a certain object is stretching the concept of semantic representation information. However, as I will argue, ensuring long-term understandability of complex cultural objects requires insight in the complex of meanings ascribed to the object by creators and users. As Christopher Lee states in his article on contextual information, the farther away an object is in time, place and social situation, the less likely it is that the Designated community has documentary evidence and commonality in perspective with the resources’ creators.[3] It is therefore important to be able to provide this type of context information along with the object. The researching of this type of information might not be a task undertaken single-handedly by the preservation practitioner since it requires historical interpretation. However, the important thing is that this information becomes available to users because it has been linked to the archival object by preservationists. We can not assume all users will discover these sources for themselves. I reckon this case is comparable to an example Rhiannon Bettivia gives in her dissertation on OAIS where she mentions that an interview with the creator of a video game character could be linked to the AIP to explicate cultural references within the game that might not be otherwise understandable for younger generations.[4] Since DDS is now UNESCO world heritage our designated community is potentially very large and very diverse so we can not assume much of a common knowledge base anyway. As stated by UNESCO on their website, The Memory of the World program aims to enable universal access to documentary heritage worldwide.[5] Arguably, the idea of universal access for the whole of humanity sits uneasily with the OAIS-concept of a specific designated community with an assumed knowledge base. This point is also made by Rebecca Frank and Laura Rothfritz who mention in their article on risk that a narrowly defined designated community conflicts with the mission of cultural heritage institutions who serve broad publics.[5] The UNESCO goal of universal access implies the importance of providing rich representation information to help users understand the significance of this cultural object. It can even be seen as an ethical duty to help users by organizing information, as mentioned in discussions on ethical cataloging.[6] As Bettivia [4] mentions, there are often two objections to collecting this data. It is labor-intensive and there is no convention on clear limits to adding knowledge as links to the object. Another objection to providing secondary sources as context is that it seems a less ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ source of information. Determining how much context is sufficient becomes interpretive work that archives would rather leave to researchers.[4] These conflicting viewpoints can also be seen in discussions on ethical cataloging. There is a clear difference of opinion on how to apply ethics in knowledge representation. Namely, whether this can be done by stressing universality and neutrality or by bringing multivocality within the representation of cultural objects.[2]  For this paper I choose to defend the latter viewpoint: instead of only linking seemingly objective technical information to this complex object, I propose that we explicate the underlying subjectivities on the history of DDS by keeping conflicting information on its meaning and interpretation in plain view. I will illustrate the relevance of semantic representation information for understandability by using aspects of DDS and its development history as a case study. After all, how can we explain what is special about DDS without providing insight into the ideals and values of its creators and users? Since this is not only a story about technological development but also about people: the creators and the community of DDS in the social context of the early days of the internet, with its characteristic vibe of optimism and experimentation.

The Digital City

The digital city started in 1994 as the first community platform accessible to the general public in The Netherlands. Up to that point only companies and universities had been able to connect to the internet. DDS had as its mission to enable the general public to explore the possibilities of the then-new internet. As stated by the founders the interface was supposed to be user-friendly to such an extent that even people with no computer experience would be able to use it. The metaphor of a city was supposed to help achieve this goal. But there were also signs that people were actually confused by the metaphor because it created unfulfilled expectations about what would be available on the website. Over the years multiple technologically innovative ideas were tried out and implemented. While DDS started out as a text-based interface, shortly after the launch a graphical user interface was added. DDS originally was funded for a number of weeks by the city of Amsterdam as an experiment to bring citizens and politicians closer together in the run-up to the elections. By providing free access to internet and e-mail, the project became a success and continued as a foundation. Without government funding, DDS tried to create revenue by selling websites and advertisements. After a few years DDS started losing customers to other commercial competitors. In 2000 DDS was transformed to a limited company. After this, parts were sold and user numbers declined even further. At the end of 2001 it became clear that none of the initial objectives of DDS were viable anymore.[2] The remains of this portal are now stored at KBNL as digital world heritage. It consists of a freeze that was made in 1996 of all the software and content that was on the servers at that time. This was stored on tapes and came to light only years later.

When trying to unearth context information on DDS through articles, interviews and newspapers an overall image of conflicting values appears. The digital city was a succes when considering the implementation of innovative ideas and the number of visitors, but not so much when taking into account accessibility and attractiveness for a diverse user group. How do we represent this diversity of perspectives in the representation information that we provide to our designated community?

Charismatic Technology

To answer this question, I will analyze the history and design of DDS using the concept of charismatic technology. This concept, as coined by Morgan Ames in her paper with the same title, is useful for exposing the ideological stakes behind technology that has a certain 'holding power' over its users. Charismatic technology is defined by Ames as a technological object that derives its power through the promise of action. What the object promises to do is more important than what it actually is. This promise in its turn evokes feelings of connection to a greater purpose. Invoking the imagination is more important than the material form of the object.[7] The idea of charisma is used by her to expose ideological values behind technological solutions. As Ames states in another article: “While it may seem difficult to identify ideological frameworks when our subjects and participants are themselves not aware of them, we believe that it is strategically possible to do so. [...] In particular, we suggest that researchers zero in on points of friction or doubt within a community (as well as the concomitant response) as a way of bringing ideological commitments to the surface.”[8]

Charisma is used for dealing with uncertainty and handling contradictions and obstacles. This is very appropriate for DDS since this platform held a great attraction to its initial users, and the founders themselves, as an experimental platform that would connect people with all the benefits of the internet. They had to navigate this contradiction of being accessible to all and being innovative. That DDS did not actually achieve all its promises did not diminish the enthusiasm of its creators. As Ames also states in her article, asking whether charisma is good or bad is besides the point. The question that matters is whether it is still alive.[7] I think for DDS we can safely state that it still is. One of the founders, Marleen Stikker, still sees in DDS an example of the internet as it was: a public space with democratic values, created in a time when the internet was not run by large commercial companies selling data. A state of the internet to which she would like to return.[9] This is precisely why I think analyzing DDS through the lens of charismatic technology is appropriate: the imagined realization of certain values behind DDS, like low barriers to internet use, were in a sense more important than the material reality of the platform itself, which could be difficult to use in practice as we will see below.

My analysis will be based on the literature available on DDS, spanning decades: both research as well as articles and interviews in newspapers. After all, this is the context information that is a candidate for being linked to the archival package as representation information and therefore should contribute to creating understanding of the different perspectives on this cultural phenomenon of the early web. An extra indication that this type of information is indeed important can be seen in the way the founders themselves also collected some of this information about DDS on the servers of DDS, now part of the preserved collection. Furthermore, they were aware of the historical relevance of their experiment even two years after the start. To preserve these first years of DDS for future researchers was the reason they created what would become ‘the Freeze’.[10] In this way, we can see DDS as a platform that created an archival object out of its own data and designated historians as the future ‘Designated community’ of the archival data.

By analyzing DDS through the concept of charisma we can hopefully get a better idea on how to represent the ideological values embedded within our digital heritage which is also part of making an archival object understandable. For preservation this poses interesting questions, such as what do we want our users to understand about our collection in the case of conflicting values within the context information we store along with the objects? Who gets to write history? Are opposite perspectives allowed?

The City Metaphor

If we decide to look for ideological commitments by searching out points of doubt or contradictions, an obvious starting point would be the metaphor of the city. Even though the creators of DDS might not have thought of it, choosing to represent DDS as a city has implicit political connotations. Cities can be contested places where certain groups are empowered and others are disempowered or marginalized. The latter are therefore not able to engage in identity creation and place making.[11] Indeed in DDS we can see certain processes of contestation where users try to negotiate for participation in decision making which is ultimately rejected by the management of DDS on the grounds of the user base not being considered representative enough for a real democratic process. In an interview with Geert Lovink, Marleen Stikker said the following about this: “The metaphor of the city of course led many people to create an anology with the real city. There have been interesting conversations in the first years of its existence where the question kept coming back whether DDS should give representatives of the group of inhabitants a share in the decision making by way of elections. I must admit that I wasn't a proponent of this.”[12] (own translation)

Difference in privileges can also be seen in the fact that only the management had write-access to shared spaces. Users only had the ability to modify their homepage and their ‘front door’, which was an icon representing their homepage or ‘house’ on the shared space of the ‘square’. However these front doors were removed from time to time by the management to make the interface more dynamic. An exception to this lack of write-access for users to shared spaces was the metro: a multi-user dungeon where users actually were able to participate in building.[13]

 The explicit reason for choosing the city metaphor for DDS was to lower barriers to its use. The idea was that the familiarity of names taken from the physical city would help people in exploring the new and strange medium of the internet. So DDS had squares, houses, pubs, a city hall and a metro among other things. People could visit the city as a visitor or as a resident. As a resident they could claim a house which meant they could create their own homepage within the city. DDS was modelled after free-nets that had started out a few years before as local initiatives within different cities in America. Some of these free-nets also used city metaphors like the town hall for political information, but none of them used this metaphor as extensively as DDS.[14] According to one of the founders, Geert Lovink, the city metaphor “referred to a conceptual density that in its turn results into diversity and debate.”[15] The city thus also symbolized different groups coming together. Even though DDS was funded by the city of Amsterdam, it was meant to be a city for everyone in the Netherlands so it was not considered the digital city of Amsterdam but just the digital city. Since one of the original objectives of DDS was to make people familiar with all the possibilities of the internet, even people considered technological 'have-nots', user-friendliness was very important for the founders and creators of DDS. The city metaphor was one of the solutions to realize this goal. But did it work?

There are a few places where we can look for answers. One of the most interesting sources is a research paper from 2001 where the user-friendliness of DDS was tested by letting ten first time users click through the interface and talk about what they would expect or what they thought was difficult to understand. The users were selected because they represented in some way the users originally targeted by DDS: people with diverse backgrounds and, for the most part, limited experience with technology. From this experiment it became clear that the city metaphor sometimes created more confusion to users. For example, because they expected to see information about the physical city, like information about shops or public transportation. For the designers the metaphor was a way of avoiding technical terms so 'visiting the city' meant accessing the interface. New users, it seems, took this metaphor more literally, thereby creating expectations of finding information on the physical city. This effect was enhanced by the fact that some elements of the interface were linked to the city of Amsterdam, like the logo resembling the coat of arms of the city. The conclusion of the article is that the technological frame of the designers was too different from that of first-time users. This created a situation where ideas about what would improve understandabilty did not match user expectations. This is also seen in the way the designers expected newcomers to learn the interface. They envisioned that people would learn by clicking around, because this was their own preferred way of learning. However some of the users became frustrated instead and expected more help. The conclusion in the article is that designs should be tested by least-skilled users.[16] This can still be a valuable lesson for preservationists trying to enhance understandability of their objects for the designated community.

Another interesting historical source on the reception and user-friendliness of DDS for first-time users is a newspaper article from the early days of DDS, also available in the collection of KBNL. It is a full page article where the reporter describes his experience of first logging in to DDS at a live event. It is written as a running commentary on the things the reporter comes across while exploring DDS. At first he admits being disappointed about the lack of city-related graphics, but on the whole it seems that he is able to understand the metaphors and is able to explore the city in the way the designers envisioned: by clicking and browsing to see what is behind the metaphors of the post office, the library etc. His experience might have been more positive because one of the founders was there to give the reporter pointers on where to click, as mentioned in the article.[17] If so, then this illustrates exactly the situation preservationists try to avoid when it comes to understandability: being dependent on the help of people because there is not enough context information available to understand the digital object independently. In the source material available on DDS we see that the city metaphor had a certain charisma, a certain attractiveness for the designers that was seen as the way to overcome the obstacle of new technical terms daunting first time users. To the creators of DDS it seems to have symbolized user-friendliness even when in practice some people might have struggled in understanding all the metaphors. I asked former user of DDS and KBNL-colleague Willem Jan Faber on what he thought about the city metaphor and usability: “I thought it was a bit futuristic. It was nice to be able to use these terms to explain things to my parents, but for me it was not really necessary. For my parents it became more clear what it was about, because it was described in Dutch terms. But I thought even then, a lot would have to change before this can be an access point that would work for my parents.” (personal communication, May 23, 2024) Based on all these different sources of information on the city metaphor we can see how it wasn’t really necessary for people who already knew how to navigate the internet. It might have been helpful to some people, but arguably not enough to overcome all technical barriers for least-skilled users, even according to an expert user. However, as charismatic technology, what it did or did not do was less important than how it evoked the imagination. In this case the imagination of a city on the web where things could be different from a city in the real world.

We must realize that DDS was created in a period when web usability wasn’t the norm yet so we should not assume current definitions of usability when looking at DDS. However, the creators of DDS had strong ideological commitments of making the internet accessible to a diverse group of users so testing assumptions of then-current notions of usability might have been an option. In practice, the designers relied on their own assumptions of what would help people understand.

In a way we can sympathize with these assumptions because reading these sources now as a preservationist, it is hard to envision how little technical knowledge was available to non-technical people in the early days of the internet. As becomes clear from the historical sources, people back then sometimes had no idea what the word 'digital' even meant.[16] This is an important reminder that the knowledge base of the designated community must not be considered a fixed entity. Some technical terms have become more broadly known over the years, while some terms have fallen out of use.

Diversity in the Digital City

Another interesting contradiction presents itself when we look at the community of users behind DDS. As stated before, the idea of DDS was to appeal to a broad user base. It was meant to bring all sorts of people together through the medium of the internet. But did it succeed in this? Here we also have historical sources that are essential as representation information for the cultural heritage that is DDS. The interesting thing is that the management of DDS has run a number of surveys in the early days of DDS to appraise the diversity of the user groups, as this was one of their core objectives. Surveys were sent out in 1994 and 1996 (the year of the freeze which produced the archival object currently preserved at KBNL). As becomes clear from the surveys, the majority of DDS users were male, below 30 and highly educated. In 1996 DDS had 48.000 inhabitants and an average of 8000 visits per day. Of the 1300 respondents to the survey 84% was male and 86% was in higher education or had a degree.[18]According to newspaper evidence, these demographics sometimes led to surprising situations, like a discussion group for women that only contained men. As commented on by Marleen Stikker at the time, this was not seen as a cause for concern as the founders strongly believed in self-regulation by the community.[19]

One of the original solutions for creating more diversity was the placement of terminals in public spaces. The idea was that even people without the means for buying equipment and paying for the telephone costs would be able to connect to the digital city. However, soon these terminals got broken and weren't repaired anymore. Also the switch from a text-based user interface to a graphical user interface meant that barriers to use became higher because suddenly people had to install a browser before they could access the digital city. The change of interface was seen as a necessary innovation to stay ahead of the competition.[20]

Since one of the original objectives was to bring people closer together, there were high expectations of people having meaningful debates in the discussion groups. However, as becomes clear from newspaper sources, many discussion groups weren't active in practice and newcomers were admonished when they didn't adhere to the then current netiquette.[28] Even though diversity was an important goal, in practice this seems to have lost out to goals of experimentation and technological virtuosity. By defining the user group to be 'everybody' the creators of DDS unconsciously designed it from their own perspective and interests. Even though there was a discussion group where the community could discuss the functionality and management of DDS, in practice this feedback wasn't used much to steer management and design choices.[20] In the end, the objectives of diversity and accessibility lost out to the goal of staying ahead of commercial competitors by prioritizing innovation and experimentation.

Other conflicting values can be seen in the issue of users posting offensive messages in the discussion groups. In multiple newspaper articles the founders spoke out against regulation like removing offensive posts from message boards because they saw this as limiting freedom of speech.[22] This clearly exposes some of the ideological commitments of the founders as a group and shows which values were prioritized in case of conflict.  On the one hand the discussion groups were meant to be inclusive but on the other hand the management strongly believed in self-regulation. Here we see that the more charismatic aspects of innovation and self-regulation prevailed over more prosaic, regulatory actions that might have benefited accessibility and inclusion. For example by providing help-buttons and deleting offensive posts, something that has become more commonplace on the internet since, but wasn't the norm yet.

Representation Information and the Designated Community

For preservation, the case of DDS poses interesting questions. The most practical question is: if we want the heritage of DDS to be understandable to the designated community, how do we represent conflicting information within the representation information attached to the digital object? As can be seen from the above, to really understand DDS as it was, we need to take into account the various perspectives about what DDS was for and how it was different things to different people. We should be able to present DDS both from the perspective of its users as well as from the perspective of its creators and we should take into account the diversity of perspectives even within these two groups. The historical sources present a mixed image of openness and exclusion, of top-down management decisions as well as self-regulation. If we want our users to understand DDS we need to provide them with all the conflicting evidence and invite them to explore these for themselves. Also when providing access we need to enable users to dig below the surface and discover the underlying values and original objectives that helped shape DDS. Therefore it is important that we not only work on a way of presenting the original interface and its contents, but also that we provide links to resources about DDS, such as articles and newspaper clippings as representation information. When we want our users to experience DDS in an authentic way we should take into account the context information that provides insight into how users experienced DDS back in the days, as can be gleaned from some of the newspaper articles. We should ask ourselves how authentic this experience should be, considering that many first time users had trouble connecting to DDS because of congestion of the telephone line. In the end a truly authentic experience would be hard to recreate since we have to take into account the fact that some users back then experienced the internet for the first time. Current users will probably have vastly different expectations even if they have never seen DDS.

But the case of DDS is also interesting for a different reason: here we have an example of an institute and a virtual community, analogous to the trustworthy digital archive and its designated community, since the founders of DDS were aware of the historical significance of their platform and wanted to preserve it by creating a freeze. The management of DDS had an ideal of what their community should look like and how they should enhance understanding of the functionality and content of DDS for the community. They also formed an idea of what future users would want. In this way it slightly resembles the power relation between an archive and its designated community. However, they were not explicit about which groups the design was for and did not explicitly test the assumptions put into the design. In one of the articles on DDS this is called the I-methodology of design, where the designers see themselves as representative of the typical user.[14] As heritage institutions we might also unconsciously create solutions for understanding our digital objects using the I-methodology. Especially when we assume a broad definition of our designated community without catering to differences within the community. This is a pitfall that might be avoided by verifying our assumptions of what is needed to ensure understandibility. For instance, by asking feedback from real users. 

Conclusion

So what can we learn from the contested history of DDS when we consider preservation of the complex object that is DDS? I think DDS can be considered a complex case when trying to apply OAIS-concepts like Designated community and Knowledge Base. Because of its world heritage status, its Designated Community can not be narrowly defined. Because of this, the concept of knowledge base also becomes difficult to apply. As DDS was created in a specific time frame of the early internet, we can not expect younger generations or non-technical people to understand DDS by just providing access to the interface without context information about technological developments as well as cultural references and ideological values that informed the creation of DDS. The quote of Marleen Stikker in the press release of the UNESCO nomination neatly summarizes what DDS stands for according to her as one of the founders: “The fact that DDS as the first digital public space and social media platform has been nominated as global world heritage by UNESCO means a big recognition for the importance of social movements and artists in the development of the internet. It shows that the internet can be a digital public space and that we should invest heavily in it”.[23] (my translation) There is a lot to unpack in this single statement. We can not possibly expect all our users to understand this interpretation of DDS by providing them with the interface and the technical information only. To help our users understand the cultural references embedded in DDS we need to point them to information on the cultural background of the founders who came from social movements or had an artistic background. We should help them understand the discussions about government regulation and commercial interests that formed the background for promoting public space on the internet. And importantly, we should also give voice to the users who sometimes had different views, values and experiences compared to the founders. To be able to do this, we can not have a narrow view of our designated community as historians who will figure this out for themselves and also not a positivist view on representation information as only ‘objective’ technical specifications. Even if it requires interpretation and meaning-making, we should aim to present different perspectives and cultural information alongside technical information while being transparent about our own perspective. There is a lot of meaning embedded in the ‘data’ of DDS that just isn’t self-explanatory for all possible users. The internet has already changed a lot since the 90’s so we shouldn’t expect all our users to be able to relate to that time frame without cultural context information. The concept of semantic representation information can be used for this purpose, I would say, as long as we take a broad, humanist view of understandability rather than a view of data as representing value-free ‘objective’ facts that should be served by the archive without interpretation. Understanding should not be a binary concept that users either have or don’t have, but rather a range with more or less quality, richness and depth. It would be interesting to have more discussion on this topic within the digital preservation community because it is related to the underlying values of digital preservation. As Bettivia states: “there is more involved in understanding objects than simply recreating the objects themselves: artefacts are a product of a particular place and time, and are understandable as such.”[4] Since charismatic technology is charismatic exactly because of its way of invoking the imagination rather than its material form, only describing the material form will provide users with incomplete information on its meaning. Through representation information we should also be able to link to information that captures some of the imaginaries surrounding the object.

It is important that we involve real users and test our assumptions of understandability on a group of users that represents the diversity present within the community so that we do not fall prey to the I-methodology ourselves. Also we need to be prepared to prioritize actions that improve understandability even if the manual work of compiling information detracts from more charismatic actions like adding new functionality to our services. Finally, we need to ensure that diverse, possibly conflicting, perspectives are represented within the context information we provide along with complex digital objects if we want to keep them understandable for the long term.