contextualised and decontextualised fragments are both useful

  • saving context with content is often neglected
    • digital metadata often inadequate
      • doesn’t save the things that are meaningful to the collector
      • saves things commercially useful or useful to platform owner
    • the kinds of context people need
      • task based, topic based, etc
    • original context helps in refinding
      • context of saving needed for bookmarking
        • (Hwang, Herder and Ronchetti, 2017)
        • “A Link Back to MemoryLane: The Role of Context in Bookmarking and Refinding”
      • discussion of context being important for revisiting sites - huangIRCHIVERInformationCentricPersonal2025
    • benefits of decontextualised content
      • ‘raw’ data eg text is reusable
        • interdisciplinarity
        • outside its usual reach
        • “A single piece of content can ultimately be used in many different contexts to the one for which it was originally intended.” quickref#^06b2bb
    • problems of decontextualised content
      • lacking authorship
      • lacking info on perspectives/purposes embedded in its creation
      • ‘raw’ or ‘atomic’ is still contestable - what is an atom in this context, anything that provides meaning? right down to a single bit? ‘raw’ likely still has context embedded in it that is now obscured and assumed universal. define everything, everything relies on something else, everything takes a perspective
      • satire, devices employed for teaching, unfiltered early thoughts etc taken out of context of their assumed truth/falsity/etc
      • cross-cultural mismatch, translation error