Socioplastics 11953 Two Catalogues, Two Cities
A research query travels through an archive, language or information system that has already assembled its evidence. SearchDivergence names the different fields made available when a seemingly identical question enters distinct systems. A city may appear as listed heritage in an official catalogue, displaced labour in an oral history archive and a set of commercial images in a search engine. Each result reflects the infrastructure through which traces become retrievable. Marcia Bates’s berrypicking model treats search as a developing process in which each finding can alter the next query. Marc Augé’s anthropology of modernity examines how places and non-places are produced through social relations. Their approaches help show how search results influence interpretation and how a researcher’s path through records changes what a city becomes in the inquiry. A study could run the same questions through municipal, community, commercial and multilingual catalogues. Researchers would record search terms, ranking, metadata, omissions and the sources each system returns. They could follow how one finding changes the next query and compare the resulting urban accounts. The comparison would make each catalogue’s scope and retrieval logic visible. SearchDivergence treats information systems as infrastructures of memory. It helps researchers compare how different archives make a city retrievable and what forms of evidence each privileges. The marker supports a more explicit search method: record where queries travel, how results redirect attention and which sources remain inaccessible. These paths become part of the account of how knowledge was produced. Keeping them allows another researcher to repeat or challenge the search and understand why a particular city emerged from the archive.
REFERENCES
Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by J. Howe. London: Verso.
Bates, M.J. (1989) “The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface”, Online Review, 13(5), pp. 407–424. https://doi.org/10.1108/EB024320
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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