Track Changes

Around 900 delegates of the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) chose the mecca of European pilgrimage to celebrate this year's biennial congress.The tracks that pilgrims leave in their journey were chosen as a metaphor, to reflect on the marks that humans leave behind, which are observed and analysed by our research community.The congress title 'Track Changes' refers to transformations that both the word and our discipline are facing, and to how we as its practitioners are adapting.The authors of this report each followed the thematic area that most resonated with our research: digital and creative ethnography.In this report, we offer a summary of the keynotes and a personal reflection on these thematic areas.Cidade da Cultura, located on top of Gaiás hill, was the location chosen to welcome all participants.This modern artificial hilltop created by Peter Eisenman is a controversial place as it required the mining of part of the hill's base and because its completion was interrupted by the economic crisis in 2008.In this milieu, Susana Narotzky delivered the first keynote, The politics of evidence in an uncertain world: Experience, knowledge, social facts and factual truth.The experiences of struggle and precarity of communities that, as Gaiás hill, still suffer the aftermath of the financial crisis in Spain, are the evidence examined by Narotzky.These experiences counter the power of political evidence, dominated by numbers, trends and traces of fake optimism.After a half-day of sessions, we listened to the second keynote by Tim Ingold, titled Strike-through and wipe-out: Tactics for overwriting the past.Filling the chalkboard behind him with sketches, Ingold showed us that any human-made gesture of elimination never succeeds in removing what was there before, as it happens when rock naturally sediments in layers forming the surface of the Earth.Before such destructive tactics, it is our task to explore that trace of life, that wiggling text or ground that survives underneath.Someone in the audience asked Tim Ingold to talk about digital overwriting and removal, but he admitted that he had not adjusted enough to using a computer to do it.However, the digital world was addressed on the last day by Coppélie Cocq in her keynote Digital footprints and narrative traceability / Nar

Geography · Remote sensing · Track (disk drive · Computer Science · Geology