/ lab

The BRKCODE Lab gathers experimental tools, pedagogical prototypes and working methods developed within Breaking the Code: Algorithmic Non-Normativity in Creative Digital Humanities. It is a space for testing how digital infrastructures classify knowledge, how categories become operational, and how mistakes, unstable vocabularies and speculative taxonomies can become research and teaching material.

ParVO — For the Validation of Platypuses

ParVO is a Wikibase-based pedagogical and research prototype developed within BRKCODE. Its title plays with the Portuguese word parvo, meaning silly or foolish, and with the figure of the platypus as a historical problem for taxonomy.

The platypus matters because it makes classification hesitate. It allows us to ask what happens when a body, object, archive or form of knowledge arrives before the category prepared to receive it. In ParVO, this hesitation becomes a method for thinking about encyclopaedic normativity, situated knowledge and non-standard classifications.

Through ParVO and the ParVA pedagogical proposal, students work with archives, Wikidata, Wikibase Cloud and different vocabularies: encyclopaedic, speculative and one’s own. The aim is to understand how knowledge is structured, what kinds of information enter public databases more easily, and what forms of situated knowledge require other vocabularies.

ParVO asks how digital infrastructures might host knowledge that does not fit existing categories cleanly. In doing so, it turns mistakes, missing entries, awkward labels and unstable relations into pedagogical material.

How it works

The ParVA proposal guides students through three related stages:

Encyclopaedic vocabulary
working with Wikidata and public structured knowledge.

Speculative vocabulary
testing categories and relations that do not yet fit existing models.

One’s own vocabulary
building a situated vocabulary from the archive, the research problem and the learner’s own position.

Access

Access ParVO: https://parvo.wikibase.cloud/
Read the ParVA proposal: https://parvo.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Proposta_ParVA

Further pedagogical resources, workflows and documentation will be added here as the BRKCODE outputs are prepared for open dissemination.

This prototype was developed within the DARIAH-funded project Breaking the Code: Algorithmic Non-Normativity in Creative Digital Humanities. Related pedagogical outputs and workflow documentation will be prepared for open dissemination through appropriate platforms, including DARIAH-Campus and the SSH Open Marketplace, whenever legal, ethical and copyright conditions allow it.