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Welcome to the Lekha Wiki!
This wiki documents several aspects of lekha, such as our philosophy behind creating it,Documentation, Software Design and architecture, as well as all the versions and their associated changes leading up to this point.
Lekha is a web based platform that allows a user to create and manage archives.Lekha aims to make the process of creating artist archives easier and more accessible. Lekha allows individual artists, collectives and arts institutions to create digital archives which are safe, secure and sharable.
The platform is an outcome of work done during the pandemic, in response to the difficulty of using existing archival software. Lekha aims to solve this problem by allowing artists to create, organize and share archives of their works easily.
Lekha is always a work in progress. We are committed to remain open, accessible, free to use, and in service of all artists and creatives around the globe. Please do reach out to us if there is a feature you would like to see implemented on lekha.
Lekha is a project by the Software Design Research group at The Indian Sonic Research Organisation (theISRO). Lekha is supported by the Goethe Institut-Bangalore and (Art)ScienceBLR.
Everything you need to know about LEKHA.
Tutorial for creating an Archive.
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Get an account by signing up.
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Add a category. A category is a folder that organises your work. Eg: Paintings, costumes..etc.
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Add work.In a new work tab you can add all the files associated with that work as well as any metadata pertaining to the work. Work could be files such as .jpg.
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Organise your archives. Drag your work into other series or categories if you wish.
LEKHA(Lists, Exhibition and Knowledge Hueristics for Art and Archives)
Lekha aims to make artist archives easier and more accessible.
The platform is an outcome of work done during the pandemic, in response to the difficulty of using existing archival software. Lekha aims to solve this problem by allowing artists to create, organize and share archives of their works easily.
The code base of LEKHA mirrors the act of archiving and the structure of archives in the real world. Media files in LEKHA are called "ART". Art could be documents, sound files, video, texts, STL files or any other file that you might think of. LEKHA does not discriminate. ART is added to the ARCHIVE using a process called ARCHIVING. The act of "ARCHIVING" could include creating, adding, changing or even deleting ARCHIVES. These metaphors with the real world act of archiving also apply to the software design philosophy. For example:
myArchive = Archiving.add(ARCHIVE_NAME, ART.filename)
myArchive.update()
is a human readable object and a method that could be used to add to an archive.
There are 2 entities in LEKHA - Objects and Processes. Objects include Users, Archives, Artists, Institutions. Processes include that of Archiving - adding, deleting,creating, cataloging..etc. The Archive can be thought of as a Meta File Folder. The contents of an Archive are Files which may exist on their own or under other File Folders.
The Archive, therefore is nothing but a giant FILE folder. The difference between a regular Folder on your computer and LEKHA is that each folder and each file in LEKHA is associated with METADATA. METADATA is nothing but any field of data that is associated with a file or a folder. For Example, a file that represents a photograph could have METADATA that ranges from the name of the photographer, the subject and dimensions of the photograph to information that is of interest to an archivist of art – where is this photograph now? What period of the artist career does it belong to? Both the FILE, the FOLDER and the METADATA have to be represented spatially to the modern user of an archive.
The User Interface of LEKHA is largely inspired by the spatial way of organizing files. Designing Files and Folders to look like a physical Folder dates back to the early days of the GUI to XEROX PARC’s Alto. In designing LEKHA, we felt that the best metaphor for representing a FILE is the metaphor of the Desktop from the early days of Graphical User Interfaces. An archive from the viewpoint or perspective of an artist contains “Art”. The files that we are referring to however represent or point to this “Art”. Our database does not care about what kind of art is made by the artist. However, this “art” lives in our archives as a document – a pdf, txt or word document, as an image or a sound file or some other format that we have yet to imagine or conceive.
ARCHIVES CONTAIN ART
The act of “ARCHIVING” consists of adding, deleting, creating, tagging, sharing..etc. These process’s are what makes an ARCHIVE.
An ARCHIVIST creates an ARCHIVE using the process and technique of ARCHIVING.
Once we are clear that archives contain art and that a process called archiving is applied to both the ART and the ARCHIVE, we can get a clearer picture on how we should structure our code and database. In addition to "ART", LEKHA also distinguishes itself by having a METADATA DESIGNER that allows one to design METADATA for any file(ART).
Lekha is a project by the Software Design group at the Indian Sonic Research Organisation.