- who has encountered/seen/witnessed artefacts? when? how?
- where is an artefact currently held? how is it (digitally accessed?)
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there are physical/real (although not necessarily material) objects (aka artefacts)
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there are digital records; these may witness artefacts or claim their existence (an artefact's existence and attributes are always described through a digital records)
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coincidence of two digital records (i.e. they (possibly/probably/certainly) refer to the same physical object) is described by a relation between the phyiscal objects they are connected to
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evidentiality from linguistics (verb aspect e.g. in Bulgarian); useful types of evidentiality (to complement the source itself) include:
- indicative (I have observed myself)
- inferential (knowing due to inference)
- renarrative (someone told me that)
- dubitative (I heard that but I have reason to doubt/who I heard from also hasn't observed)
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recording the absence of an object (I know/believe/suspect that an object exists but have no record of it/don't know where it is held)
- physical object itself - basis for nearly everything else (because we're eventually interested in artefacts)
- the cultural context it is from (denomination of the culture/group) & evidentiality of that
- other objects that relate to the object (by being about the object, by describing it)
- relationships between physical objects (through object categories, being potentially the same, parts of each other)
- digital records - the lens through which we interact with physical object
- museums, institutions - entities that hold and, importantly, create and publish digital records about them
- idetifiers about institutions themselves
- policies, documents and other contextual materials about object status and restitution
- (persistent) identifiers assigned by institutions for digital records