Wittgenstein's Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition is the only CD-ROM to give you instant facsimile and text access to the 20,000 pages of the philosopher's Nachlass as catalogued by Professor von Wright in his 1982 publication The Wittgenstein Papers. -/- The result of 10 years of academic research and editorial work by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen this electronic edition is the first scholarly resource to apply a uniform, well-documented, consistent set of editorial principles to the writings. (...) The CD-ROM is a joint publication between Oxford University Press and the Wittgenstein Archives and is published in Text & Facsimile and Text Only formats. (shrink)

In Archive Fever , Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology--fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs (...) a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling. "Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."-- The Guardian "[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."-- Choice "Beautifully written and clear."--Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review "Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."-- Library Journal. (shrink)

Considering the value of archives for dealing with the past processes, especially for the establishment of collective memory and identity, this paper discusses the role of archives in situations of conflicting memories such as in the case of the official Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. A crucial problem of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation are the divergent perceptions of what to consider as proper ‘evidence’, i.e. as objective, reliable, impartial or trustworthy sources of knowledge in order to prove the Armenian genocide. The (...) aim of this paper is to show how in a general atmosphere of distrust or prejudiced credibility judgments, even technically reliable archival records will be perceived as unreliable and biased, lacking any evidentiary status to factually prove a genocide which is categorically denied. Therefore, this working paper discusses how claims to reliability, objectivity and other similar scientifically and epistemically relevant attributes are understood in archival science as well as memory studies, and emphasizes the problems related to their instrumentalization by political actors within the context of genocide denialism. The Turkish-Armenian context promises many important empirical as well as theoretical insights on the uses and misuses of these attributes, suggesting that measures ought to be taken beforehand to decrease intergroup prejudice and distrust toward the ‘other’, so that archives can be effective in the truth-finding process. (shrink)

Die Reihe versammelt Forschung in deutscher und englischer Sprache, die die Trias aus Kultur, Text und Medium in ihrer wechselseitigen Bezogenheit zum Gegenstand der Untersuchung macht. Prozesse des Mitteilens und der Vermittlung entfalten sich stets in kulturellen Zusammenhängen, auf die sie auch zurückwirken. In der Reihe werden Kommunikationskulturen sowohl als Effekt von Formgebung als auch mit Blick auf ihre medialen Bedingungen untersucht.

In this contribution, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges arising from memory institutions' need to redefine their archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data. We will reflect on this topic by critically examining the case study of the UK Web Archive, which is made up of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries: the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries Oxford, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin. The UK (...) Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the UK web space. This is achieved through an annual domain crawl, first undertaken in 2013, in addition to more frequent crawls of key websites and specially curated collections which date back as far as 2005. These collections reflect important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. This commentary will explore a number of questions including: what heritage is captured and what heritage is instead neglected by the UK Web archive? What heritage is created in the form of new data and what are its properties? What are the ethical issues that memory institutions face when developing these web archiving practices? What transformations are required to overcome such challenges and what institutional futures can we envisage? (shrink)

Les archives, bien que fondamentales dans la pratique des historiens, tiennent une faible place dans leur réflexion épistémologique, alors que la notion, employée le plus souvent au singulier, a été davantage analysée par certains philosophes, dont en dernier lieu Paul Ricoeur. Il s'agira donc de comprendre l'usage que ce dernier fait du concept d'archive dans son dernier ouvrage, La Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, puis de montrer sa filiation avec les travaux de Michel Foucault et de Michel de Certeau. Enfin, on (...) voudrait montrer en quoi cette« archive», liée intimement à la notion de témoignage, peut conduire à des difficultés du point de vue de l'épistémologie historique, et qu'il semble possible de lui opposer un autre usage de la notion, soucieux d'en souligner l'historicité et la matérialité face à une interprétation plus textuelle et herméneutique. (shrink)

This book makes available for the first time in English—and for the first time in its entirety in any language—an important yet little-known interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel. Their conversation addresses, among other things, questions of presence and its manufacture, the technicity of presentation, the volatility of the authorial subject, and the concept of memory. Derrida (...) offers a penetrating intervention with regard to the distinctive nature of photography vis-à-vis related technologies such as cinema, television, and video. Questioning the all-too-facile divides between so-called old and new media, original and reproduction, analog and digital modes of recording and presenting, he provides stimulating insights into the ways in which we think and speak about the photographic image today. Along the way, the discussion fruitfully interrogates the question of photography in relation to such key concepts as copy, archive, and signature. Gerhard Richter introduces the volume with a critical meditation on the relationship between deconstruction and photography by way of the concepts of translation and invention. Copy, Archive, Signature will be of compelling interest to readers in the fields of contemporary European critical thought, photography, aesthetic theory, media studies, and French Studies, as well as those following the singular intellectual trajectory of one the most influential thinkers of our time. (shrink)

An archive is an integral part of literate and social life and is in the custody of political institutions for their historical value. It is argued that societies who lack the faculty of recording histories contribute to the archive-making process in a different context. To advance this, the work of anthropologists on the Igorots, more specifically the Kalingas, of the Philippine Cordilleras, and their tattooing practices are considered for heuristic purposes. It is in these societies, where the concept (...) of the Western archive is absent, that the body becomes a repository of significant life events and rituals concretized by tattoos. Tattooing becomes a form of memory on how bodies remember and create narratives and counter-narratives. To serve as a provocation for further research, Derrida’s two-fold understanding of the archive is utilized. The archive, on the one hand, as a commencement that evokes the writing of the archive and, on the other hand, the understanding of the tattoos as disjointed and incomplete, allows us to understand tattoos as a trace. (shrink)

Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records (...) through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering. Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists Longlist, ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars. (shrink)

In the current debate on art, thought on time has commanded a prominent position. Do we live in a posthistorical time? Has objective art historical time and belief in a continual progress shifted to a more subjective experience of the ephemeral? Has history fallen away and, if so, what does this mean for the future of art? How does a visual archive relate to artistic memory? This volume investigates positions, arguments and comments regarding the stated theme. Philosophers and theorists (...) explore the subject matter theoretically. Curators articulate the practice of art. The participants are: Hans Belting, Jan Bor, Peter Bürger, Bart Cassiman, Leontine Coelewij, Hubert Damisch, Arthur C. Danto, Bart De Baere, Okwui Enwezor, Kasper König, Sven Lütticken, Manifesta, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Donald Preziosi, Survival of the Past Project, Ernst Van Alphen, Kirk Varnedoe, Gianni Vattimo, and Kees Vuyk. (shrink)

Our oldest archival records originate from the Near East. Systems of archival record-keeping developed over several millennia in Mesopotamia before spreading to Egypt, the Mycenean world, and the Persian empire, and continuing through the Hellenistic and Seleucid periods. Yet we know little about the way archival practices were established, transmitted, modified, and adapted by other civilizations. This interdisciplinary volume offers a systematic approach to archival documents and to the societies which created them, addressing questions of formal aspects of creating, writing, (...) and storing ancient documents, and showing how archival systems were copied and adapted across a wide geographical area and an extensive period of time. (shrink)

This essay addresses the much discussed problem of archiving digital poetry. Digital media are labile, and several writers of digital poetry are incorporating the media’s ephemerality into their poetics. Rather than rehash arguments that have been taking place within the field of digital media and digital poetics for years, I turn to the field of contemporary art curation and preservation, a field in which curators and archivists are struggling with the very immediate concerns, ethical and otherwise, related to archiving works (...) that are made from ephemeral media. One particular digital poem that has recently broken, has recently become unreadable, is Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia. Memmott composed the poem in 2000, and he incorporated the poem’s inevitable obsolescence into the text of the poem itself. He has since refused to “fix” or “update” the poem, because he contends that that would make it something other than what it was intended to be. Rather, he is choosing to let the poem die because that is what the poem is supposed to do. This essay concludes with a discussion of the political implications of acknowledging the ephemerality of digital media, the resistant potential of the poem when its ephemerality is embraced, and some ways in which archivists can preserve the memory of the poem without necessarily preserving the poem itself. (shrink)

This article investigates dilemmas in the archiving and sharing of qualitative data in educational research, critically engaging with practices and debates from across the social sciences. Ethical, epistemological and methodological challenges are examined in reference to open access agendas, the politics of knowledge production, and transformations in research practices in the era of data management. We first consider practical and interpretive decisions in archiving qualitative data, then map current policy and regulatory frameworks governing research data management, taking Australia as a (...) case-study. We argue that governance and protocols for data sharing have not attended sufficiently to the distinctive ethical and methodological dimensions and knowledge claims of qualitative research. Instead, approaches associated with quantitative data are extrapolated in ways which construct an imaginary of decontextualised data, abstracted from the conditions of its production. We further argue for more critical attention to the double-edged affordances and ambivalent effects of data sharing and openness and to how data archives are imagined, constructed and curated. This includes greater acknowledgement of the affective and temporal dynamics involved in data archiving, understanding them as practices of (re)invention that also curate ‘archives for the future’ and help to foster an historicising imaginary in educational research. (shrink)

The three processes needed to create life, compartmentalization, metabolism, and information transfer (memory stored in nucleic acids and manipulation operated by proteins) are embedded in organized genome features. The core of life puts together growth and maintenance (which drives survival), while life in context explores and exploits specific niches. Analysis of gene persistence in a large number of genomes shows that the former constitutes the paleome, which recapitulates the three phases of the origin of life: metabolism of small molecules on (...) surfaces, substitution of surfaces by an RNA-world where transfer RNA played a central role, and invention of template mediated information transfer. Colonization of each niche is performed using an almost unlimited set of genes, forming the cenome. The agreement of the paleome structure with a consistent scenario for the origin of life is such that we may consider extant genomes as providing us with an archive of the origin rather than as a palimpsest where most of our past would be irremediably hidden. (shrink)

The article begins with Derrida’s etymology of the word ‘archive’: a privileged site to which records are officially consigned and in which they are guarded by legal authority. It explores contemporary variations on the theme of archive. The cases presented include efforts to construct scholarly archives that stand as personal monuments, struggles over the collection and consignment of records during official investigations of government scandals, and the ‘popular archive’ produced by the media spectacle surrounding the O. J. (...) Simpson trial. The discussion orients to these archives not only as sources of documentary information but also as sites of historical struggle over the writing, collection, consignment, destruction and interpretation of writings. (shrink)

The archive is the place for the storage of documents and records. With the emergence of the modern state, it became the storehouse for the material from which national memories were constructed. Archives also housed the proliferation of files and case histories as populations were subjected to disciplinary power and surveillance. Behind all scholarly research stands the archive. The ultimate plausibility of a piece of research depends on the grounds, the sources, from which the account is extracted and (...) compiled. An expanding and unstable globalizing archive presents particular problems for classifying and legitimating knowledge. Increasingly the boundaries between the archive and everyday life become blurred through digital recording and storage technologies. Not only does the volume of recordable archive material increase dramatically, but the volume of material seen worthy of archiving increases too, as the criteria of what can, or should be, archived expands. Life increasingly becomes lived in the shadow of the archive. (shrink)

S'appuyant sur des exemples issus de l'étude de la Seconde Guerre mondiale ainsi que de l'histoire du passé récent dans les sociétés post-communistes, cet article tente de voir dans quelle mesure les modalités d'accès aux archives publiques peuvent être tenues pour responsables de phénomènes d'amnésie - ou d'hypermnésie - de la mémoire collective, de la fabrication de mythes et de légendes. Il est certain que sans l'accès aux archives du troisième Reich, Raul Hilberg n'aurait pu entreprendre son œuvre monumentale et (...) pionnière sur la destruction des juifs d'Europe. Pour autant, il est des domaines, notam­ment celui des comportements collectifs, sur lesquels l'archive est muette - à moins de bénéficier de ces formidables corpus que constituent par exemple les archives des polices politiques comme les dossiers de la Stasi. Toutefois, l'usage public de ce type d'archives peut poser problème et générer des batailles de mémoire. Lestés d'enjeux, les conflits de mémoire ne se résolvent certes pas à coup de preuves tirées des archives, mais la rétention de ces dernières favorise incontestablement l'élaboration de récits mythiques ou de « romans nationaux ».Drawing on examples from studies of the Second World War and from the recent history of post-Com­munist societies, this article attempts to discern how far rules of access to public archives may have been responsible for collective amnesia - or hyper-amnesia - and the emergence of myths and legends. What is certain is that without access to the archives of the Third Reich, Raul Hilberg would never have been able to undertake his monumental pioneering work on the destruction of Europe's Jews. And yet, there are areas, especially where collective behaviour is concerned, that cannot be fathomed through archives - short of having access to the extraordinary material represented by political police archives such as the Stasi files. However, public use of such archives can raise problems and generate conflicts over memory. Because they embody such a weight of issues, conflicts over memory cannot be resolved merely by pulling out evidence from an archive, but withholding such records most certainly fosters the emergence of mythical narratives and "national epics". (shrink)

This article proposes a new approach to the question of why so few Arabic documents have survived in their original archival context. Taking the Mamluk period as a case study it argues that the category “archive” itself needs to be reconfigured, away from the idea of fixed archival spaces, or even a Mamluk state archive, toward archival practices. These archival practices were spread across the Mamluk realm and involved numerous actors, which included the central bureaucracy in Cairo, individual (...) secretaries, and, most importantly, the small-scale administration managed by officers. These archival practices emerge not from normative and narrative texts, but primarily from a consideration of archival traces on surviving documents. (shrink)

Is there a specificity peculiar to the “Foucault archives” that makes them a sensitive object for philosophical and critical thought today? Can we use the “Foucault case” to reflect more broadly on the question of the philosophical archive / archives – what does the creation of archives for philosophers imply in terms of the reception and re-actualisation of their thought? In this article, we will start with a description of the multiple Foucault archives existing today and the history of (...) their composition, as well as an initial discussion of their possible uses. We would then like to start from the concrete, material experience of the archives in order to ask a question that is more than methodological, ethico-political: would there be a “good use” of the archives of and by philosophers? More specifically, is there a “Foucaultian exception” which would require the Foucaultian, and probably philosophical, archives to be used in a broad sense, in a “different” way? We will plead for the construction of an ethic which is rather an “aesthetic” of the philosophical archives: the ability to bring out through the work on archives not something like “the good and true identity” of their author, but points of diffraction, unexpected faces, new writings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Archive TraumaHerman Rapaport (bio)Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Trans. of Mal d’archive. Paris: Galilée, 1995.The occasion for Archive Fever (Mal d’archive) was a conference held at the Freud archives in England and the society that it serves. Throughout his lecture, Derrida returns to a number of problematics that he had considered earlier in (...) his career with respect to writing, in particular, issues raised in The Post Card that concern the destiny of the letter as legacy. No doubt the post cards, such as Derrida had considered them, were already a fascicle or archive of some sort, a sheaf of papers burning with some kind of fever or madness. So, for example, on September 7, 1977, one of the envois, as if cut to ribbons, reads in part as follows. And yet— No literature, yes, but still. Our delinquency, mylove, we are the worst criminals and the first victims. I would like not to kill anyone, and everything that I send you goes through meurtrières [murderesses; fortification openings for weapons]. As for the children, the last ones I might touch, the holocaust has already begun.We have never yet seen each other. Only written.[67–68]What exactly has Derrida archived here? Toward the back of the fascicle of cards Derrida will admit “that I will die without having understood anything” [247]. One wonders. Is this inevitable failure to understand constitutive of archive fever?Let’s start again. There is misunderstanding in the archive. It’s inevitable. And moreover, we have archives—we preserve archives—because there is something in them that defies understanding but that we want to grasp. In the archive that is Derrida’s fascicle of missives, the matter that defies understanding is as conspicuous as it is feverish. There is, for example, a rampant death wish that cannot decide whether to act or be acted upon, hence the wish not to kill and yet the wish to shoot something through the meurtrière. This, by way of verbal association, links up with the sending of something by way of a murderess. And then, the fragment of yet another fantasy, the holocaust of children and their being touched—by way of the murderesses? the malicious missives or orders that the subject has passed on to them? the kindness of the one who fantasizes and nostalgically holds on to them before the end? Obviously, one could speculate at length; indeed, we are supposed to speculate at length. Then the final scrap, “We have never yet seen each other. Only written.” Does this refer to the desk murderer and his accomplice? Or something more benign?Consider The Post Card to be the displaced main act of Archive Fever. As such The Post Card may well be Archive Fever’s phantom limb, something essential that has been cut off and that haunts the text. What sets Archive Fever apart, however, is that whereas the envois of The Post Card were, in essence, staged as a private correspondence inhospitable to onlookers, the Freud archives are being thought through from the [End Page 68] perspective of a public institution or apparatus that houses and is hospitable to that which it capitalizes upon, namely, the memory of something that would otherwise be lost. Still, as Derrida reminds us, perhaps with Archive Fever’s phantom limb in mind, archives occur at that moment when there is a structural breakdown in memory. This contrasts rather sharply with Michel Foucault’s view in The Archaeology of Knowledge that archives are, in essence, the textual systematization of their own enunciability and that, as such, they are predicated upon mnemonic reliability. Derrida’s archive, in contrast, is mnemonically unreliable insofar as it is somewhat feverish, hallucinatory, fragmentary, and, as in the case of The Post Card, somewhat sick (“as for the children... the holocaust has already begun”). In short, where there is regularity and efficiency in Foucault’s archive, there is trauma in Derrida’s.This trauma in the archive is what, I think, Derrida is referring to when he speaks of there being a mal d’archive. After all... (shrink)

Les Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences présentent les Actes du colloque international sur Pline à la Renaissance : transmission, réception et relecture d’un encyclopédiste antique, organisé à Besançon les 27 et 28 mars 2009 par l’Institut des sciences et des techniques de l’Antiquité de l’université de Besançon sous la direction d’Alfredo Perifano. Ce recueil extrêmement riche, qui aborde en vingt-quatre contributions, toutes inédites et bien informées, les principales questions...

This article aims to give an overview of Jewish archives and archival sources in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Besides describing significant existing collections, the article looks into ongoing archival projects, digitizing and infrastructure programs, and maps out future challenges.

Sharing social media research datasets allows for reproducibility and peer-review, but it is very often difficult or even impossible to achieve due to legal restrictions and can also be ethically questionable. What is more, research data repositories and other research infrastructure and research support institutions are only starting to target social media researchers. In this paper, we present a practical solution to sharing social media data with the help of a social science data archive. Our aim is to contribute (...) to the effort of enhancing comparability and reproducibility in social media research by taking some first steps towards setting standards for sustainable data archiving. We present a showcase for sharing social media data with the example of a big dataset containing geotagged tweets through a research data archive. We provide a general background to the process of long-term archiving of research data. After some consideration of the current obstacles for sharing and archiving social media data, we present our solution of archiving the specific dataset of geotagged tweets at the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences, a publicly funded German data archive for secure and long-term archiving of social science data. We archived and documented tweet IDs and additional information to improve reproducibility of the initial research while also attending to ethical and legal considerations, and taking into account Twitter’s terms of service in particular. (shrink)

The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has exposed a shared condition of vulnerability on a global scale. How can we use vulnerability as an effective paradigm in order to foster collective political initiatives? This essay claims that the idea of care is key to understand the vulnerability framework as being both an epistemic and a political resource to address ethical issues. The first half of the essay recollects several arguments in Adriana Cavarero’s and Judith Butler’s most recent works, insofar as both theorists (...) have insisted on the notion of vulnerability in order to interpret contemporary political mobilizations. The second part of the essay retraces a constellation of practices of care in the works of several Black and decolonial feminist thinkers situated in different socio-political contexts. Whereas for Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman the focus is on the matter of Blackness and Black lives in their constitutive vulnerability, both Cristina Rivera Garza’s and Sayak Valencia’s works remarkably insist on the specific socio-political context of today’s Mexico. These authors urge the readers to adopt a critical posture when encountering official narratives, also because in their texts they exhibit their own vulnerability. For them, writing, their writing is an ethical demand to imagine alternatives and to foster new entanglements between bodies persisting on the margins, at the limits of the norms that regulate legibility. (shrink)

This article considers that reasoning over archives is a joint enterprise between archivists and researchers and that both groups are increasingly using machine agents to assist them in it. It starts by considering the processing of archivists, researchers and machine agents separately. Using the different perspectives this brings to highlight different aspects of that processing, as a process of sense-making, as scholarly research activity, as practices that realise and achieve data for the drawing of further inference, it reasserts the argument (...) that archives cannot be regarded as raw data to be reasoned over, but must be seen as the result of multiple representative and interpretive acts, of iterative realisation and activation as ‘data’ potentially involving many, many additional actors. It then goes on to consider how the involvement of machine agents fits into and potentially alters this picture by providing more detail about the basis on which they currently perform such acts. (shrink)

The study is devoted to the study of actual state of the archival materials of V.S. Solovyov which are held in different funds of Russia. During the working process was carried out the analysis of Solovyov’s related materials in a number of archives of Moscow and St. Petersburg. In the context of this topic, documents from such archive funds as: RGALI, GARF, TsAGM, OR RSL (Moscow), OR RNL, IRLI RAS, RGIA (St. Petersburg) were reviewed. Particular attention was paid to (...) the 1880s as the least researched period of philosopher’s work in his biography due to the insufficient availability of sources and to the restrictions of spiritual censorship in connection with the church-political content of Solovyov’s works of this period (“The Great Debate and Christian Politics”, 1883; “The History and Future of Theocracy”, 1887, etc.). In this regard, special attention was paid to the Solovyov funds in such archives as RGALI (F. 446) and OR RNB (F. 718). In the course of the study, many storage units were identified containing unsorted, draft materials, notebooks and notes of the philosopher, which need to be systematized and studied. The work carried out allows us to establish the scale and determine the priority areas of current research on the creative biography and philosophy of V.S. Solovyov based on the study of primary sources in the archives of Russia. (shrink)

This article uses a close reading of Jacques Derrida’s short work Archive fever: A Freudian impression (1996), in order to show the structural impossibility for law and the wider legal system to protect itself from the destabilising effects of deconstruction. It shows law’s inability to stabilise/close the system and hence its inability to ‘assure order’.