Online digital archives have allowed researchers to explore the past as never before. Arguably without the search technology offered by online digital archives the lives of many individuals would have remained in obscurity. Furthermore, the level of detail that can be quickly gleaned about individuals from the past, particularly when multiple digital archives are accessed, raises ethical questions. For example, when reporting findings researchers could be disclosing personal information that is unknown to descendants, and if it relates (...) to a sensitive topic then there is the potential for the researcher to cause distress. However, the rapid growth in digital archives has meant there has been little consideration of what ethical concerns digital archives might generate. This article reflects upon research using one digital archive and the importance of the researcher’s relationship with the material they retrieve when searching this type of source. (shrink)

Digital data inundation has far-reaching implications for: disciplinary jurisdiction; the relationship between the academy, commerce and the state; and the very nature of the sociological imagination. Hitherto much of the discussion about these matters has tended to focus on ‘transactional’ data held within large and complex commercial and government databases. This emphasis has been quite understandable – such transactional data does indeed form a crucial part of the informational infrastructures that are now emerging. However, in recent years new sources (...) of data have become available that possess a rather different character. This is data generated in the cultural sphere, not only as a result of routine transactions with various digital media but also as a result of what some would want to view as a shift towards popular cultural forms dominated by processes of what has been termed prosumption. Our analytic focus here is on contemporary prosumption practices, digital technologies, the public life of data and the playful vitality of many of the ‘glossy topics’ that constitute contemporary popular culture. (shrink)

Co-authored by a Computer Scientist and a Digital Humanist, this article examines the challenges faced by cultural heritage institutions in the digital age, which have led to the closure of the vast majority of born-digital archival collections. It focuses particularly on cultural organizations such as libraries, museums and archives, used by historians, literary scholars and other Humanities scholars. Most born-digital records held by cultural organizations are inaccessible due to privacy, copyright, commercial and technical issues. Even when (...) born-digital data are publicly available, users often need to physically travel to repositories such as the British Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France to consult web pages. Provided with enough sample data from which to learn and train their models, AI, and more specifically machine learning algorithms, offer the opportunity to improve and ease the access to digital archives by learning to perform complex human tasks. These vary from providing intelligent support for searching the archives to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks. In this article, we focus on sensitivity review as a practical solution to unlock digital archives that would allow archival institutions to make non-sensitive information available. This promise to make archives more accessible does not come free of warnings for potential pitfalls and risks: inherent errors, "black box" approaches that make the algorithm inscrutable, and risks related to bias, fake, or partial information. Our central argument is that AI can deliver its promise to make digital archival collections more accessible, but it also creates new challenges - particularly in terms of ethics. In the conclusion, we insist on the importance of fairness, accountability and transparency in the process of making digital archives more accessible. (shrink)

The archive is a cultural institution that creates a framework for the social and collective memory and as such is one of the collection of knowledge institutions that not only preserves and classifies “texts” but uses them to re-create collective memory and sometimes to invent cultural histories. Like all knowledge institutions, the archive is also a construction deeply implicated in knowledge politics or what Foucault calls power/knowledge. In the past the archive has functioned as a central metaphor (...) for the construction of human knowledge in all it is different institutional forms and like the encyclopedia and the camera, the archive produces highly coded representations that make implicit validity claims to the truth and justice of the past. Politically speaking, those who control the archive control the past. In the digital world, the archive is used to describe a machine-readable location as a store for “data” and “information.” Digital technologies radically alter our existing institutions,... (shrink)

Over two hundred years after Immanuel Kant’s death, the first full, critical, and digital edition of his last manuscript is currently being completed by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. This edition stands in institutional continuity with Wilhelm Dilthey’s monumental Akademieausgabe of Kant’s writings that was grounded in Dilthey’s lastingly influential concept of the national, literary-philosophical archive. The new edition showcases Kant’s dynamic writing process as a matter of investigation in its own right. As I argue here, it brings (...) into view the constitutive role of the archive for both texts and interpretative practices. A historical perspective that links the legacy of the Akademieausgabe with the digital edition of the Opus postumum highlights the changing role of the archive in emphasising or de-emphasising the manuscript’s resistance to certain appropriations and stylisations of Kant as a thinker. (shrink)

Galleries, libraries, archives and museums are striving to retain audience attention to issues related to cultural heritage, by implementing various novel opportunities for audience engagement through technological means online. Although born-digital assets for cultural heritage may have inundated the Internet in some areas, most of the time they are stored in “digital warehouses,” and the questions of the digital ecosystem’s sustainability, meaningful public participation and creative reuse of data still remain. Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are (...) used to bring born-digital archives to light, aiming to enhance the public’s engagement and participation. At the core of this debate lies both the openness of data and issues of privacy. How open to the public should born-digital archives be? Should everything be open and available online, and what does it take to achieve balance between openness and privacy, especially through AI initiatives? The study is qualitative and builds on the rationale of grounded theory. The role of AI development is critically investigated in relation to opening up born-digital archives online, by considering privacy and ethics issues. Grounded in the context of the author’s PhD research, the paper proposes a human-centred approach to AI development for democratising its development towards fairness and social inclusion, contrary to the stereotypical cliché of blackboxing, allowing space for the plurality of born-digital archives to flourish. (shrink)

Accounts of how research capacity in education can be developed often make reference to electronic networks and online resources. This paper presents a theoretically driven analysis of the role of one such resource, an online archive of educational research studies that includes not only digitised collections of original documents but also videos of contextual interviews with the original researchers, linked and presented using emerging 'semantic web' technologies. An exploration with a group of early career researchers in education of how (...) the archive might be used to support their own research activities is reported: this suggests that thinking about such online resources as elements of heterogeneous 'assemblages' may be useful in their design and in understanding their role in research training and research networks more generally. (shrink)

Taking technological developments in urban mapping and the megacity phenomena of rapid change and sprawling space as its starting point, this essay provides a history of the present through a genealogy of maps of Montpellier in France, a rapidly growing modern city that provides examples from the earliest printed maps of the 16th century through to the most recent innovations in public-sponsored 3D mapping. By tracing the shifting correlations of narrative elements, it places in historical perspective the relationship between those (...) concepts, such as verticality and horizontality, and perception and representation, which are problematized in the contemporary contexts of megacities and digital technology. (shrink)

Digital cultural archives and databases are promising an era of heritage democratization and an enhancement of the role of arts in everyday cultures. It is hoped that mass digitization initiatives in many corners of the world can facilitate the secure preservation of human cultural heritage, with easy access and diverse ways for creative reuse. Understanding the dialogic processes within these increasingly vast databases necessitates a dynamic conceptualization of data they contain. The paper argues that this can be found in (...) Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotic notion of text and text’s functions in culture. It elaborates on the three key characteristics of text – expression, boundary, and structure – as manifested within the digital semiosphere. At the same time, the textual dialogues within digital archives are increasingly conditioned by metadata, which is hereby conceptualized as metalanguage inducing a modeling effect on archived texts and defining their possible sphere of dynamics. To balance the explanations of creative operations of digital archives, the paper also demonstrates their auto-communicative mechanisms for facilitating cultural continuities and stability. (shrink)

After a brief introduction to the history of the Husserl Archives I focus on the methodological specificities in studying Husserl’s work on the basis of his manuscripts and of his archives. In a second step I expound on the effects that the current shift from an analogous to a hybrid analogous and digital archives is producing in the self-understanding of the practices of our institution. Particularly, developing digital technology means that the Husserl Archives are entering a new phase (...) in respect to how archival and editorial impulses will affect the presentation of Husserl’s writings. Finally, I offer some perspectives about how the planned virtual platform, which will give direct access to his manuscripts, is designed to promote a new understanding of Husserl’s specific process of philosophical writing, of his unique wording of thoughts. (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)

Much writing on, first, analogue and, later, digital archives has focused on related power-dynamics and the structuring effects of archives and their technologies on discursive freedom and cultural dynamics. In recent years, however, work within the media archaeology domain, especially by Wolfgang Ernst, has addressed how the specific materialities of digital archives, and the nature of their algorithms and particular functions, could be seen to facilitate dynamics in cultures. This article sets this work in dialogue with the cultural (...) semiotics of Juri Lotman, whose late work focused on how communicative processes between and within different subsystems of culture facilitate their dynamic change and the production of new forms and cultural systems. The article suggests further interdisciplinary dialogue between media archaeology and cultural semiotics in order to understand the role of archives in facilitating communicative processes and interlinking in culture and the emergence of novelties – that is, for understanding the ‘creativity’ of archives. (shrink)

John Sheridan talks with Clare L E Foster, sharing some wider observations about the challenges of the digital transformation of The National Archives..

In many ways, digital practices have precipitated remarkable changes in the global accessibility of art. However, the digital revolution has also radically influenced the conservation processes surrounding art, including archiving, preserving, and remembering. This paper explores the conservation of digital artworks for the future benefit of culture, with particular peference to creators and viewers of art, as well as participants in interactive artworks. More specifically, this paper focuses on the philosophical and technical approaches adopted by creators, conservators, (...) and philosophers involved in the preservation of variable media artworks. Issues of programming, interoperability between archival systems, and enhanced public access increasingly inform the design of digital archives. Indeed, the continuously shifting technological landscape—marked by the centrality of digital technologies to everyday life—problematizes the preservation of digital art through mainstream museological paradigms. Part of this analysis of digital art conservation will be drawn from the archival philosophies of Boris Groys and Rick Prelinger. (shrink)

On the 7th of June 2018, The National Archives UK held its inaugural digital lecture, delivered by Professor Luciano Floridi entitled “Semantic Capital: What it is and how to protect it”. The lecture was followed by a poster exhibition, showcasing nine cutting-edge digital research projects at The National Archives. This paper aims at giving a distinct overview of The National Archives’ digital research priorities, drawing on examples from the active and recently completed research projects, which were displayed (...) at the exhibition on the 7th of June 2018. The focus of this paper is to discuss the research challenges that we are facing as we seek to become a second-generation digital archive, that is digital by instinct and design. By placing a particular emphasis on the conceptual and epistemological challenges relating to trust and openness, the paper suggests that research is the key for us as a rapidly evolving digital archive; enabling us not only to inform but also innovate around the forthcoming digital challenges, and helping us to define future directions and lead the shaping of the future archive. (shrink)

Interfaces have partially replaced editors. They now administer and have industrialized the processes of content circulation. Web platforms mediatize cultural memory and one example of this is that of online audiovisual archives which are a paradigmatic case involving interfaces mediating our image of the past. Therefore, their role as an enunciative framework is clearly worthy of thought and study. We will thus use a semiotic approach based on the starting hypothesis that digital interfaces shape our belief systems through a (...) discursive framing of content to which they give access. By analyzing two case studies, we will argue that the transparency of interfaces appears to recall the notion of “mechanical objectivity” and thus refashion the reliability of the archives. However, a final counter-analysis of a document read in the framework of an on-site consultation invites us to reshape our considerations and enlarge the perspective from semiotic visual analysis to include the social processes linked to the publication of digital heritage. (shrink)

This paper approaches web archiving as preservation of digital memory and as a dynamic informational environment with complex problems of harvest, use, access and preservation. It uses a qualitative and exploratory-descriptive approach, identifying web archiving initiatives and promoting a reflection on the ways of defining web information collection, geographical gaps in web archiving and problems regarding uses and rights of this information. Whereas initiatives such as Internet Archive harvest a lot of information from across the web, an imbalance (...) of digital memory exists where many countries do not possess their own web archiving initiatives, and therefore, coverage of information is unequally produced. (shrink)

Introduction -- Against house arrest -- Digital impressions: writing memory after Agnès Varda -- Folding time: toward a new theory of montage -- Archiving disappearance: from Michelangelo Antonioni to new media.

Purpose This paper aims to provide a brief overview of the ethical challenges facing researchers engaging with web archival materials and demonstrates a framework and method for conducting research with historical web data created by young people. Design/methodology/approach This paper’s methodology is informed by the conceptual framing of data materials in research on the “right to be forgotten” (Crossen-White, 2015; GDPR, 2018; Tsesis, 2014), data afterlives (Agostinho, 2019; Stevenson and Gehl, 2019; Sutherland, 2017), indigenous data sovereignty and governance (Wemigwans, 2018) (...) and feminist ethics of care (Cifor et al., 2019; Cowan, 2020; Franzke et al., 2020; Luka and Millette, 2018). It demonstrates a new method called an archive promenade, which builds on the walkthrough and scroll-back methods (Light et al., 2018; Robards and Lincoln, 2017). Findings The archive promenades demonstrate how individual attachments to digital traces vary and are often unpredictable, which necessitates further steps to ensure that privacy and data sovereignty are maintained through research with web archives. Originality/value This paper demonstrates how the archive promenade methodological intervention can lead to better practices of care with sensitive web materials and brings together previous work on ethical fabrications (Markham, 2012), speculation (Luka and Millette, 2018) and thick context (Marzullo et al., 2018), to yield new insights for research on the experiences of growing up online. (shrink)

What is a “historical” video game, let alone a successful one? It is difficult to answer this question because all our definitions of history have been constructed in a linear-narrative cultural context that is currently being challenged and in large part displaced by digital media, especially video games. I therefore consider this question from the point of view of historical semantics and in relation to the impact of digital technology on all aspects of the historiographical operation, from the (...) establishment of digital archives, to the production of e-texts, to the digital remediation of visual modes of historical representation. Seen from this dual perspective, video games appear to participate in a process of spatialization and virtualization of historical semantics. In the first place, video games have begun to detach the notion of history from its double reference to the past and to the real—“what essentially happened”—that it had acquired at the end of the eighteenth century. Second, they also challenge the semiotic production of “historic events” that has characterized the construction of modern historical consciousness. Historical video games, in other words, replace representation with simulation and presence with virtuality, thereby marginalizing the oscillation of the modern historical imagination between historical facts and historic events, transcendence and immanence, representation and presence. Although digital reworkings of historical semantics have not produced any grammatical transformation of the signifier, history—nor does this essay propose one—I do argue that the impact of video games on our contemporary historic culture is of paradigmatic proportions similar to those described by Reinhart Koselleck for the dawn of the modern age. Focusing on one of the most successful contemporary video games, Sid Meier’s Civilization, I show how the remediation of cinematic genres by video games is pushing the processes of de-temporalization and de-referentialization of history toward the formation of a new notion of the historical that may be conceptualized as the inversion of the classic Aristotelian paradigm: history has replaced poetry and philosophy as the realm of the possible. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article situates the recent concept of ‘sharenting’ in relation to the literature on the ‘parenting culture’. Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the ecstatic is then introduced and used as a lens through which to understand and critique this contemporary parenting culture. The discussion that follows covers: ways in which social media contribute to the development of new iterations of the individual subject and their relationship to parenting culture; the congruence between those forms of subjectivity and Baudrillard’s notion of the (...) ecstatic; and the resulting notion of ecstatic parenting. (shrink)

In claiming that metadata possess the power to put historical awareness into the act of listening, this article examines digital music use as an aesthetic situation driven by potentialities of becoming. Working from a theoretical foundation amalgamating digital music archives and metadata as environments the article discusses Georgina Born’s notion of musical assemblages alongside the concept of virtuality, and by letting these meet the article argues for a musical assemblage built from sensibilities of becoming rather than layers of (...) mediation. The inner workings of digital music use constitute an ecology in which recorded music history moves and reconnects, and this makes the historicity of recorded music be fluid, thus turning listening into a historicised action. In exemplifying this, the article discusses some of the strategic programming of metadata on the digital music platform Diskoteket, and through an analysis of sampled music, the prospects of recorded music’s historicity are shown as affective capacities. (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)

Since 2020, many countries worldwide have deployed digital contact tracing programs that rely on a range of digital sensors in the city to locate and map the routes of viral spread. Many critical commentaries have raised concerns about the privacy risks and trustworthiness of these programs. Extending these analyses, this paper opens up a different line of questioning that goes beyond privacy-centered single-axis critique of surveillance by considering digital contact tracing symptomatic of the broader changes in modes (...) of urban governance that renders our cities traceable, knowable, and governable through data. Based on archival and real-time analysis of South Korean national and local COVID-19 dashboards, online forums, and interviews with South Korean public health practitioners, this paper offers a sociotechnical analysis of digital contact tracing that looks at the various intersections of state-political, bio-political, and techno-political power dynamics. In contrast to popular narratives that attributed the success of the Korean approach to digital contact tracing to its collectivist culture and smart city infrastructures, this paper suggests that the case can be better understood by looking at both the macro-level shift in the forms of governance that takes on a spatialized and networked character and the micro-level formation of moral responsibility that shape one's conduct as a health and safety-conscious citizens. As the latest realization of the expanding regime of traceability in digital/urban governance, the development of digital contract tracing is seen to parallel with concurrent changes occurring in multiple domains of life including knowledge production, cultural memory, and individual subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of standards being used in the domain of digital cultural heritage with focus on the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard created by the Library of Congress in the United States of America. The process of digitization of cultural heritage requires silo breaking in a number of areas—one area is that of academic disciplines to enable the performance of rich interdisciplinary work. This lays the foundation for the emancipation of the second form of silo which (...) are the silos of knowledge, both traditional and born digital, held in individual institutions, such as galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Disciplinary silo breaking is the key to unlocking these institutional knowledge silos. Interdisciplinary teams, such as developers and librarians, work together to make the data accessible as open data on the “semantic web”. Description logic is the area of mathematics which underpins many ontology building applications today. Creating these ontologies requires a human–machine symbiosis. Currently in the cultural heritage domain, the institutions’ role is that of provider of this open data to the national aggregator which in turn can make the data available to the trans-European aggregator known as Europeana. Current ingests to the aggregators are in the form of machine readable cataloguing metadata which is limited in the richness it provides to disparate object descriptions. METS can provide this richness. (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)

The digital humanities represent, for many researchers, the potential for extending their research in terms of audience, scope, methods, and opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration. Ideally, this potential should also extend access to cultural engagement and preservation for marginalized groups. In practice, the reality may be quite different for projects that focus on diverse racial, gender, ethnic, and cultural heritage. In this short article we discuss preliminary findings from a study of patterns in U.S. federal funding for digital humanities (...) projects, with particular focus on cultural heritage and archival projects. Through the lens of funding and access, we raise some questions about whether the digital humanities can represent a shift from old hegemonies or run the risk of expressing them in a new technological paradigm. (shrink)

The Commens Papers (http://www.commens.org/papers) publishes preprints, reports, and communications that deal with the philosophy, scientific contributions, and life of C. S. Peirce. The Commens Papers are primarily meant for scholarly products that lack other means of publication, but which the author wishes to bring to the attention of the research community. The papers must meet editorial approval, but they are not fully peer reviewed. -/- The Commens Papers accepts a broad variety of intellectual products in various formats, including: Conference papers, (...) Manuscripts made available for comments and criticism before submission for peer review, Reports of original research, such as archival research, Catalogues or other systematic summaries of (parts of) Peirce’s writings, Reports from scientific meetings Lectures, as text, video, or audio, Posters presented at academic conferences . (shrink)

Cognition is commonly taken to be computational manipulation of representations. These representations are assumed to be digital, but it is not usually specified what that means and what relevance it has for the theory. I propose a specification for being a digital state in a digital system, especially a digital computational system. The specification shows that identification of digital states requires functional directedness, either for someone or for the system of which it is a part. (...) In the case or digital representations, to be a token of a representational type, where the function of the type is to represent. [An earlier version of this paper was discussed in the web-conference "Interdisciplines" https://web.archive.org/web/20100221125700/http://www.interdisciplines.org/adaptation/papers/7 ]. (shrink)

Philosophy of science is expanding via the introduction of new digital data and tools for their analysis. The data comprise digitized published books and journal articles, as well as heretofore unpublished material such as images, archival text, notebooks, meeting notes, and programs. The growth in available data is matched by the extensive development of automated analysis tools. The variety of data sources and tools can be overwhelming. In this article, we survey the state of digital work in the (...) philosophy of science, showing what kinds of questions can be answered and how one can go about answering them. (shrink)

As Ricœur scholars know, the literature by and on Ricœur is vast. Material written by Ricœur that is not collected in published volumes is often difficult to locate, and even in the published volumes it is frequently a challenge to locate where Ricœur discusses a particular topic. Given the amount of his work it can be a challenge too to determine changes in his analyses over the life of his corpus. And locating secondary literature on Ricœur can be equally problematic. (...) In response, we have been working to establish a model for how Ricœur’s corpus might be digitized so that the issues of access, keyword location, and pattern might all be addressed. To develop the model, we are starting with Ricœur’s primary texts in English and plan to expand over time to other languages and to the secondary literature on Ricœur. In the present article we discuss our model and its five steps: digital access; copyright; text preparation for digital searches and analysis; examples of digital searches and analyses; and an archive portal interface that allows users to query based on an extensible set of search variables without needing to know or access the underlying search logic. We also invite interested researchers to help assist the development of this digitization project. (shrink)

Excerpt from Archives of Philosophy Rhythm as a Distinguishing Characteristic of Prose Style: Assn: Lus. 50 cents. The Field of Distinct Vision: W. O. Bunions. 70 cents. The Influence of Bodily Position on Mental Activities: Ema E. Jonas. 50 cent. A Statistical Study of Literary Merit: Manama]: lyman Warns. 30 cents. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books (...) uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Much of social life now takes place online, and records of online social interactions are available for social science research in the form of massive digital text archives. But cultural social science has contributed little to the development of machine-assisted text analysis methods. As a result few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by proposing metatheoretical (...) and theoretical foundations suitable for machine-assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of Elder-Vass, Kaidesoja and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non-discursive social and cognitive processes. Theoretically I follow Feldman and many others in arguing that language is fundamentally shaped by processes of embodied cognition. Researchers developing digital text analysis techniques must theoretically account for such processes if they wish to produce algorithms that can interpret texts in ways that supplement, and not only amplify, human interpretation. I critically survey contemporary text analysis methods that implicitly share these metatheoretical and theoretical positions and discuss some ways these can be further developed with newly available software. (shrink)

Email archives are important historical resources, but access to such data poses a unique archival challenge and many born-digital collections remain dark, while questions of how they should be effectively made available remain. This paper contributes to the growing interest in preserving access to email by addressing the needs of users, in readiness for when such collections become more widely available. We argue that for the content of email to be meaningfully accessed, the context of email must form part (...) of this access. In exploring this idea, we focus on discovery within large, multi-custodian archives of organisational email, where emails’ network features are particularly apparent. We introduce our prototype search tool, which uses AI-based methods to support user-driven exploration of email. Specifically, we integrate two distinct AI models that generate systematically different types of results, one based upon simple, phrase-matching and the other upon more complex, BERT embeddings. Together, these provide a new pathway to contextual discovery that accounts for the diversity of future archival users, their interests and level of experience. (shrink)

In utopian/science fiction literature, comprehensive knowledge is a familiar motif that also inspires recent policies to screen society through surveillance. In the late 20th century, a digital archive promised to facilitate quick access to abundant information and effective strategies to confront myriad challenges. Yet, today, the scale and scope of information accumulation in national and corporate repositories is reaching proportions whose intelligent processing excedes human capabilities, and triggering a shift in focus from dumb repository to artificial intelligence. Processing (...) such accumulation of knowledge necessiates skills commonly attributed to divinity. Without a theory that recognizes this condition and informs the operations of artificial intelligence, the latter is likely to fail in human ways, e.g., by perceiving false patterns resulting from flawed theories assigning meaning to knowledge. For successful pattern recognition to occur, theories must rest on science fiction and a digital ontotheology of the machine as the form this archive assumes. (shrink)

For the last few years, the Escuela de Estudios Árabes has been carrying out a project for the computerisation of Arabic manuscripts. In this paper, we explain the benefits of consulting a manuscript using computer support, as apposed to traditional methods. We outline the steps followed in the process of building a digital archive: scanning of the manuscript as the first step, retrieval and use of the images storaged in the computer as the last one.

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)

How might experimental media art help theorise what falls by the wayside in the digital public sphere? Working in the years immediately following the launch of YouTube in 2005, some media artists centred their creative praxis towards the end of that decade upon rescuing, revalorising, and placing back into digital circulation audiovisual media formats and technologies that appeared aged or obsolete. Although there may be a degree of nostalgia behind such practices, these artworks articulate a cogent critique of (...) the drive towards constant innovation that was responsible for the invention and global expansion of cinema, but in recent decades has been responsible for its decay—or, perhaps more accurately, for its perpetual transformation. The article explores this 'media-archaeology' sensibility as a way of thinking about AI more widely: an approach that sees histories of media not as a linear, chronological search for origins, but as a critical recovery of artefacts lodged discontinuously in multiple layers of the past. Although digital technologies form a central part of the creative process of the artists considered in this article, their works also act as a critical conscience about digital change, asking what the so-called digital revolution is leaving out, and leaving behind. In so doing, it illuminates some potential positive and negative impacts of digital technologies' mediation of new forms of public engagement, whether in art, archives, or on social media. (shrink)

With a mass digitisation programme underway and the addition of non-print legal deposit and web archive collections, the National Library of Scotland is now both producing and collecting data at an unprecedented rate, with over 5PB of storage in the Library’s data centres. As well as the opportunities to support large scale analysis of the collections, this also presents new challenges around data management, storage, rights, formats, skills and access. Furthermore, by assuming the role of both creators and collectors, (...) libraries face broader questions about the concepts of ‘collections' and ‘heritage', and the ethical implications of collecting practices. While the ‘collections as data’ movement has encouraged cultural heritage organisations to present collections in machine-readable formats, new services, processes and tools also need to be established to enable these emerging forms of research, and new modes of working need to be established to take into account an increasing need for transparency around the creation and presentation of digital collections. This commentary explores the National Library of Scotland's new digital scholarship service, the implications of this new activity and the obstacles that libraries encounter when navigating a world of Big Data. (shrink)

Introduction : schizoanalysis, digital screens and new brain circuits -- Schizoid minds, delirium cinema and powers of machines of the invisible -- Illusionary perception and powers of the false -- Surveillance screens and powers of affect -- Signs of time : meta/physics of the brain-screen -- Degrees of belief : epistemology of probabilities -- Powers of creation : aesthetics of material-force -- The open archive : cinema as world-memory -- Divine in(ter)vention : micropolitics and resistance -- Logistics of (...) perception 2.0 : multiple screens as affective weapons -- Conclusion : the neuro-image : brain-screens from the future. (shrink)

Due to the transformation of digital media, the notion of “publicity” has become problematic. In most cases, the debate is focused on the question whether the internet causes a decline of so-called civic publicity or rather intensifies and pluralizes it. Rudolf Maresch outlines Jürgen Habermas's famous study of this category and challenges his claim concerning its “structural transformation,” referring to the governmental and medial processes which have always already controlled every form of communication. Publicity, he claims, is an epiphenomenon (...) not only of print media, but of a general addressability of subjects, that has been produced previously by postal services. Today, he concludes, publicity is a concept that competes with other offers of mass media, which are all based on criteria of novelty and excitement. Mercedes Bunz also notes the expansion and pluralization of the public sphere due to the change of digital media, but sees the crucial issues in the design and distribution of knowledge and power by evaluation. So-called human beings no longer decide on the dissemination and evaluation of information, but algorithms, which are for the most part concealed from the public sphere that they produce in the first place. Both authors agree that a pluralization of public sphere(s) has taken place, while Habermas's notion of publicity refers to a single public sphere. German Durch den digitalen Medienwandel ist der Begriff der Öffentlichkeit problematisch geworden. Die Debatte fokussiert sich zumeist auf die Frage, ob die sogenannte bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit durch das Internet im Niedergang begriffen ist oder eine Intensivierung und Pluralisierung erfährt. Rudolf Maresch zeichnet die berühmte Untersuchung der Kategorie durch Jürgen Habermas nach und zieht den von ihm konstatierten Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit in Zweifel. Dagegen verweist er auf die gouvernementalen und medialen Prozesse, die jede Form von Kommunikation immer schon gesteuert haben. Öffentlichkeit sei daher ein Epiphänomen nicht allein des Zeitungswesens, sondern der bereits vorgängig ergangenen postalischen Herstellung einer allgemeinen Adressierbarkeit von Subjekten. Heute sei Öffentlichkeit innerhalb der auf Novitäts- und Erregungskriterien abstellenden Massenmedien ein mit anderen Angeboten konkurrierendes Konzept. Mercedes Bunz konstatiert ebenfalls eine Ausweitung und Pluralisierung von Öffentlichkeit durch den digitalen Medienwandel, sieht aber die entscheidenden Fragen in der Konzeption und Verteilung von Evaluationswissen und Evaluationsmacht. Nicht mehr die sogenannten Menschen, sondern Algorithmen entscheiden über die Verbreitung und Bewertung von Nachrichten. Diese sind in der Öffentlichkeit – die sie allererst erzeugen – weitgehend verborgen. Einig sind sich die Autoren darin, dass es zu einer Pluralisierung von Öffentlichkeiten gekommen ist, während der Öffentlichkeitsbegriff von Habermas auf eine singuläre Öffentlichkeit abstellt. (shrink)

Durch den digitalen Medienwandel ist der Begriff der Öffentlichkeit problematisch geworden. Die Debatte fokussiert sich zumeist auf die Frage, ob die sogenannte bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit durch das Internet im Niedergang begriffen ist oder eine Intensivierung und Pluralisierung erfährt. Rudolf Maresch zeichnet die berühmte Untersuchung der Kategorie durch Jürgen Habermas nach und zieht den von ihm konstatierten Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit in Zweifel. Dagegen verweist er auf die gouvernementalen und medialen Prozesse, die jede Form von Kommunikation immer schon gesteuert haben. Öffentlichkeit sei daher (...) ein Epiphänomen nicht allein des Zeitungswesens, sondern der bereits vorgängig ergangenen postalischen Herstellung einer allgemeinen Adressierbarkeit von Subjekten. Heute sei Öffentlichkeit innerhalb der auf Novitäts- und Erregungskriterien abstellenden Massenmedien ein mit anderen Angeboten konkurrierendes Konzept. Mercedes Bunz konstatiert ebenfalls eine Ausweitung und Pluralisierung von Öffentlichkeit durch den digitalen Medienwandel, sieht aber die entscheidenden Fragen in der Konzeption und Verteilung von Evaluationswissen und Evaluationsmacht. Nicht mehr die sogenannten Menschen, sondern Algorithmen entscheiden über die Verbreitung und Bewertung von Nachrichten. Diese sind in der Öffentlichkeit – die sie allererst erzeugen – weitgehend verborgen. Einig sind sich die Autoren darin, dass es zu einer Pluralisierung von Öffentlichkeiten gekommen ist, während der Öffentlichkeitsbegriff von Habermas auf eine singuläre Öffentlichkeit abstellt. Due to the transformation of digital media, the notion of “publicity” has become problematic. In most cases, the debate is focused on the question whether the internet causes a decline of so-called civic publicity or rather intensifies and pluralizes it. Rudolf Maresch outlines Jürgen Habermas's famous study of this category and challenges his claim concerning its “structural transformation,” referring to the governmental and medial processes which have always already controlled every form of communication. Publicity, he claims, is an epiphenomenon not only of print media, but of a general addressability of subjects, that has been produced previously by postal services. Today, he concludes, publicity is a concept that competes with other offers of mass media, which are all based on criteria of novelty and excitement. Mercedes Bunz also notes the expansion and pluralization of the public sphere due to the change of digital media, but sees the crucial issues in the design and distribution of knowledge and power by evaluation. So-called human beings no longer decide on the dissemination and evaluation of information, but algorithms, which are for the most part concealed from the public sphere that they produce in the first place. Both authors agree that a pluralization of public sphere(s) has taken place, while Habermas's notion of publicity refers to a single public sphere. (shrink)

Following the daily routines of collecting and record keeping at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Albena Yaneva tells the story of how the nature of architectural archives reflects the nature of design as a collective endeavor in which archivists, librarians, editors, curators, digital humanists, and conservators all play a role. She also makes an argument about the importance of architectural archive-making as an index of the cultural position of design in contemporary societies.