Chapter 18: Proposal for a Monument to Lost Data

(Pre-publication draft) Review of: Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive. Jussi Parikka ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Published (2015) Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 37(4)

Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling, 2019

Introduction to the special issue of the Nordic Journal of Information Science and Cultural Mediation on "Archives that Matter. Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Histories". This special issue is dedicated to critical and aesthetic engagements with colonial archives in the wake of digitization. Taking the digitization of the Danish colonial archives as a starting point, the issue brings together articles, essays and artistic contributions that address the various materialities of the archival record, while pointing to the need to reimagine the infrastructures best suited to share digitized colonial heritage.

The Journal of Literacy and Technology 12.3, 2011

This article offers a contemporary re-visioning of the gifts of archival work presented in Susan Wells' renowned "Claiming the Archive for Rhetoric and Composition" in light of digital archives.

LEA : Lingue e Letterature d'Oriente e d'Occidente, 2012

Regardless of the widely spread use in historiography, anthropology, cultural studies, information sciences, archives is a heavily inflated word. Beginning with the ancient Greek administrative role of Archeion, the emergence of archival institution as a symbolic mean to strengthen national identity in the age of nation states, through referencing social construction and parallel stories of postmodern historiography, there is a need for a new archival theory to connect high level theories with new archival practices embedded in the digital society. The essay tries to remove some interpretative layers from the non-discoursive practices of archives and it yields the generative nature of its architecture by referencing media archeology as method. The analysis of Eastern and Central European historical examples add nuance to our understanding of archival complexities: the fate of secret police files in the Post-Communist societies, how to serve the collective memory of traumatized nations with new approaches to collection management, and finally, referencing Pan-European efforts to cooperate or to compete with huge private technology providers in the digital age. The essay is part of a growing body of research on resituating "the archival identity" and suggesting to examine both static and dynamic archives in the light of technology developments to understand digital forgetting, digital remembering and controlling data for the whole society.

2003

Media Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. His current teaching and research are concerned mainly with the social and cultural contexts of records creation and use. Australian records professionals have heard and seen him performing regularly, most recently when he delivered the keynote address at the Australian Society of Archivists' 2002 conference 'Past Caring? What Does Society Expect of Archivists?'. Being Digital entails for archives more than preserving and providing digital documents: it presents a techno-cultural challenge to connect archives with people.1 Archives will be redesigned as a public sphere where individual, organisational and collective memories and stories are experienced, exchanged, and enriched. To achieve this, a goal-oriented entrepreneurial shift to new products and services is necessary. Strategies should not be restricted to merely digitising what archivesas-a-place already do. The 'Archives of the Future' was one of the concerns Captain Hilary Jenkinson dealt with in his Manual, which in the first edition included treatment of 'the problems of war archives and archive making'.2 Libraries of the Future was the book Joseph Licklider, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published in 1965. Licklider, today considered to be one of the fathers of Cyberspace,

Reflections based on questions related to digitization and raised at the first ForumZ with the topic "Archives for the digital era", which took place on February 11th 2017 in Luxembourg and was organized by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History.

This article examines the construction of a digital collection. Using a theoretical framework adapted from digital history and historiography, it will investigate the implications of archival digitization. Through an empirical study of the National Library of Israel's digital depository of ephemera entitled 'Time Travel', the article demonstrates how the selection of archival records for digital preservation, the design of the search interface, and the crowdsourcing of metadata collection are all directing archive users toward certain narratives about Israeli history and away from others. Drawing on interviews with professionals, analysis of reports, and investigations of user experience, I will unearth the political, religious, and cultural tensions that lie beneath the surface of 'Time Travel'. This research demonstrates that digitization of archival documents is not just a technical process but a cultural, social, and political one as well.

2014

Records created through institutional and personal activity are the primary concern of archives, regardless of the form or media of those records. This pa­per focuses on the implications of the networked society for how such records are created, as well as how they are defined and appraised by archivists, and the kinds of searching and uses to which they might be subjected. It argues that in responding to these implications, archives will have to move beyond the custodial and institutional mindset that has dominated the field for cen­turies and instead embrace a network orientation. It proposes and provides examples of several potential conceptualizations of “networked records”: the multi-provenance bureaucratic record and the record created by the crowd; the metadata record; the extra-institutional record, the transinstitutional and the transjurisdictional record, and the mobile or itinerant record; the stitched-together record; the mined, mapped and compiled record; and the implie...

This collection of essays explores the current proliferation of the concept of the archive. The concept of the archive has expanded into areas beyond the classical archive to art, philosophy, and new textual and media practices. Simultaneously, these new practices both resist and transform the archival impulse, perhaps creating what one could call a new “anarchival” condition. The contributions approach the topic from three different but related angles: 1. New Conceptions, 2. New Archival Practices, and 3. New Challenges. In the first section Knut Ove Eliassen (one of the best on MF ever written) and Wolfgang Ernst lays the ground for some of the new conceptions of the archive at stake in this collection. The next section, “New Archival Practices” is devoted to practices outside the archive proper which relate to or reflect upon the contemporary archival condition. Susanne Østby Sæther explores emerging forms of Archival Art practices, and Terje Rasmussen analyses how the interplay between digital media and memory construction affects the smallest units in society, the family and the individual. Here, the mobile phone as an archive and a recorder is crucial. In the last section, “New Challenges” Kjetil Jacobsen and Alexander Galloway pose a series of critical reflections as well as speculative conclusions regarding the future of the archive. In the article “Anarchival Society” Jacobsen argues that we have moved from a historical society to an archival society, or as he calls it (after Wolfgang Ernst), “anarchival society”, and Alexander Galloway from New York University addresses the Internet as a new kind of archive which determines every aspect of social life. In the epilogue, Trond Lundemo sums it all up in an reflection upon the organizational principles and algorithms structuring what is accessible and stored in the archives and on the Internet, tends to hide themselves.

Digital preservation assists in the safekeeping of valuable digital objects, which are in danger of being lost forever. Future generations can benefit if actions are taken now in order to have the opportunity to assess, examine, and admire the cultural, historical, and innovative memories of the past and learn from the developed strategies. Digital losses have caused grave ‘holes’ within collections and archives, and with the massive information flood of the 21st century, the digital age needs to be prepared. Professionals and non-professionals alike are required to take action to ensure accessibility and longevity of new and old digital objects. Examining the views and knowledge of 25 interviewees based in the digital industry, this research examines the general awareness of a ‘digital dark age’, the differences and similarities in maintaining corporate and personal memories, and the favourable preservation methods of today.