The excerpted parts of Wolfgang Ernst’s book provided a perspective on archive that greatly focused on technology rather than archiving itself. I found his writing rather confusing, and I struggled to see where he was going with his distinctions between storage, transfer, memory components, etc.

That being said, his perspectives on archival science working its way into other “fields” worked a bit better. In some ways, I wish he had compared some of the instantaneous, “current archive,” and past archive ideas in the works of news and newspapers, since they could provide a bit less technical of an example. “Instantaneous archives” and related new-knowledge are becoming some of the most prevalent forms of information in the forms of social media and interactive media. As such, research into their usefulness (and ways to enable those use cases) are important.

Some Notes (as archive!)

I was a tad confused by the pieces, so I tried to compile some of the points here.

Temporality and the Multimedia Archive starting on page 77;

  • Ernst started as classicist
  • Brings historian tools to discussion of memory and storage in media cultures
  • New vocabulary: read-only vs random access, registers, accumulators, buffers, cycle and access times, latency
  • Overall different notions of archive

Underway to the Dual System (pages 81-94);

  • Digitization on demand as a model–generate new archives according to current needs
  • Participative form of archival reading (generate data together through their queries)
  • Dynarchive
  • Von Neumann architecture: accessing data during computation
  • Digital archives as information theory-informed art
  • Erasure as a feature (there or not)
  • Instantaneous art: does it need archiving (yes)
  • Format-Based Archives: images to images. Media vs. Format
  • Archiving Software
  • Data storage and display are completely separate–can transform in between
  • Emulating past materiality with software (old storage methods)

Archives in Transition (pages 95-101)

  • Storing “algorithmic dynamics instead of documentary stills”
  • Computer memory closely couples storage and timing
  • Empathetic cultural memory: oriented towards eternity
  • Intermediary media memories: no longer separated into current and archive. Example of soccer match being posted an hour after game