Reading responses to final course readings:

Featherstone’s overview on the nature of the archive

  • Archives are for storage, but they are also for access.
  • This text connects to our Memes of Resistance project, stating clearly that archives are also necessary for the documentation, and remembrance, of uneven power struggles and surveillance activities. But those who control the archives control the remembrance. That archives, as they were originally conceived, were to be kept secret is worth noting. Archives were also conceived of as playing a role in regulation and oversight of populations: “From the perspective of the emerging European nation-states as they became drawn together and then locked into a globalized power struggle, the construction of archives can be seen as furthering governmentality and the regulation of internal and colonial populations, as well as providing foreign policy information about the strategies and globalizing ambitions of rivals.” More nefariously, this led to an individuation process, whereby “people’s characteristics were observed, recorded and stored in the files,” which is perhaps most common today in oppressive regimes. However, this is exactly what’s happening over the Internet–many of our behaviors, including and perhaps especially our purchase behaviors, are known more by companies than by ourselves. The issue of classifying and selecting data is, in today’s case, extreme, as is the issue of data ownership, which did not originally exist in the case of many historical archives.
  • I particularly enjoy the insight of “‘archive reason [as] a form of reason that is devoted to the detail’ (Osborne, 1999: 58). Yet it is clear that the archivist’s gaze depends upon an aesthetics of perception, a discriminating gaze, through which an event can be isolated out of the mass of detail and accorded significance.”
  • Now I have to read “Funes, his memory.” This story sounds fantastic.
  • I agree with Foucault’s formulation of the archive as archaeology, viewing it as a humanized accounting system in which discourses are created from given data.

Ernst’s “Dynamic Media Memories” | Chapter 4 in “Archives in Transition”

  • It’s telling that German public broadcast services view archives as “production archives,” compelling us to recycle archived information and keep it in use.
  • Digital archives are co-produced by users for their own purposes.
  • The ability to memorize is now automatic for digital systems, but recall still requires resources.
  • “The shift from emphatic cultural memory (which is oriented toward eternity) to intermediary media” implies a sort of “Eye of Sauron”–a shift in focus as cultural memory dissolves and intermediary interests take root. Perhaps time, today, seems to move faster because our memory is simply shorter, as we offload memory tasks to computational agents that curate information to us in ways that humans never would in a technology desert.

Ernst’s “Underway to the Dual System”

  • This section expands upon observations of the last, integrating our understandings of generative data and memory manipulation through recall.
  • Specificity of search and recall is paramount in the digital archive: “The digital archive has no intrinsic macrotemporal index, as the “year 2000” problem made clear. It operates at a microtemporal level instead.” Likewise, their existence emerges through recall functions: “Algorithmic objects are objects that always come into being anew and processually; they do not exist as fixed data blocks.”
  • References becoming “self-aware” is a unique and curious concept. Hyperlinks allow us to embed and access data that we would never be able to embed and access in the “real world,” such that they take on new meaning and engagement capabilities. Paired with the fact that algorithms allow us to construct new data through faceted affordances, this paradigm makes for a novel way of creating, in a sense, our own custom views of reality. This is both worthwhile and dangerous, in the case of archives, since this customization can do away with important nuance, improperly focus on details that are context-dependent, and inauthentically allow individuals with archive control permissions to dictate the scope of public data access and, as a result, public knowledge and discourse channels.