Nanna Bonde Thylstrup: The Politics of Mass Digitization (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · book, cultural memory, digitisation, europeana, google, infrapolitics, infrastructure, knowledge, library, media infrastructure, monoskop, networks, shadow library, speed, ubuweb
“A new examination of mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon that alters the politics of cultural memory.
Today, all of us with internet connections can access millions of digitized cultural artifacts from the comfort of our desks. Institutions and individuals add thousands of new cultural works to the digital sphere every day, creating new central nexuses of knowledge. How does this affect us politically and culturally? In this book, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup approaches mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon, offering a new understanding of a defining concept of our time.
Arguing that digitization has become a global cultural political project, Thylstrup draws on case studies of different forms of mass digitization—including Google Books, Europeana, and the shadow libraries Monoskop, lib.ru, and Ubuweb—to suggest a different approach to the study of digital cultural memory archives. She constructs a new theoretical framework for understanding mass digitization that focuses on notions of assemblage, infrastructure, and infrapolitics. Mass digitization does not consist merely of neutral technical processes, Thylstrup argues, but of distinct subpolitical processes that give rise to new kinds of archives and new ways of interacting with the artifacts they contain. With this book, she offers important and timely guidance on how mass digitization alters the politics of cultural memory to impact our relationship with the past and with one another.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2018
ISBN 9780262039017, 026203901X
ix+200 pages
Reviews: Paul Conway (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2019), Logan Brown (New Media & Society, 2019), Marc Kosciejew (Information & Culture, 2019), Lizzie Martin (Convergence, 2019).
Commentary: Seb Chan (2019), Bill Caraher (2019).
Abigail De Kosnik: Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (2016)
Filed under book | Tags: · archive, archiving, cultural memory, digital media, diy, fan culture, fiction, internet, preservation
“The task of archiving was once entrusted only to museums, libraries, and other institutions that acted as repositories of culture in material form. But with the rise of digital networked media, a multitude of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet. These nonprofessional archivists have democratized cultural memory, building freely accessible online archives of whatever content they consider suitable for digital preservation. In Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik examines the practice of archiving in the transition from print to digital media, looking in particular at Internet fan fiction archives.
De Kosnik explains that media users today regard all of mass culture as an archive, from which they can redeploy content for their own creations. Hence, “remix culture” and fan fiction are core genres of digital cultural production. De Kosnik explores, among other things, the anticanonical archiving styles of Internet preservationists; the volunteer labor of online archiving; how fan archives serve women and queer users as cultural resources; archivists’ efforts to attract racially and sexually diverse content; and how digital archives adhere to the logics of performance more than the logics of print. She also considers the similarities and differences among free culture, free software, and fan communities, and uses digital humanities tools to quantify and visualize the size, user base, and rate of growth of several online fan archives.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2016
ISBN 9780262034661, 0262034662
x+430 pages
Reviews: Jan Baetens (Leonardo, 2017), Amanda Gilroy (PopMatters, 2017), Ludi Price (2016), Silvia Bertolotti (DigiCult, 2016).
Interview with author: Henry Jenkins (2016), Christina Yang (TDR, 2019).
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Klára Jirková, Aleš Čermák (eds.): Formování historie. Interpretace dějin z pohledu různých států (2012) [Czech]
Filed under book | Tags: · cultural memory, historiography, history
A comparative survey of how the events of Second World War are interpreted in history textbooks from nine countries today.
“Kniha se zabývá interpretací dějin z pohledu různých států. Je vytvořena jako obraz jedné a té samé události – druhé světové války. Vedle sebe se potkávají přeložené části textu z učebnic dějepisu devíti různých zemí světa. Důležitým motivem této knihy je možnost porovnávání faktů, které se za normálních okolností nemají či spíše ani nemohou setkat.”
Publisher Academy of Fine Arts & Ausdruck Books, Prague, 2012
ISBN 9788087108376
333 pages
Publisher (Ausdruck)
Publisher (AVU)