Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

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.

The Politics of Mass Digitization

Catherine D'Ignazio

Annie Ring

Kristin Veel

Daniela Agostinho

"The ambition of this book is to examine in close detail the whole range of epistemological, political and ethical uncertainties that are being raised by big data in our time"--

Critical Keywords for Big Data

Uncertain Archives

Ulrik Ekman

Uncertain Image

Solveig Gade

An investigation of digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes. Digital and data technologies are actively transforming the archives of contemporary warfare. Bringing together a range of scholarly perspectives and artistic practices, (W)ARCHIVES investigates digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes. Throughout the book, the (w)archive emerges as a term to grasp the extended materiality of war today, wherein digital archiving intersects with images, bodies, senses, infrastructures, environments, memories, and emotions. The essays explore how this new digital materiality of war reconfigures the archival impulses that have shaped artistic practices over the last decades, and how archives can be mobilized to articulate political demands, conjure new forms of evidence, and make palpable the experience of living with war.

Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art

(W)ARCHIVES

Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate terms relevant to critical studies of big data, from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. This pathbreaking work offers an interdisciplinary perspective on big data, interrogating key terms. Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate concepts relevant to critical studies of big data--arranged glossary style, from from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability--both challenging conventional usage of such often-used terms as prediction and objectivity and introducing such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm. The contributors include both leading researchers, including N. Katherine Hayles, Johanna Drucker and Lisa Gitelman, and such emerging agenda-setting scholars as Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts and Nicole Starosielski.

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

Books

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