Archival Silence in the Age of Trump

The Trump presidency has fueled growing apprehension about a media landscape rife with lies, bogus news, and conspiracy theories. These concerns can be situated within a discourse of archival silence which questions the ways in which knowledge may be concealed, misappropriated and exploited in the service of governments, corporations and individuals. This work has prompted a variety of strategies to counter, resist and make visible various forms of exclusion and omission. Efforts to preserve at-risk data have been accompanied by efforts to protect the information of at-risk populations. This paper seeks to illuminate both the silences of information loss and the threat posed by unprotected user information. It describes efforts within the library, archival, IT, and scientific communities to preserve and protect records while monitoring official information that is subject to alteration. This resistance to archival erasure represents an acknowledgement of the centrality of archival production in establishing truth, providing a foundation for new knowledge and preserving the historical record. And it reminds us that many are engaged in a contemporary battle to prevent a reign of archival silence

The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information by Paul Dourish

A book review of The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017) by John Douris

Hybridity, Mutability, Multiplicity: Theorizing Electronic Library Collections

published or submitted for publicatio

Archive and Library

Archives and libraries operate within a complex web of social, political and economic forces. Digital technologies, globalization, the corporatization of the academy, and increasing commercial control of the scholarly record are just some of the myriad forces shaping their evolution. Libraries and archives in turn have shaped the production of knowledge, participating in transformations in scholarship, publishing and the nature of access to current and historical materials. Librarians and archivists increasingly recognize that they exist within institutional systems of power. Questioning long-held assumptions about library and archival neutrality and objectivity, they are working to expand access to previously marginalized materials, to theorize transformations in the nature of the historical record, to educate users about the forces shaping their access to information, to raise awareness about bias in information tools and systems, and to empower disenfranchised communities

Archive and database as metaphor: Theorizing the Historical Record

Digital media increase the visibility and presence of the past while also reshaping our sense of history. We have extraordinary access to digital versions of books, journals, film, television, music, art and popular culture from earlier eras. New theoretical formulations of database and archive provide ways to think creatively about these changes to the cultural and historical record. This essay explores the ways in which the current digital environment can be theorized in terms of, what I call, its archival effects

Mapping Archival Silence: technology and the historical record

Recent theorizations of archival silence signal a heightened and expanding concern with information that is lost, concealed, destroyed or simply not available for scholarly use. As our access to the archive becomes more dependent upon technologies of the interface, scholars exhibit increasing concern about the impact of digital affordances and constraints on record-keeping, research and artistic production. As digital archives are technocultural artifacts, developments in the field of science studies can provide insight into the interdependence and coevolution of the social, cultural and material factors shaping archival silence. Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Bruno Latour and others have shown how machine and human agents form tightly linked networks that must be understood as dynamically integrated wholes. Digital archives lend themselves to this kind of exploration of the entanglement of matter and meaning; content and device, human and machine elements. We can thus understand digital archives not as singular physical entities, but as a set of possibilities shaped by the convergence of social and material factors

The Symbolic Value of Libraries in a Digital Age

As an increasingly virtual society anticipates the decline of print, it looks to the keepers of the written record to maintain continuity with its past. Libraries cannot formulate intelligent collection and preservation policies without taking into account current perceptions of the fragility of historical memory. Understanding the symbolic role they play in the cultural imaginary will help libraries to map a future that addresses public concerns about the preservation of the historical record

Cyberhope or Cyberhype?: Computers and Scholarly Research

Abstract: With the expansion of electronic products and services for libraries, two questions continue to demand our attention. What is the impact of new tools on scholarly research? And how is scholarship affected by libraries' decisions to remake or reorganize themselves so as to accommodate new technologies? This paper looks at the social and political implications of various electronic tools, especially in the humanities, and particularly in literary fields. Résumé: La prolifération de produits et services électroniques disponibles dans les bibliothèques soulève deux questions qui ne cessent de requérir notre attention. Quel est l'impact de nouvelles technologies sur la recherche savante? Et quels sont les effects sur la recherche lorsque les bibliothèques décident de se refaçonner ou de se réorganiser pour mieux s'accommoder de nouveaux outils technologies? Cet article se propose de discuter des questions sociales et politiques soulevées par un certain nombre d'outils électroniques dans les humanités et surtout dans les domaines littéraires