From museum to memory institution: the politics of European culture online

Museums, libraries and archives have long been considered the retainers of some form of collective memory. Within the last twenty years, the term ‘memory institution’ has been coined to describe these entities, which is symptomatic of the fact that such places are increasingly linked through digital media and online networks. The concept of the memory institution is also part of the vocabulary used to promote broader cultural integration across nations, and appears in discussions of European heritage and in policy documents concerning the digitization of cultural heritage collections. To explore the relationship between cultural heritage, memory and digital technology further, this paper will examine the large-scale digitization project Europeana, under which museums, libraries and archives are re-defined as cultural heritage institutions or memory institutions. My purpose is to trace the conceptual trajectory of memory within this context, and to address how the idea of a European cultural memory structured by technology holds implications for institutions traditionally associated with practices of remembering

Collective memory or the right to be forgotten? Cultures of digital memory and forgetting in the European Union

This article investigates cultures of digital memory and forgetting in the European Union. The article first gives some background to key debates in media memory studies, before going on to analyse the shaping of European Commission and European Union initiatives in relation to Google’s activities from the period 2004–present. The focus of inquiry for the discussion of memory is the Google Books project and Europeana, a database of digitized cultural collections drawn from European museums, libraries and archives. Attention is then given to questions of forgetting by exploring the tension between Google’s search and indexing mechanisms and the right to be forgotten. The article ends by reflecting on the scale of the shift in contemporary cultures of memory and forgetting, and considers how far European regulation enables possible interventions in this domain

Computing Utopia: The Horizons of Computational Economies in History and Science Fiction

This article connects the recent flourishing of economic science fiction with the increasing technicity of contemporary financial markets, to pose questions about computational economies, both historical and fictional, and their ambiguous utopian currents. It explores examples of computational economies and societies in which economic resources are largely defined and allocated by computational systems to challenge—if not entirely dispel—assumptions about the inextricability of computation and the dystopian specters of capitalism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. The article puts insights from the histories of cybernetics, computer science, and economics into dialogue with sf novels that experiment with different sociopolitical configurations of computational economies. The novels that are the primary focus of the discussion are The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin and If Then (2015) by Matthew De Abaitua. The article concludes with some thoughts about the use of history and fiction for expanding the imaginative horizons of the computable in economics

Negotiating digital public spaces: context, purpose and audiences

Purpose The purpose of this article is to investigate digital public spaces and audiences and to explore the relationship of digital public spaces to both ideas of nationhood and physical public institutions. Design/methodology/approach The article investigates tensions arising from the conjuncture of public spaces and digital culture through the lens of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This research uses qualitative content analysis of a range of data sources including semi-structured interviews, primary texts and secondary texts. Findings The construction of the public library space as a digital entity does not attract anticipated audiences. Additionally, the national framing of the DPLA is not compatible with how audiences engage with digital public spaces. Originality/value Drawing on original, qualitative data, this article engages with the prevalent but undertheorized concept of digital public spaces. The article addresses unreflexive uses of the digital public and the assumptions connected to the imagined audiences for platforms like the DPLA

Technologies of public culture: Heritage encounters with photography, television and the web

The operations through which cultural heritage institutions perform their civic and governmental roles have been identified with a logic of visual apprehension by writers such as Tony Bennett. This article explores how these institutions have ordered and regulated contact with their publics via a negotiation of different visual communication technologies, specifically, photography, television and the web. Through analysis of individual cases, it is possible to discern the shifting relationship between public heritage institutions and their audiences, as mediated by these technologies. It is argued that this approach develops a distinctive understanding of public culture and demonstrates the ways in which notions of publicness shape and are shaped by visual communication technologies in the cultural heritage context

Irreducible uncertainty in near-term climate projections

Model simulations of the next few decades are widely used in assessments of climate change impacts and as guidance for adaptation. Their non-linear nature reveals a level of irreducible uncertainty which it is important to understand and quantify, especially for projections of near-term regional climate. Here we use large idealised initial condition ensembles of the FAMOUS global climate model with a 1 %/year compound increase in CO2 levels to quantify the range of future temperatures in model-based projections. These simulations explore the role of both atmospheric and oceanic initial conditions and are the largest such ensembles to date. Short-term simulated trends in global temperature are diverse, and cooling periods are more likely to be followed by larger warming rates. The spatial pattern of near-term temperature change varies considerably, but the proportion of the surface showing a warming is more consistent. In addition, ensemble spread in inter-annual temperature declines as the climate warms, especially in the North Atlantic. Over Europe, atmospheric initial condition uncertainty can, for certain ocean initial conditions, lead to 20 year trends in winter and summer in which every location can exhibit either strong cooling or rapid warming. However, the details of the distribution are highly sensitive to the ocean initial condition chosen and particularly the state of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. On longer timescales, the warming signal becomes more clear and consistent amongst different initial condition ensembles. An ensemble using a range of different oceanic initial conditions produces a larger spread in temperature trends than ensembles using a single ocean initial condition for all lead times. This highlights the potential benefits from initialising climate predictions from ocean states informed by observations. These results suggest that climate projections need to be performed with many more ensemble members than at present, using a range of ocean initial conditions, if the uncertainty in near-term regional climate is to be adequately quantified

In-situ characterization of the Hamamatsu R5912-HQE photomultiplier tubes used in the DEAP-3600 experiment

The Hamamatsu R5912-HQE photomultiplier-tube (PMT) is a novel high-quantum efficiency PMT. It is currently used in the DEAP-3600 dark matter detector and is of significant interest for future dark matter and neutrino experiments where high signal yields are needed. We report on the methods developed for in-situ characterization and monitoring of DEAP's 255 R5912-HQE PMTs. This includes a detailed discussion of typical measured single-photoelectron charge distributions, correlated noise (afterpulsing), dark noise, double, and late pulsing characteristics. The characterization is performed during the detector commissioning phase using laser light injected through a light diffusing sphere and during normal detector operation using LED light injected through optical fibres

Using the past to constrain the future: how the palaeorecord can improve estimates of global warming

Climate sensitivity is defined as the change in global mean equilibrium temperature after a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration and provides a simple measure of global warming. An early estimate of climate sensitivity, 1.5-4.5{\deg}C, has changed little subsequently, including the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The persistence of such large uncertainties in this simple measure casts doubt on our understanding of the mechanisms of climate change and our ability to predict the response of the climate system to future perturbations. This has motivated continued attempts to constrain the range with climate data, alone or in conjunction with models. The majority of studies use data from the instrumental period (post-1850) but recent work has made use of information about the large climate changes experienced in the geological past. In this review, we first outline approaches that estimate climate sensitivity using instrumental climate observations and then summarise attempts to use the record of climate change on geological timescales. We examine the limitations of these studies and suggest ways in which the power of the palaeoclimate record could be better used to reduce uncertainties in our predictions of climate sensitivity.Comment: The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Progress in Physical Geography, 31(5), 2007 by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. \c{opyright} 2007 Edwards, Crucifix and Harriso