by Anthony Mandal

1. Materiality and the digital archive
Anthony Mandal, UK medical heritage library event
27/10/2016
1

2. MATERIALITY AND THE
DIGITAL ARCHIVE
Anthony Mandal, Cardiff University
(@CardiffBookHist)

3. “
Any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the
product of one complex set of social and
technological processes and also the starting point
for another. In the first place, a large number of
people, machines, and materials must converge
and act together for it to come into existence at all.
How exactly they do so will inevitably affect its
finished character in a number of ways. In that
sense a book is the material embodiment of, if not
a consensus, then at least a collective consent. Its
identity can be understood accordingly, in terms of
these intricate processes. But the story of a book
evidently does not end with its creation. How it is
then put to use, by whom, in what circumstances,
and to what effect are all equally complex issues.
Each is worthy of attention in its own right. So a
printed book can be seen as a nexus conjoining a
wide range of worlds of work. Look closely and you
are likely to find simplicity and inevitability in
neither the manufacture of an object like this nor
its subsequent control.
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge
in the Making (1998)

4. DIGITALITY AND MATERIALITY

5. “
David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the
Search for Order, 1450–1830 (2003)
During the last two decades or so, we
have become accustomed to speaking
or writing of “printers” not as people,
but as machines made of plastic,
metal and other substances that sit on
our desks: machines driven at least
one remove from ourselves via the
computer, keyboard and screen that
now form parts of our daily lives. In
similar linguistic fashion, in the
eighteenth century the Royal
Observatory at Greenwich employed
people who were referred to as
computers. At the end of the
nineteenth century, the people we
now know as typists were referred to
as typewriters. Such changes of usage
come about almost by accident, but
they have their roots in a mechanical
assumption: that the printer or
typewriter, human or otherwise, is an
agent of reproduction, of reproducing
our thoughts, words and images —
usually but not always on paper.

6. “Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters (2011)
The facsimile is designed to imitate, to
emulate, to reproduce; it encourages readers
to overlook the ontological rift between the
facsimile and the object that is being
imitated and nowhere more acutely than in
the digital environment.

7. “
Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory
and the Archive (2013)
It is not the digitality of the
so-called digital archive that
is new but the fact that
what is involved is binary
code, the smallest
information unit of which is
the bit, through whose
duality words, images,
sounds, and times are
archivally encodable.

8. “
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘The Enduring
Ephemeral or the Future is a Memory’ (2011)
Also key to the newness of the digital
is a conflation of memory and storage
that both underlies and undermines
digital media’s archival promise.
Memory, with its constant
degeneration, does not equal storage;
although artificial memory has
historically combined the transitory
with the permanent, the passing with
the stable, digital media complicate
this relationship by making the
permanent into an enduring
ephemeral, creating unforeseen
degenerative links between humans
and machines.

9. “Doron Swade, ‘Preserving Software in an Object-
Centred Culture’ (1998)
The intractable fact of the matter is
that in terms of archaeological time
scales the operational continuity of
contemporary hardware cannot be
assured even when suitable
specimens are available to begin with.
What meaning, then, does an archive
of bit-perfect program software have
if he material cannot be run?

10. MEDIA ARCHAELOGY

11. MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY
Jussi Parikka identifies 4 key
themes:
1. Modernity
2. Cinema
3. Histories of the present
4. Alternate histories

12. THE ARCHIVE
“Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (2012)
increasingly being rearticulated less as a place of
history, memory and power, and more as a
dynamic temporal network, a software
environment, and a social platform for memory –
but also remixing. […] Unlike earlier formations of
the archive which can be said to focus on freezing
time – to store and preserve – these new forms of
archives in technical media culture can be
described as archives in motion.

13. “Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Underway to
the Dual System: Classical
Archives and/or Digital Memory’
(2009)
Every computer is already a
digital archive. The archiving
occurs in the RAM of the
familiar computer, not in
the emphatic sense, but
rather as the precondition
for any calculating process
taking place at all.

14. “Matthew Kirschenbaum,
Mechanisms: New Media and the
Forensic Imagination (2008)
[A]ll of the other ambient
data on the original media
is retained as part of the
forensic object, including
even (if the process is done
right) data on ‘bad’ or
corrupted sectors no longer
accessible.

15. ARCHIVE AND POST-ARCHIVE

16. FROM ARCHIVE TO DATABASE
“
Tara McPherson, ‘Post-Archive: The Humanities, the
Archive, and the Database’ (2015)
We must not assume that digitization will
adequately capture the richness and diversity of
the cultural record or that digital surrogates can
simply replace the physical archive. […] Historically
the archive was officially meant to collect, preserve
and protect. Selection of, access to, and the use of
archival materials were rigorously regulated. The
archive cultivate an ethos of the rare and the
original. Careful order was imposed. The
digitization of archives upset this careful hierarchy.

17. CONCLUSION

18. DIGITAL HUMANITIES 3.0
“David Berry, Understanding Digital Humanities (2012)
Computational techniques could give us greater
powers of thinking, larger reach for our
imagination and, possibly, allow us to reconnect to
political notions of equality and redistribution.

19. “
Robert Darnton, ‘The Information Landscape’
(2008)
Information has never been stable. […]
I would argue that the new
information technology should force
us to rethink the notion of
information itself. It should not be
understood as if it took the form of
hard facts or nuggets of reality ready
to be quarried out of newspapers,
archives, and libraries, but rather as
messages that are constantly being
reshaped in the process of
transmission. Instead of firmly fixed
documents, we must deal with
multiple, mutable texts.