Wiki Notes
Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy since Plato has misunderstood
what it means for something "to be", tending to approach this question
in terms of a being, rather than asking about Being itself. In other
words, Heidegger believed all investigations of being have historically
focused on particular entities and their properties, or have treated
Being itself as an entity, or substance, with properties. A more
authentic analysis of Being would, for Heidegger, investigate "that on
the basis of which beings are already understood," or that which
underlies all particular entities and allows them to show up as entities
in the first place.
Heidegger argued that this misunderstanding, beginning with Plato, has
left its traces in every stage of Western thought. All that we
understand, from the way we speak to our notions of "common sense", is
susceptible to error, to fundamental mistakes about the nature of being.
These mistakes filter into the terms through which being is articulated
in the history of philosophy—such as reality, logic, God,
consciousness, and presence. In his later philosophy, Heidegger argues
that this profoundly affects the way in which human beings relate to
modern technology.
Two recurring themes of Heidegger's later writings are poetry and
technology. The essence of modern technology is the conversion of the
whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated "standing reserve"
(Bestand) of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put
it. Heidegger described the essence of modern technology as Gestell, or
"enframing." Heidegger does not unequivocally condemn technology: while
he acknowledges that modern technology contains grave dangers, Heidegger
nevertheless also argues that it may constitute a chance for human
beings to enter a new epoch in their relation to being.
More recently, Heidegger's thought has considerably influenced the work
of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. This is evident even from
the title of Stiegler's multi-volume magnum opus, La technique et le
temps (volume one translated into English as Technics and Time, 1: The
Fault of Epimetheus).[95] Stiegler offers an original reading of
Heidegger, arguing that there can be no access to "originary
temporality" other than via material, that is, technical, supports, and
that Heidegger recognised this in the form of his account of world
historicality, yet in the end suppressed that fact. Stiegler understands
the existential analytic of Being and Time as an account of psychic
individuation, and his later "history of being" as an account of
collective individuation. He understands many of the problems of
Heidegger's philosophy and politics as the consequence of Heidegger's
inability to integrate the two.
Monday, 31 March 2014
Sunday, 30 March 2014
The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel - Review
Interesting excerpts from a review of Eva Geulen's book (http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25232-the-end-of-art-readings-in-a-rumor-after-hegel/)
Eva Geulen's slim book argues that Hegel's idea of the end of art fails -- in its beginning as well as in its end -- to qualify as a genuine idea and is better regarded as a rumour. Further, as a rumour this notion is best encountered as it has been repeatedly enacted, that is, according to the manner in which it appears within discourse, here specifically the discourse of modern aesthetic theory. Her premise is that the rumour stands to the concept as aesthetic reflection does to philosophy. Geulen's book thus provocatively traces Hegel's purported idea of the end of art through the four key figures of modern German aesthetics: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger.
Hegel
Hegel, according to Geulen, does not initiate the thesis, or even the idea, of the end of art but rather inaugurates the central motif and tradition of modernity, which is to say, the discourse of modernity, by setting into motion the rumour of the end of art:
"The end of art -- this is the book's claim -- has not just been played out variously and repetitively, but the playing out occasionally provides glimpses of the rules of the game, the discursive conditions under which it is played. At the end of the end of art one does not find an end, but a beginning: the discovery of the end of art as a discourse of modernity" (14).
The emphatic achievement of classical art is the transformation of the symbol into convention and tradition. In short, tradition -- the locus of conventionality -- itself might be characterized as just that successful melding of invention and discovery:
"Conventions can be denounced, suppressed, transformed, and degraded; one can accuse or praise them. But there is only one place where conventions are produced. The imaginary home of anachronicity, in which tradition and convention are invented in order to be rejected, transformed, or sublated, is the museum" (38).
The museum then, obvious enough to many writers in aesthetics, functions as the entombment of the past. Less obvious to most is that by functioning this way the museum also necessarily makes available the (modern) possibility of the establishment of traditions, and of what might be called the invention of discovery.
Nietzsche
[Nietzsche discusses the history of the tragic form and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (very loosely: reality as disordered and undifferentiated by forms versus reality as ordered and differentiated by forms). Nietzsche claims life always involves a struggle between these two elements, each battling for control over the existence of humanity]
The continuing and continuous birth and rebirth of the tradition of modernity -- specifically as tragedy -- ought to come immediately to mind. And therewith Geulen's subsequent chapter is titled "Nietzsche's Retrograde Motion," in which, and without explicit acknowledgement, it is nonetheless apparent that it is all too easy to replace the Hegelian tropes of invention and discovery with the Nietzschean figures of Apollo and Dionysus. But the reconciliation achieved for (and by?) Hegel in the simultaneous invention of the museum and discovery of classical art is for Nietzsche instead tragedy, indeed a tragedy made genuine by its success at making all aesthetic appearance homogeneous:
"In tragedy appearance becomes visible as appearance, and just as the privileged status of tragedy is the result of a translation, so translation is also its innermost principle: 'Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the language of Dionysus: and so the highest goal of tragedy and of all art is attained'"(57-58).
When all aesthetic appearances become interchangeable, tragedy comes to an end, and what Nietzsche calls "tragic knowledge" no longer has any import beyond any other form of knowledge. Nietzsche's repeated reports of the death, demise, suicide, etc. of tragedy is characterized by Geulen as the overdetermination of tragedy's end. And the purpose of this overdetermination is for Nietzsche to provide himself an ironic distance from the death of tragedy as well as from tragedy per se. Irony thereby becomes the (aesthetic) means by which Nietzsche attempts to avoid the deathliness of the Hegelian end of art aesthetic. Nietzsche's accomplishment, however, remains ambiguous (and therefore not distinct enough from Hegel's); for his ironising of tragedy and tragic knowledge also can be read as re-enactment of just that ambiguous interplay between discovery and invention. Irony is at once the inventive undermining of a tradition -- insofar as it calls into question the legitimacy of any assertion -- as well as the reinforcement, hence discovery, of the force of some tradition.
Benjamin
The "rumour" of the end of art, in the work of Benjamin, now comes to speak of the very ambivalence of tradition itself, regardless of whether it is the tradition of art. Benjamin's rumouring thus expands to consider the fraught character of history as well as the possibility that it could, with the appropriate device, cease to be altogether, or rather: come to be in a wholly unique manner. (No doubt Nietzsche's own "untimely meditation" on the uses and disadvantages of history might nonetheless have provided an inspiring model).
Film -- or better, the moving camera which produces it -- serves as the premier apparatus which, according to Benjamin, has no history precisely because it is instead the capacity to produce its objects in the very act and form of their presentation. The historical continuity previously reaffirmed by the very sequence of event followed by representation, is no longer the sole form of historical coming into existence. History, now genuinely produced exclusively by the mechanism of the movie camera, thus collapses as but the mere representation of some prior continuity. Benjamin's mechanical reproducibility essay promises a kind of future beyond the end of art, perhaps also thereby beyond the end of history. And yet, there remains something of the ambivalence of the rumour in Benjamin's own unresolved thoughts on the nature of the famous "aura."
Though this trope has become central to the reception of Benjamin, Geulen makes innovative use of it by likening aura -- which she describes as "less a concept than a performative intervention" (84) -- to the movement of rumour: "Its [aura's] decay does not invade aura from without; rather, the decay produces it in the first place… . The explication of the aura does not proceed from a preordained standpoint, but unfolds in a series of steps and from various perspectives" (85). In the end, however, aura is not rumour enough; it remains entrenched, even and especially in its disappearing, decaying appearance, too closely allied with the Hegelian requirement that all reflection on aesthetics begins (and thereby ends?) with the end of art.
Adorno
Adorno "has little to contribute to a genealogy of modernity as developed by Hegel, Nietzsche, or Benjamin" (91). His concern is best understood as centred on the (negative) character of language rather than on art or aesthetics. Indeed, "Adorno advances the aesthetic as a category of experience as an alternative to the aesthetic as art" (92-93). It will turn out that for Geulen this substitution by Adorno of experience for art is directed toward a critique of the failure of language, whose curse it is to forget as well as to suppress the difference between the world and the world of thought.
Heidegger
"Because Heidegger's reflections on art cannot be severed from his political decision in favour of national socialism, they also represent the fatal apex of that [aesthetic] tradition, and render it transparent" (112).
This transparency is immediately made opaque, however, by the difficulties of his texts, and then compounded by the many Heideggerian-infected interpretations of them. Still, Geulen succeeds in bringing much light to "The Origin of the Work of Art" essay and in recuperating Heidegger as a central figure in the rediscovery of the Hegelian end of art discourse, which is to say the return to the insight regarding the constitutive ambivalence of the modern tradition of aesthetic reflection:
"What Hegel founded was, strictly speaking, not a thing but an empty place, an indeterminacy, an unclarity, an absence. It has proven endlessly productive".
Eva Geulen's slim book argues that Hegel's idea of the end of art fails -- in its beginning as well as in its end -- to qualify as a genuine idea and is better regarded as a rumour. Further, as a rumour this notion is best encountered as it has been repeatedly enacted, that is, according to the manner in which it appears within discourse, here specifically the discourse of modern aesthetic theory. Her premise is that the rumour stands to the concept as aesthetic reflection does to philosophy. Geulen's book thus provocatively traces Hegel's purported idea of the end of art through the four key figures of modern German aesthetics: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger.
Hegel
Hegel, according to Geulen, does not initiate the thesis, or even the idea, of the end of art but rather inaugurates the central motif and tradition of modernity, which is to say, the discourse of modernity, by setting into motion the rumour of the end of art:
"The end of art -- this is the book's claim -- has not just been played out variously and repetitively, but the playing out occasionally provides glimpses of the rules of the game, the discursive conditions under which it is played. At the end of the end of art one does not find an end, but a beginning: the discovery of the end of art as a discourse of modernity" (14).
The emphatic achievement of classical art is the transformation of the symbol into convention and tradition. In short, tradition -- the locus of conventionality -- itself might be characterized as just that successful melding of invention and discovery:
"Conventions can be denounced, suppressed, transformed, and degraded; one can accuse or praise them. But there is only one place where conventions are produced. The imaginary home of anachronicity, in which tradition and convention are invented in order to be rejected, transformed, or sublated, is the museum" (38).
The museum then, obvious enough to many writers in aesthetics, functions as the entombment of the past. Less obvious to most is that by functioning this way the museum also necessarily makes available the (modern) possibility of the establishment of traditions, and of what might be called the invention of discovery.
Nietzsche
[Nietzsche discusses the history of the tragic form and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (very loosely: reality as disordered and undifferentiated by forms versus reality as ordered and differentiated by forms). Nietzsche claims life always involves a struggle between these two elements, each battling for control over the existence of humanity]
The continuing and continuous birth and rebirth of the tradition of modernity -- specifically as tragedy -- ought to come immediately to mind. And therewith Geulen's subsequent chapter is titled "Nietzsche's Retrograde Motion," in which, and without explicit acknowledgement, it is nonetheless apparent that it is all too easy to replace the Hegelian tropes of invention and discovery with the Nietzschean figures of Apollo and Dionysus. But the reconciliation achieved for (and by?) Hegel in the simultaneous invention of the museum and discovery of classical art is for Nietzsche instead tragedy, indeed a tragedy made genuine by its success at making all aesthetic appearance homogeneous:
"In tragedy appearance becomes visible as appearance, and just as the privileged status of tragedy is the result of a translation, so translation is also its innermost principle: 'Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the language of Dionysus: and so the highest goal of tragedy and of all art is attained'"(57-58).
When all aesthetic appearances become interchangeable, tragedy comes to an end, and what Nietzsche calls "tragic knowledge" no longer has any import beyond any other form of knowledge. Nietzsche's repeated reports of the death, demise, suicide, etc. of tragedy is characterized by Geulen as the overdetermination of tragedy's end. And the purpose of this overdetermination is for Nietzsche to provide himself an ironic distance from the death of tragedy as well as from tragedy per se. Irony thereby becomes the (aesthetic) means by which Nietzsche attempts to avoid the deathliness of the Hegelian end of art aesthetic. Nietzsche's accomplishment, however, remains ambiguous (and therefore not distinct enough from Hegel's); for his ironising of tragedy and tragic knowledge also can be read as re-enactment of just that ambiguous interplay between discovery and invention. Irony is at once the inventive undermining of a tradition -- insofar as it calls into question the legitimacy of any assertion -- as well as the reinforcement, hence discovery, of the force of some tradition.
Benjamin
The "rumour" of the end of art, in the work of Benjamin, now comes to speak of the very ambivalence of tradition itself, regardless of whether it is the tradition of art. Benjamin's rumouring thus expands to consider the fraught character of history as well as the possibility that it could, with the appropriate device, cease to be altogether, or rather: come to be in a wholly unique manner. (No doubt Nietzsche's own "untimely meditation" on the uses and disadvantages of history might nonetheless have provided an inspiring model).
Film -- or better, the moving camera which produces it -- serves as the premier apparatus which, according to Benjamin, has no history precisely because it is instead the capacity to produce its objects in the very act and form of their presentation. The historical continuity previously reaffirmed by the very sequence of event followed by representation, is no longer the sole form of historical coming into existence. History, now genuinely produced exclusively by the mechanism of the movie camera, thus collapses as but the mere representation of some prior continuity. Benjamin's mechanical reproducibility essay promises a kind of future beyond the end of art, perhaps also thereby beyond the end of history. And yet, there remains something of the ambivalence of the rumour in Benjamin's own unresolved thoughts on the nature of the famous "aura."
Though this trope has become central to the reception of Benjamin, Geulen makes innovative use of it by likening aura -- which she describes as "less a concept than a performative intervention" (84) -- to the movement of rumour: "Its [aura's] decay does not invade aura from without; rather, the decay produces it in the first place… . The explication of the aura does not proceed from a preordained standpoint, but unfolds in a series of steps and from various perspectives" (85). In the end, however, aura is not rumour enough; it remains entrenched, even and especially in its disappearing, decaying appearance, too closely allied with the Hegelian requirement that all reflection on aesthetics begins (and thereby ends?) with the end of art.
Adorno
Adorno "has little to contribute to a genealogy of modernity as developed by Hegel, Nietzsche, or Benjamin" (91). His concern is best understood as centred on the (negative) character of language rather than on art or aesthetics. Indeed, "Adorno advances the aesthetic as a category of experience as an alternative to the aesthetic as art" (92-93). It will turn out that for Geulen this substitution by Adorno of experience for art is directed toward a critique of the failure of language, whose curse it is to forget as well as to suppress the difference between the world and the world of thought.
Heidegger
"Because Heidegger's reflections on art cannot be severed from his political decision in favour of national socialism, they also represent the fatal apex of that [aesthetic] tradition, and render it transparent" (112).
This transparency is immediately made opaque, however, by the difficulties of his texts, and then compounded by the many Heideggerian-infected interpretations of them. Still, Geulen succeeds in bringing much light to "The Origin of the Work of Art" essay and in recuperating Heidegger as a central figure in the rediscovery of the Hegelian end of art discourse, which is to say the return to the insight regarding the constitutive ambivalence of the modern tradition of aesthetic reflection:
"What Hegel founded was, strictly speaking, not a thing but an empty place, an indeterminacy, an unclarity, an absence. It has proven endlessly productive".
Saturday, 29 March 2014
Defining the Problem of Tomorrow's Memory: P. 3 Digital Memory
The recognition that the medium of digital technology fundamentally alters its message, brings me on to the final part in this series of posts, which is concerned with the broader implications for memory in the digital age. As a mode of communication, digitisation is significant for memory insofar as it implies a collective view on past events that is increasingly constituted via digital networks. Drawing on an argument made by Andrew Hoskins, José van Dijck sets out the digital challenge to established accounts of collective memory:
“The traditional idea of collective memory is generally grounded in the presumption that the individual and the collective are separate entities that are associated through technological mechanisms, such as media, and through social institutions, such as archives. However, the formation of memory is increasingly structured by digital networks, and memory’s constituting agency is both technological and human”.
Likewise, as the discussion of the memory institution demonstrates, digital technology networks consolidate links between cultural organisations through social media and online collections. This new model is indicative of a more pluralistic, diverse, and possibly less unifying societal restructuring. While the medium of the network, exemplified by the Internet, may provide increased opportunities for collaboration and the dissemination of content, its architecture and mode of interaction are geared less toward building a consensus. One of the differences the media theorist Marshall McLuhan discerns between print and digital technology explains this apparent contradiction. He observes that where electric media is total and inclusive, previous technologies were fragmentary and partial, drawing attention to the participatory aspects of digital technology and the totalising structure the network installs across different levels of society. The early theoretician of social memory, Maurice Halbwachs, wrote that ‘while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as groups who remember’. However, the demand for plurality seems less achievable when undertaken by individuals or even groups of individuals in increasingly diverse societies. A programme for systematic inclusion ironically runs the risk of breaking down the categories it seeks to shore up, raising questions about whether diversity comes at the cost of the communicability of memory.
In the idea of tomorrow’s memory, which was the starting point for this discussion, it is possible to detect a reluctance to remember for its own sake, the implication being that it should be the responsibility of the next generation to decide what is important. The situation is not a new one but it is distinct in that memory is inflated beyond any previous individual or collective capacity. We are exhausted by the sheer volume of memory, particularly in cases where it is equated with an artificial storage model or inventory. Yet perhaps that model offers the only chance of securing a genuinely representative collective memory, when it is no longer the role of societies but of computer systems to do the collecting. It is still possible, therefore, to speak of the utopian dream of preserving cultural memory online but it is an ambiguous sort of utopia:- at once anxious and hopeful about the prospect of regaining a proportional sense of memory yet covetous of the dream of oblivion (see Heidegger, Hidden Histories post), in which the task of remembering is no longer humanity's responsibility (see also Stiegler).
“The traditional idea of collective memory is generally grounded in the presumption that the individual and the collective are separate entities that are associated through technological mechanisms, such as media, and through social institutions, such as archives. However, the formation of memory is increasingly structured by digital networks, and memory’s constituting agency is both technological and human”.
Likewise, as the discussion of the memory institution demonstrates, digital technology networks consolidate links between cultural organisations through social media and online collections. This new model is indicative of a more pluralistic, diverse, and possibly less unifying societal restructuring. While the medium of the network, exemplified by the Internet, may provide increased opportunities for collaboration and the dissemination of content, its architecture and mode of interaction are geared less toward building a consensus. One of the differences the media theorist Marshall McLuhan discerns between print and digital technology explains this apparent contradiction. He observes that where electric media is total and inclusive, previous technologies were fragmentary and partial, drawing attention to the participatory aspects of digital technology and the totalising structure the network installs across different levels of society. The early theoretician of social memory, Maurice Halbwachs, wrote that ‘while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as groups who remember’. However, the demand for plurality seems less achievable when undertaken by individuals or even groups of individuals in increasingly diverse societies. A programme for systematic inclusion ironically runs the risk of breaking down the categories it seeks to shore up, raising questions about whether diversity comes at the cost of the communicability of memory.
In the idea of tomorrow’s memory, which was the starting point for this discussion, it is possible to detect a reluctance to remember for its own sake, the implication being that it should be the responsibility of the next generation to decide what is important. The situation is not a new one but it is distinct in that memory is inflated beyond any previous individual or collective capacity. We are exhausted by the sheer volume of memory, particularly in cases where it is equated with an artificial storage model or inventory. Yet perhaps that model offers the only chance of securing a genuinely representative collective memory, when it is no longer the role of societies but of computer systems to do the collecting. It is still possible, therefore, to speak of the utopian dream of preserving cultural memory online but it is an ambiguous sort of utopia:- at once anxious and hopeful about the prospect of regaining a proportional sense of memory yet covetous of the dream of oblivion (see Heidegger, Hidden Histories post), in which the task of remembering is no longer humanity's responsibility (see also Stiegler).
Friday, 28 March 2014
Modelling Memory: Remembering Differently
As might be expected, the notion of memory (in an institutional context) has varying connotations across different regions, countries and continents.
In Latin America, memory is often linked to post-dictatorship discourses of mourning. See, for example The Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Chile: http://publichistorycommons.org/the-museum-of-memory-and-human-rights-making-consensus-matter/
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Niemeyer#Bras.C3.ADlia
Oscar Niemeyer’s design for Brasilia envisaged a thoroughly modern city unencumbererd by the layers of history and constructed on a tabula rasa: an urban utopia that needed no museum. Instead, it alluded to the idea of an invisible history, a mythical past independent of western notions of culture and memory signified by the museum.
Institute of National Remembrance (Poland) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_National_Remembrance
Platform of European Memory and Conscience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_of_European_Memory_and_Conscience
In Latin America, memory is often linked to post-dictatorship discourses of mourning. See, for example The Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Chile: http://publichistorycommons.org/the-museum-of-memory-and-human-rights-making-consensus-matter/
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Niemeyer#Bras.C3.ADlia
Oscar Niemeyer’s design for Brasilia envisaged a thoroughly modern city unencumbererd by the layers of history and constructed on a tabula rasa: an urban utopia that needed no museum. Instead, it alluded to the idea of an invisible history, a mythical past independent of western notions of culture and memory signified by the museum.
Furthermore, in Spanish speaking countries the word patrimony is used to refer to cultural heritage, which is closer etymologically to the idea of the inheritance of property (or possibly memory), than the intrinsic cultural value implied by heritage.
Other examples (Eastern European context):
Other examples (Eastern European context):
Institute of National Remembrance (Poland) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_National_Remembrance
Platform of European Memory and Conscience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_of_European_Memory_and_Conscience
Thursday, 27 March 2014
Sreten Ugričić - former Director of the National Library of Serbia
As part of the research for my MA dissertation, I referred to Sreten Ugričić's internal paper for the workshop at the Sarajevo CWG meeting, 16 November 2010, ‘Orphan Works and their National Libraries versus Orphan States and their National Libraries’. Ugričić was then the Director of the National Library of Serbia. Of the disparity between EU and non-EU countries, he commented:
"We still believe that ICT and digitization can be an efficient tool for distributing and making available culture, education and science, both within the national framework, and within the wider framework of international communication and cooperation. But this has not taken place in the countries of the first group [outside the EU], nor has it given satisfactorily (sic) results. The discrepancy between the two classes of countries and their national libraries does not narrow, on the contrary".
However, he no longer holds this position since being forcibly removed by the Serbian authorities for his support of Montenegrin writer/political figure Andrej Nikolaidis, who criticised the Serbian government in 2012. More than a lack of resources and opportunities, then, Serbia as a so-called 'orphan state', also has a potentially more volatile political situation, and less freedom of speech legislation to protect its citizens. More info about this story can be found here:
http://wild-rooster.com/controversy-bolsters-international-popularity-for-montenegrin-author-andrej-nikolaidis/
"We still believe that ICT and digitization can be an efficient tool for distributing and making available culture, education and science, both within the national framework, and within the wider framework of international communication and cooperation. But this has not taken place in the countries of the first group [outside the EU], nor has it given satisfactorily (sic) results. The discrepancy between the two classes of countries and their national libraries does not narrow, on the contrary".
However, he no longer holds this position since being forcibly removed by the Serbian authorities for his support of Montenegrin writer/political figure Andrej Nikolaidis, who criticised the Serbian government in 2012. More than a lack of resources and opportunities, then, Serbia as a so-called 'orphan state', also has a potentially more volatile political situation, and less freedom of speech legislation to protect its citizens. More info about this story can be found here:
http://wild-rooster.com/controversy-bolsters-international-popularity-for-montenegrin-author-andrej-nikolaidis/
Wednesday, 26 March 2014
Digital Public Library of America
The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives in America since the early 1990s. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historic records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials, but these digital collections often exist in silos.
The DPLA brings these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together in a single platform and portal, providing open and coherent access to our society’s digitized cultural heritage. For more info visit: http://dp.la/
The DPLA brings these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together in a single platform and portal, providing open and coherent access to our society’s digitized cultural heritage. For more info visit: http://dp.la/
Tuesday, 25 March 2014
Audio Interview with Bruno Racine (Chair of the Europeana Foundation Board)
In this interview, Racine talks about the role of a national library, about scanning and digitization, Google, the Lyon Library (France’s second largest), Europeana, the value added offered by librarians and other interesting topics. He comments on the changing selection criteria for digitisation (from positive, the 'best', to negative, e.g. deterioration, out of copyright etc). He also distinguishes the concept of a digital library from a mass of digitised material like Google Books. Listen to the interview here:
http://literarytourist.com/2008/12/audio-interview-with-bruno-racine-president-bibliotheque-nationale-de-france/
http://literarytourist.com/2008/12/audio-interview-with-bruno-racine-president-bibliotheque-nationale-de-france/
Defining the Problem of Tomorrow's Memory: P. 2 From Cultural Heritage to Cultural Memory
In a 2007 speech to announce the European digital library project (later to become Europeana), the EC’s former Information Society and Media Commissioner Vivian Reding made this comment:
“Without a collective memory, we are nothing, and can achieve nothing. It defines our identity and we use it continuously for education, work and leisure”.
This claim forms part of a broader shift in the vocabulary of the contemporary cultural heritage sector, which has perpetuated the use of memory in a number of institutional mission statements. The Library of Congress hosts the American Memory project, Library and Archives Canada refer to the ‘continuing memory’ of the nation, UNESCO has the Memory of the World Programme, and the Australian Government Records invoke ‘the memory of our nation’. The move towards memory is more widely embodied in the notion of the memory institution, a descriptive term, which serves as an alternative to ‘cultural heritage institution’ in heritage theory and policy.
Of course, in some respects the concept of the memory institution is not a new one. In their critical work on the rhetorical arts of memory, Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers have drawn attention to the spatial metaphors employed in the classical mnemonic tradition. Mnemonics is identified by Yates as a system of memory, which is exercised in the mental arrangement of images and places as a means of situating knowledge so that it cannot be forgotten. Carruthers refines this characterisation of the art of memory; noting a tendency in Yates' work to ‘reinforce some common misconceptions about the possible cognitive uses of ‘the art of memory’, and thus the nature of its influence on the making of images and ‘places’ for this purpose’. In the ancient text Rhetorica ad Herennium, which was later taken up by medieval scholars, Carruthers notes that the art of memory is described as a form of invention and constructed based on the building plan of a house. Drawing attention to the etymological proximity of the words invention and inventory, both derived from the Latin ‘inventio’, she suggests that while the latter is usually aligned with the mnemonic tradition, the imagination associated with invention is in fact more significant for memory. Architectural tropes were particularly popular as they were thought to provide the most familiar locations for memory, and the process of building these memory places would allow for adaptation and creative revision in the act of recall. Through emphasising the primacy of invention, Carruthers’ work on mnemonics indicates a move away from the common equation of memory with an artificial storage model or inventory. Nevertheless, this aspect of memory occupies a central position and is often taken as an implicit assumption in the contemporary field of memory studies.
Equally, the modern conception of a memory place is now frequently identified with its function as a physical repository. So, while the memory institution superficially functions as a metaphor, the places it designates do have a concrete existence. However, this new incarnation is distinct from those ancient memory places in that it pertains to a set of public spaces, rather than a private, internally constructed space. While exercising a material influence by solidifying relations between museums libraries and archives, it nevertheless embodies the utopian ideal of housing and somehow preserving intact cultural memory.
Sharing similarities with the paradox of tomorrow’s memory, outlined in my introduction, what could be called the utopian ambition of the memory institution is elusive; something that will, but has not yet, come into being. Fredric Jameson articulates the principle of this temporal paradox as follows:
“The presumption is that Utopia, whose business is the future, or not-being, exists only in the present, where it leads the relatively feeble life of desire and fantasy [...] Utopia is philosophically analogous to the trace, only from the other end of time. The aporia of the trace is to belong to past and present all at once, and thus to constitute a mixture of being and not-being quite different from the traditional category of Becoming [...] Utopia, which combines the not-yet-being of the future with a textual existence in the present is no less worthy of the archaeological paradoxes we are willing to grant the trace”.
Through utopia, then, a link is suggested between the rhetoric of cultural heritage and the idea of tomorrow’s memory as an attempt to seize hold of the future through the medium of the present. But, while it may be possible to encompass both the present and the future conceptually, utopia, necessarily a space that is somehow other, must always eventually outdistance the present’s reach. Jameson makes a structural comparison with the trace, described as a present effect of a cause in the past, to illustrate this interaction, implying that a similar relationship with the future holds true of utopia. In this case the causes are being produced in the present, some effects of which are not yet known. Utopia is a projection of these effects. But the reference to the trace is also interesting because it re-introduces the question of material memory traces. Although the point is not picked up by Jameson, some theorists have suggested that, as well as belonging to the present and the past, the memory trace has a bearing on the future.
These traces, representing the material memory, to which the term memory institution refers, endow places with meaning and are accorded the status of authoritative historical documents. Among different types of traces, archival records seem to have a particular inviolability. The 2009 report, ‘Archives for the 21st Century’, produced by the Archives UK, announced, ‘the archival record is [...] the direct, uninterpreted and authentic voice of the past’. There is a dual preoccupation evident here; the need for authenticity and authority is coupled with the human connection to memory, which is invoked as a voice of the past. While these could be taken as indicators of the archive’s perceived significance, they are conditional upon a more complex framework that raises questions such as: who is the voice in question, and what relation does the document hold to other archival records? In his essay Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida recognises the weight of influence attached to those questions. Employing the archive as a theoretical term for discussing the organisational structures associated with heritage sites, he reflects on their nature and function, and the pervasiveness of what he calls ‘archive fever’, that passion for documenting origins. The materiality of the archive is particularly important for Derrida. He maintains: ‘there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression’. As he goes on to explain, in this context the word consignation has a double meaning; it relates not only to the act of consigning or depositing but to a principle of gathering together.
The intersection of physical and transcendental elements I have attributed to the memory institution’s utopian trait reveals itself as a technical process in Derrida’s archive. He clarifies this process later in the essay, writing:
“The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event”.
Derrida indicates that the archive today is produced by the nature of the technology used to record it. It is therefore impossible for memory traces to ever just be the authentic voice of the past, for the form they take always alters or distorts that voice. The archive’s existence in the future will take shape in the same manner, different again to what it is in the present and what it was in the past. This stake in the future is crucial to understanding the logic of the archive, and archive fever, initially interpreted as an obsession with origins could also expose a desire borne out of the promise of the future.
“Without a collective memory, we are nothing, and can achieve nothing. It defines our identity and we use it continuously for education, work and leisure”.
This claim forms part of a broader shift in the vocabulary of the contemporary cultural heritage sector, which has perpetuated the use of memory in a number of institutional mission statements. The Library of Congress hosts the American Memory project, Library and Archives Canada refer to the ‘continuing memory’ of the nation, UNESCO has the Memory of the World Programme, and the Australian Government Records invoke ‘the memory of our nation’. The move towards memory is more widely embodied in the notion of the memory institution, a descriptive term, which serves as an alternative to ‘cultural heritage institution’ in heritage theory and policy.
Of course, in some respects the concept of the memory institution is not a new one. In their critical work on the rhetorical arts of memory, Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers have drawn attention to the spatial metaphors employed in the classical mnemonic tradition. Mnemonics is identified by Yates as a system of memory, which is exercised in the mental arrangement of images and places as a means of situating knowledge so that it cannot be forgotten. Carruthers refines this characterisation of the art of memory; noting a tendency in Yates' work to ‘reinforce some common misconceptions about the possible cognitive uses of ‘the art of memory’, and thus the nature of its influence on the making of images and ‘places’ for this purpose’. In the ancient text Rhetorica ad Herennium, which was later taken up by medieval scholars, Carruthers notes that the art of memory is described as a form of invention and constructed based on the building plan of a house. Drawing attention to the etymological proximity of the words invention and inventory, both derived from the Latin ‘inventio’, she suggests that while the latter is usually aligned with the mnemonic tradition, the imagination associated with invention is in fact more significant for memory. Architectural tropes were particularly popular as they were thought to provide the most familiar locations for memory, and the process of building these memory places would allow for adaptation and creative revision in the act of recall. Through emphasising the primacy of invention, Carruthers’ work on mnemonics indicates a move away from the common equation of memory with an artificial storage model or inventory. Nevertheless, this aspect of memory occupies a central position and is often taken as an implicit assumption in the contemporary field of memory studies.
Equally, the modern conception of a memory place is now frequently identified with its function as a physical repository. So, while the memory institution superficially functions as a metaphor, the places it designates do have a concrete existence. However, this new incarnation is distinct from those ancient memory places in that it pertains to a set of public spaces, rather than a private, internally constructed space. While exercising a material influence by solidifying relations between museums libraries and archives, it nevertheless embodies the utopian ideal of housing and somehow preserving intact cultural memory.
Sharing similarities with the paradox of tomorrow’s memory, outlined in my introduction, what could be called the utopian ambition of the memory institution is elusive; something that will, but has not yet, come into being. Fredric Jameson articulates the principle of this temporal paradox as follows:
“The presumption is that Utopia, whose business is the future, or not-being, exists only in the present, where it leads the relatively feeble life of desire and fantasy [...] Utopia is philosophically analogous to the trace, only from the other end of time. The aporia of the trace is to belong to past and present all at once, and thus to constitute a mixture of being and not-being quite different from the traditional category of Becoming [...] Utopia, which combines the not-yet-being of the future with a textual existence in the present is no less worthy of the archaeological paradoxes we are willing to grant the trace”.
Through utopia, then, a link is suggested between the rhetoric of cultural heritage and the idea of tomorrow’s memory as an attempt to seize hold of the future through the medium of the present. But, while it may be possible to encompass both the present and the future conceptually, utopia, necessarily a space that is somehow other, must always eventually outdistance the present’s reach. Jameson makes a structural comparison with the trace, described as a present effect of a cause in the past, to illustrate this interaction, implying that a similar relationship with the future holds true of utopia. In this case the causes are being produced in the present, some effects of which are not yet known. Utopia is a projection of these effects. But the reference to the trace is also interesting because it re-introduces the question of material memory traces. Although the point is not picked up by Jameson, some theorists have suggested that, as well as belonging to the present and the past, the memory trace has a bearing on the future.
These traces, representing the material memory, to which the term memory institution refers, endow places with meaning and are accorded the status of authoritative historical documents. Among different types of traces, archival records seem to have a particular inviolability. The 2009 report, ‘Archives for the 21st Century’, produced by the Archives UK, announced, ‘the archival record is [...] the direct, uninterpreted and authentic voice of the past’. There is a dual preoccupation evident here; the need for authenticity and authority is coupled with the human connection to memory, which is invoked as a voice of the past. While these could be taken as indicators of the archive’s perceived significance, they are conditional upon a more complex framework that raises questions such as: who is the voice in question, and what relation does the document hold to other archival records? In his essay Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida recognises the weight of influence attached to those questions. Employing the archive as a theoretical term for discussing the organisational structures associated with heritage sites, he reflects on their nature and function, and the pervasiveness of what he calls ‘archive fever’, that passion for documenting origins. The materiality of the archive is particularly important for Derrida. He maintains: ‘there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression’. As he goes on to explain, in this context the word consignation has a double meaning; it relates not only to the act of consigning or depositing but to a principle of gathering together.
The intersection of physical and transcendental elements I have attributed to the memory institution’s utopian trait reveals itself as a technical process in Derrida’s archive. He clarifies this process later in the essay, writing:
“The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event”.
Derrida indicates that the archive today is produced by the nature of the technology used to record it. It is therefore impossible for memory traces to ever just be the authentic voice of the past, for the form they take always alters or distorts that voice. The archive’s existence in the future will take shape in the same manner, different again to what it is in the present and what it was in the past. This stake in the future is crucial to understanding the logic of the archive, and archive fever, initially interpreted as an obsession with origins could also expose a desire borne out of the promise of the future.
The Digitisation Agenda in EU Europe
Digital Agenda for Europe (http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en)
The Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) aims to help Europe's citizens and businesses to get the most out of digital technologies. It is the first of seven flagships initiatives under Europe 2020, the EU's strategy to deliver smart sustainable and inclusive growth. Launched in May 2010, the DAE contains 101 actions, grouped around seven priority areas.
The review of the Digital Priorities, published on 18th December 2012, identifies 7 key areas for further efforts to stimulate the conditions to create growth and jobs in Europe:
1. Create a new and stable broadband regulatory environment.
2. New public digital service infrastructures through Connecting Europe Facility loans
3. Launch Grand Coalition on Digital Skills and Jobs
4. Propose EU cyber-security strategy and Directive
5. Update EU's Copyright Framework
6. Accelerate cloud computing through public sector buying power
7. Launch new electronics industrial strategy – an "Airbus of Chips"
The full implementation of the updated Digital Agenda would increase the European GDP by 5%, or 1500€ per person, over the next eight years, by increasing investment in ICT, improving eSkills levels in the labour force, enabling public sector innovation, and reforming the framework conditions for the internet economy. In terms of jobs, up to 900.000 digital jobs risk going unfilled by 2020 without pan-European action while 1.2 million jobs could be created through infrastructure construction. This would rise to 3.8 million new jobs throughout the economy in the long term.
More specific project information can be found here:
ICT Policy Projects for Cultural Heritage (http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/ict-policy-projects-cultural-heritage)
Europeana Libraries project (http://www.europeana-libraries.eu) is a Best Practice Network to bring Europe's libraries together to aggregate content and deliver services. It's being led by TEL, working with CERL, LIBER and Europeana.
Monday, 10 March 2014
Defining the Problem of Tomorrow's Memory: P. 1 Distinguishing the Digital
(Adapted from a talk I gave at Shakespeare and Company on 5 March 2014)
The title of my thesis is 'Defining the Problem of Tomorrow's Memory: Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age'. The framing of the title as a problem is crystallised by the paradox of ‘tomorrow’s memory’. This is a phrase that is often used in articles and reports to highlight concerns about digital heritage collections; the implication being that a failure to preserve them will threaten the cultural legacy of generations to come. However, the temporal manoeuvre, whereby doubts about the future are expressed through recourse to the past, is grounded in a much older philosophical tradition that has found form in the work of various writers and thinkers, particularly during times of societal instability or change (see Progress-Technology-Utopia post).
My thesis draws out the problem of this characterisation of tomorrow’s memory, broadly focusing on three areas: firstly, how and to what extent digital technology represents a shift in the cultural landscape, the challenge of distinguishing the digital, secondly, the conceptual trajectory of cultural memory within the heritage context, and thirdly how the notion of a cultural memory structured by technology holds implications for heritage organisations like museums, libraries and archives.
A passage from a book I read recently is the point of departure for this first issue. Towards the end of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the protagonist, who is by now well over 200 years old, finds herself outside a bookshop in the 19th century, prompting a reflection on the changing form of the written word:
“All her life long, Orlando had known manuscripts, she had held in her hand the rough brown sheets on which Spenser had written in his little crabbed hand; she had seen Shakespeare’s script and Milton’s. She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartos and folios, often with a sonnet in her praise in them and sometimes a lock of hair. But these innumerable little volumes, bright identical, ephemeral [...], surprised her infinitely.”
The description of the books as 'bright, identical, and ephemeral' highlights the implied distinction between the singularity of the hand written manuscript and the uniformity of the bound volume, perpetuated by the advent of machine-powered presses in the mid-1800s. Following Elizabeth Eisenstein, the development of this technology positions the printing press as an agent of change in what is known as the printing revolution. Subsequent developments have led some commentators to propose a similar paradigm shift with regard to digital technologies, a move that is likewise celebrated and bemoaned. While technological enthusiasts see e-readers as representing a new stage in the evolution of the book, many writers and literary critics have expressed concerns about the potential cessation of print culture. For instance, in a recent Guardian article, titled 'Real books should be preserved like papyrus scrolls', the author, Rick Gekoski, suggests that:
“In a future electronic world, there will be a ghastly contingency about the written word […] An e-text is infinitely malleable, but there is also the dreadful possibility that it might be disarranged or censored.”
The tone of mourning or loss adopted here is redolent of what is experienced by Orlando in the scene outside the bookshop. However, the references to contingency and malleability also imply something about the digital medium itself- as a more ephemeral form. Hence, the notion of loss works on several levels, since ephemerality appears to be built into the process of digitisation. There are several reasons for this, the principal ones being that texts and objects produced digitally are systemic; that is, they require a combination of hardware and software components in order to be decoded and viewed. On top of that, their machine readable format makes them vulnerable to manipulation and undetectable modifications.
Because of these characteristics, there is a tendency, particularly within media theory, to stress the extent to which digital technologies are different, and consequently to neglect those links to earlier technologies and industries. Although the impulse is a seductive one, it is dangerous to hermetically seal off the digital as this potentially severs its relationship with forces of production; in stark terms, the connection to labour is broken and the human element is minimised. In fact, as John Mowitt has observed, the manual-digital dynamic of the hand highlights the origins of digitality as a human interaction with technology. Likewise, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, building on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of an original technicity, has written that technical supports, or technics, are the condition of culture, and that the human is constituted always already through technics.
Therefore, it is my position that digital technology is different but also a continuation of older technologies. The new system introduces change, as well as being a composite of already established systems. Sometimes called the ‘hybrid information environment’, Western societies are currently in a transitional phase between analogue and digital cultures. Anna Reading identifies a similar parallel and states the need for:
“A conceptualisation of time […] that analyses the specific temporal implication of digitisation and digitality, while recognising the coexistence and intermediation of the analogue with the digital.”
Reading’s emphasis on time reintroduces memory into the frame, and provides an opening for thinking about why memory metaphors are so pervasive in relation to digital media. Perhaps the most influential media-memory discourse focuses on the greatly increased capacity for preserving and providing access to data digitally. This is suggestive of an infallible model of memory, where forgetting becomes incidental to a system of accumulating and retrieving information. The idea of permanence and infinite storage is also relevant to the heritage context, and its own preoccupation with time. As Jussi Parikka notes:
“The archive and such institutions of modern memory as the museum are of course monuments of time in the sense of restoring, recording and maintaining various objects documents other materials.”
As so-called monuments of time, museums, libraries and archives are traditionally associated with practices of remembering. The attendant material artefacts and documents housed in such institutions are increasingly identified as material manifestations of memory in heritage discourse, and what Reading calls ‘the specific temporal implication of digitisation’ also has implications for a conception of cultural memory that is not only material but explicitly digital. In both cases, the influence of memory rhetoric in cultural heritage debates is a topic that invites further consideration.
Parts 2 and 3 to follow.
The title of my thesis is 'Defining the Problem of Tomorrow's Memory: Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age'. The framing of the title as a problem is crystallised by the paradox of ‘tomorrow’s memory’. This is a phrase that is often used in articles and reports to highlight concerns about digital heritage collections; the implication being that a failure to preserve them will threaten the cultural legacy of generations to come. However, the temporal manoeuvre, whereby doubts about the future are expressed through recourse to the past, is grounded in a much older philosophical tradition that has found form in the work of various writers and thinkers, particularly during times of societal instability or change (see Progress-Technology-Utopia post).
My thesis draws out the problem of this characterisation of tomorrow’s memory, broadly focusing on three areas: firstly, how and to what extent digital technology represents a shift in the cultural landscape, the challenge of distinguishing the digital, secondly, the conceptual trajectory of cultural memory within the heritage context, and thirdly how the notion of a cultural memory structured by technology holds implications for heritage organisations like museums, libraries and archives.
A passage from a book I read recently is the point of departure for this first issue. Towards the end of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the protagonist, who is by now well over 200 years old, finds herself outside a bookshop in the 19th century, prompting a reflection on the changing form of the written word:
“All her life long, Orlando had known manuscripts, she had held in her hand the rough brown sheets on which Spenser had written in his little crabbed hand; she had seen Shakespeare’s script and Milton’s. She owned, indeed, a fair number of quartos and folios, often with a sonnet in her praise in them and sometimes a lock of hair. But these innumerable little volumes, bright identical, ephemeral [...], surprised her infinitely.”
The description of the books as 'bright, identical, and ephemeral' highlights the implied distinction between the singularity of the hand written manuscript and the uniformity of the bound volume, perpetuated by the advent of machine-powered presses in the mid-1800s. Following Elizabeth Eisenstein, the development of this technology positions the printing press as an agent of change in what is known as the printing revolution. Subsequent developments have led some commentators to propose a similar paradigm shift with regard to digital technologies, a move that is likewise celebrated and bemoaned. While technological enthusiasts see e-readers as representing a new stage in the evolution of the book, many writers and literary critics have expressed concerns about the potential cessation of print culture. For instance, in a recent Guardian article, titled 'Real books should be preserved like papyrus scrolls', the author, Rick Gekoski, suggests that:
“In a future electronic world, there will be a ghastly contingency about the written word […] An e-text is infinitely malleable, but there is also the dreadful possibility that it might be disarranged or censored.”
The tone of mourning or loss adopted here is redolent of what is experienced by Orlando in the scene outside the bookshop. However, the references to contingency and malleability also imply something about the digital medium itself- as a more ephemeral form. Hence, the notion of loss works on several levels, since ephemerality appears to be built into the process of digitisation. There are several reasons for this, the principal ones being that texts and objects produced digitally are systemic; that is, they require a combination of hardware and software components in order to be decoded and viewed. On top of that, their machine readable format makes them vulnerable to manipulation and undetectable modifications.
Because of these characteristics, there is a tendency, particularly within media theory, to stress the extent to which digital technologies are different, and consequently to neglect those links to earlier technologies and industries. Although the impulse is a seductive one, it is dangerous to hermetically seal off the digital as this potentially severs its relationship with forces of production; in stark terms, the connection to labour is broken and the human element is minimised. In fact, as John Mowitt has observed, the manual-digital dynamic of the hand highlights the origins of digitality as a human interaction with technology. Likewise, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, building on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of an original technicity, has written that technical supports, or technics, are the condition of culture, and that the human is constituted always already through technics.
Therefore, it is my position that digital technology is different but also a continuation of older technologies. The new system introduces change, as well as being a composite of already established systems. Sometimes called the ‘hybrid information environment’, Western societies are currently in a transitional phase between analogue and digital cultures. Anna Reading identifies a similar parallel and states the need for:
“A conceptualisation of time […] that analyses the specific temporal implication of digitisation and digitality, while recognising the coexistence and intermediation of the analogue with the digital.”
Reading’s emphasis on time reintroduces memory into the frame, and provides an opening for thinking about why memory metaphors are so pervasive in relation to digital media. Perhaps the most influential media-memory discourse focuses on the greatly increased capacity for preserving and providing access to data digitally. This is suggestive of an infallible model of memory, where forgetting becomes incidental to a system of accumulating and retrieving information. The idea of permanence and infinite storage is also relevant to the heritage context, and its own preoccupation with time. As Jussi Parikka notes:
“The archive and such institutions of modern memory as the museum are of course monuments of time in the sense of restoring, recording and maintaining various objects documents other materials.”
As so-called monuments of time, museums, libraries and archives are traditionally associated with practices of remembering. The attendant material artefacts and documents housed in such institutions are increasingly identified as material manifestations of memory in heritage discourse, and what Reading calls ‘the specific temporal implication of digitisation’ also has implications for a conception of cultural memory that is not only material but explicitly digital. In both cases, the influence of memory rhetoric in cultural heritage debates is a topic that invites further consideration.
Parts 2 and 3 to follow.
Heritage of the People's Europe (HOPE)
Heritage of the People's Europe (HOPE) networks the digital collections of European institutions in social history and the history of the labour movement. The project unites more than 880,000 digitised objects from the end of the 18th century down to the present, making them available through web-based platforms like Europeana and the Social History Portal. For more info visit:
http://socialhistory.org/en/news/heritage-peoples-europe
http://socialhistory.org/en/news/heritage-peoples-europe
Saturday, 1 March 2014
Leeds Data Mill
Leeds Data Mill is a place for businesses and organisations to share their Open Data and place it online for anyone to access and use in creative and inspiring ways. For more info visit:
http://www.leedsdatamill.org/
http://www.leedsdatamill.org/
ENUMERATE Core Survey 2
The ENUMERATE project, co-funded by the European Commission, aims at creating a reliable baseline of statistical data about digitisation, digital preservation and online access to cultural heritage in Europe.
A second core survey has been conducted in the last couple of months and is now available online.The ENUMERATE core surveys focus on high level data on digitisation of cultural heritage in Europe, in order to get an overview of the progress being made.
Data are collected about:- digitisation activity- the cost of digital collections- access to digital collections- the preservation of digital heritage materials.
The full report on Core Survey 2 can be downloaded here:
http://www.enumerate.eu/en/surveys/core_survey_2/
A second core survey has been conducted in the last couple of months and is now available online.The ENUMERATE core surveys focus on high level data on digitisation of cultural heritage in Europe, in order to get an overview of the progress being made.
Data are collected about:- digitisation activity- the cost of digital collections- access to digital collections- the preservation of digital heritage materials.
The full report on Core Survey 2 can be downloaded here:
http://www.enumerate.eu/en/surveys/core_survey_2/
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