Abstract
This chapter assesses the illusory promise of total information that guides the digital age, noting how the study of specific acts of recovery in their historical and cultural contexts, reveal information as subject to loss and inaccessibility. National barriers, epistemological limits, the opacity of physical bodies, Lee suggests, inspire a more limited, more modest set of claims that digital archives can pursue.
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Notes
- 1.
Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 14; Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 3.
- 2.
Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), 23.
- 3.
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
- 4.
Raw Data Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age,” The Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
- 5.
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1972), 230.
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Lee, M.S. (2020). Globalism, Transparency, and Loss. In: Mizruchi, S. (eds) Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33373-7_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33373-7_12
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