TY - BOOK
T1 - An archaeology of digital knowledge
T2 - Imaginaries of the digital cultural heritage archive
AU - Andreasen, Torsten Arni Caleb
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - The beginning of the new millennium saw the rise of what UNESCO called a ”new legacy” of
”digital heritage” and we have since witnessed tremendous efforts to build the archives to
contain and profit from that legacy. It is, however, not an easy task to describe such a legacy
and its archives. What is an archive? What is cultural heritage? How does one inherit culture?
And what difference does it make if the archive is digital or not?
This dissertation aims to explore the above questions, not to answer them individually, but to
ask concerning the digital cultural heritage archive by tracing certain imaginaries relating to
the archive, its technical foundation and instantiation and its political and academic
strategies. These imaginaries are described as springing form an archival promise – a promise
of what can be attained with regard to knowledge and social organisation if only the archive
were to achieve its fullness. The various imaginaries are conceptualised as the promise of
archival and political pleroma: an archival plenitude where everything is archived and the
archival object reveals itself immediately and a political fulfilment, where society becomes
identical with itself and there can be no two respectable and antagonistic opinions. The
archival promise is argued to open various strategic domains in ways that require critical
scrutiny to break free of the empty operations of pleroma.
AB - The beginning of the new millennium saw the rise of what UNESCO called a ”new legacy” of
”digital heritage” and we have since witnessed tremendous efforts to build the archives to
contain and profit from that legacy. It is, however, not an easy task to describe such a legacy
and its archives. What is an archive? What is cultural heritage? How does one inherit culture?
And what difference does it make if the archive is digital or not?
This dissertation aims to explore the above questions, not to answer them individually, but to
ask concerning the digital cultural heritage archive by tracing certain imaginaries relating to
the archive, its technical foundation and instantiation and its political and academic
strategies. These imaginaries are described as springing form an archival promise – a promise
of what can be attained with regard to knowledge and social organisation if only the archive
were to achieve its fullness. The various imaginaries are conceptualised as the promise of
archival and political pleroma: an archival plenitude where everything is archived and the
archival object reveals itself immediately and a political fulfilment, where society becomes
identical with itself and there can be no two respectable and antagonistic opinions. The
archival promise is argued to open various strategic domains in ways that require critical
scrutiny to break free of the empty operations of pleroma.
M3 - Ph.D. thesis
BT - An archaeology of digital knowledge
PB - Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet
ER -