Digital archives

Description

Nanna Thylstrup
14.07.2015 (34' 15'')

Featuring commissioned music by TCF

Nanna Thylstrup works on the politics of mass digitisation, with a special focus on cultural memory, territorialisations and infrastructures as well as human rights perspectives on information assemblages. In 2014 she obtained her PhD with the thesis Politics of Mass Digitalisation, in which she explores the digitalisation of cultural-heritage archives from Google Books to Europeana. She is now part of the interdisciplinary project 'Uncertain Archives', which investigates notions of uncertainty and risk in big data environments, paying special attention to the themes of power, subjectivity and knowledge.

Nanna Thylstrup talks to SON[I]A about the digitalisation of the archive and its implications. She deeply analyses two consequences that both emerge in individual and collective spheres: first, the data shadow that big data contexts generates to each user; second, the politics behind the processes of mass digitalisation. With her analysis, she reflects on digital archives as a specific and non-neutral way of ordering the world.

As an extra feature, here are the Facebook Internal Guidelines for Content Moderation that Nanna Thylstrup refers to in the podcast.

Timeline
1:30 Data shadow: archives and information
3:25 Data shadow and discrimination
5:48 The political background of digitalisation
8:24 The transatlantic rivalry in the digital sphere
10:07 Digital archive: ordering the world
12:17 The relationship between humans and algorithms
23:00 Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence
25:17 Addiction and new technologies archives