Marton, Attila
(2011)
Forgotten as data – remembered through information.
Social memory institutions in the digital age:
the case of the Europeana Initiative.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
The study of social memory has emerged as a rich field of research closely linked
to cultural artefacts, communication media and institutions as carriers of a past
that transcends the horizon of the individual’s lifetime. Within this domain of
research, the dissertation focuses on memory institutions (libraries, archives,
museums) and the shifts they are undergoing as the outcome of digitization and
the diffusion of online media. Very little is currently known about the impact that
digitality and computation may have on social memory institutions, specifically,
and social memory, more generally – an area of study that would benefit from
but, so far, has been mostly overlooked by information systems research.
The dissertation finds its point of departure in the conceptualization of
information as an event that occurs through the interaction between an observer
and the observed – an event that cannot be stored as information but merely as
data. In this context, memory is conceived as an operation that filters, thus
forgets, the singular details of an information event by making it comparable to
other events according to abstract classification criteria. Against this backdrop,
memory institutions are institutions of forgetting as they select, order and
preserve a canon of cultural heritage artefacts.
Supported by evidence from a case study on the Europeana initiative (a
digitization project of European libraries, archives and museums), the
dissertation reveals a fundamental shift in the field of memory institutions. The
case study demonstrates the disintegration of 1) the cultural heritage artefact, 2)
its standard modes of description and 3) the catalogue as such into a steadily
accruing assemblage of data and metadata. Dismembered into bits and bytes,
cultural heritage needs to be re-membered through the emulation of recognizable
cultural heritage artefacts and momentary renditions of order. In other words,
memory institutions forget as binary-based data and remember through
computational information.
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