Series Convenor: Dr. Eleni Liarou, Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck College and BIRMAC welcomes you to the second in a series of three workshops on Archives in Pandemic-stricken times.
In this workshop, Dr Emily Bell, Dr Joseph John Viscomi and Dr Nanna Bonde Thylstrup will discuss matters of digitisation. The panel will address questions such as:
The panelists will present their work in relation to digitisation and new research tools, the politics of data archives and the relationship between archives and historical materiality.
Dr Bell will introduce The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata, a resource that brings together database histories, language variants, newspaper terminology, and Xpaths for specific fields, in a format that creates a controlled vocabulary designed to be used across disciplines and inside and outside the academy. This case study demonstrates how researchers can use different collections and their metadata to ask research questions across national and linguistic borders, discussing the tool ShiCo and how it enables us to map conceptual shift over time.
Dr Viscomi will explore the relationship between archives and historical materiality through his research on the depopulation of towns and villages in Southern Italy since the late 18th century. The study of migration has long opted for an approach that follows migrants, and their archives, out of and away from their points of departure. Few studies have located their subjects in the material landscapes from which migrants departed. Joseph will discuss how a critical examination of these histories requires a fresh perspective on the connections between archives, materiality, and land. He will also speak about a visualisation project, in collaboration with the radical cartographer Philippe Rekacewicz, that aims to digitally ‘map’ material and oral archives.
In recent years big data technologies bring with them new and crucial uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors and, as a result, new ethical challenges which require urgent attention and analysis. Building on her 2019 book, The Politics of Mass Digitization, Dr Tylstrup will address these uncertainties through cultural theories of the archive, arguing that big data presents our contemporary era with a number of pressing archival uncertainties. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, respectively, the talk tunes in on three types of uncertainty that overlap and intertwine, yet also reveal different configurations of archival uncertainty, which Tylstrup will argue is central to the understanding of conditions of the digitally networked data archives that have become a crucial component of the cultures of surveillance and governmentality today.
Listen to the podcast recording of the event here.
