Politics of Mass Digitization

The Politics of Mass Digitization

By Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
Hardcover
Regular price$35.00
/
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Non-returnable discount pricing
A new examination of mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon that alters the politics of cultural memory.

Today, all of us with internet connections can access millions of digitized cultural artifacts from the comfort of our desks. Institutions and individuals add thousands of new cultural works to the digital sphere every day, creating new central nexuses of knowledge. How does this affect us politically and culturally? In this book, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup approaches mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon, offering a new understanding of a defining concept of our time.

Arguing that digitization has become a global cultural political project, Thylstrup draws on case studies of different forms of mass digitization--including Google Books, Europeana, and the shadow libraries Monoskop, lib.ru, and Ubuweb--to suggest a different approach to the study of digital cultural memory archives. She constructs a new theoretical framework for understanding mass digitization that focuses on notions of assemblage, infrastructure, and infrapolitics. Mass digitization does not consist merely of neutral technical processes, Thylstrup argues, but of distinct subpolitical processes that give rise to new kinds of archives and new ways of interacting with the artifacts they contain. With this book, she offers important and timely guidance on how mass digitization alters the politics of cultural memory to impact our relationship with the past and with one another.


Details

Publish date January 29, 2019
Publisher MIT Press
Format Hardcover
Pages 216
ISBN 9780262039017
026203901X

New Releases View all

February 25, 2025
February 25, 2025
February 18, 2025
February 18, 2025
February 11, 2025
February 11, 2025