Uncertain Archives

“the archive” emerges “as an abstract, depopulated space, untouched by human labor and laborers” (Whearty 2018).” ⤴️
“consider “actually existing archives,”” ⤴️
“the ethical challenges of archiving sensitive material, the need for collective work with marginalised and vulnerable communities, and the relevance of archives for human rights, social justice, and care (Caswell and Cifor 2016; Cifor and Wood 2017; Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand 2017; Sutherland 2017a).” ⤴️
“both capture and exclusion have important ethical consequences,” ⤴️
“archives are always contested sites of power, knowledge, possibility, and aspiration” ⤴️
“the emergence of datafication—and its embeddedness in regimes of neoliberal global governance and increasing precarity—means that uncertainty and risk have become functions of disruption complicit with power.” ⤴️
“Our present times are thus imbued with a “spirit of uncertainty” that animates the cultural backdrop of social life (Appadurai 2012: 7).” ⤴️
“the government of the incalculable, a regime in which one could only ever govern through estimation.” ⤴️
“Uncertainty, then, exists at the crux of today’s governance dilemma between security and freedom: if modernity’s governance systems had demanded scientific predictability, universality, and rationality, today’s globalised economies also celebrate uncertainies (O’Malley 2009).” ⤴️
“data companies and governments across the globe welcome big data as an effective solution to deal with informational uncertainty, risks, and unknowns. Its promise of accurate calculations, precise predictions, and pre-emptions speaks to contemporary concerns about the taming of social, economic, financial, environmental, and political risks.” ⤴️
“big data as drivers of creativity and high-gain opportunity. Uncertainty and control are thus equally embraced by techno-capitalism.” ⤴️
“reflections of a political and social reality where uncertainty is profoundly feared and yet simultaneously embraced as potentially disruptive (Thylstrup 2018).” ⤴️
“moments of resistance when individuals and collectives turn towards uncertainty” ⤴️
“the potential to change the way information is held and employed and to provide marginalised individuals and groups with opportunities to contest dominant organisations of information” ⤴️
“remobilisation of uncertainty” ⤴️
“André Breton’s ([1924] 1969: 9) criticism of realism in his “Manifesto of Surrealism”: “our brains are dulled by the incurable mania that consists in reducing the unknown to what is known, to what can be filed.”” ⤴️
“The surrealists were concerned with the high degree of structure found in unconscious objects such as dreams and subconscious actions, as well as with the impossibility of capturing and showing it fully. For them, archival practices were devoted not so much to imposing order on contingencies, but rather to how to work with the existing order of the unconscious (Spieker 2008).” ⤴️
“The unknown and unknowable are the ultimate generators of uncertainty.” ⤴️
“This is a spatial as well as a temporal problematic, and it represents the other side of the coin from the extensive mapping practices of information- intensive environments.” ⤴️
“Thinking about unknowns invariably leads on to thinking about maps. We suggest that mapping is a fundamental archival–technological function and indeed is a drive to make unknowns known and render them available for detection and domination.” ⤴️
“depiction of uncertain and speculative territories by ancient Roman and medieval cartographers, occasionally with the phrases hic sunt leones (here be lions) or hic sunt dracones (here be dragons). Rather than leaving unknown territories blank, these cartographers populated them with fantastical creatures that would instil in the map’s readers both a fear of the unknown and a desire to colonise it.” ⤴️
“an attempt to justify the history of violence in the conquest of those lands” ⤴️
“At the end of the seventeenth century, sea monsters gradually disappeared from maps.” ⤴️
“more emphasis was placed on the colonial imaginary of humans’ ability to master the water: to sail on it, conduct trade on it, and colonise it” ⤴️
“introducing new kinds of uncertainties (Kwan 2016).” ⤴️
“the motivations have expanded from colonial conquest to encompass societal securitisation, civic management, capitalist exploitation, healthcare advancement, the handling of climate change, and crisis prevention (Halpern and Günel 2017).” ⤴️
“algorithmic mappings chart not only spaces but also temporalities (Parisi 2013). They create new archival folds in time: the future is folded back into the past, insofar as the future that an algorithmic system can predict is limited by the historical data used to train that system” ⤴️
“If the input data are racist and sexist, the output will most likely also be racist and sexist.” ⤴️
“the conquest of unknowns is a highly generative and speculative act that gives rise to spatial and temporal imaginaries and a wide variety of coping and exploitation strategies (Kwan 2002). These imaginaries function as mirrors of our societies: they tell us something about how to cope with unknowns and about our affective relationship with the unknown.” ⤴️
“Mimi Onuoha (2016) points directly at the unknown in her project The Library of Missing Data Sets, a list of data that go uncollected because of lack of political will, discrimination, or systemic neglect. The list includes topics such as “unarmed civilians killed by police” and “unpaid internships.”” ⤴️
“In mid-twentieth-century metaphorical terms, the black box is the paramount symbol of that about which we can only know the input and the output. It has come to represent what we do not—or cannot—know. The black box expresses not only the unknown and unknowable, but also the human desire to know more, to make the opaque at least predictable, if not transparent. It is a question of how we cope with the invisible—with that which has a presence, yet which is not present or comprehensible with the tools at our disposal (Steiner and Veel 2018).” ⤴️
“a question of methodologies—of the tools available to us to understand the world” ⤴️
“new archival mapping mechanisms embedded in big data have not only created new forms of knowing and predictability, they have also given rise to new modes of unknowing (Rosenberg 2014; Murakami Wood 2015).” ⤴️
“significant challenge in the use of big data: namely, that the empirical past, no matter how comprehensively collected, can never preclude the arrival—or attack—of the unknown and the unexpected.” ⤴️
“the emergence of epistemophilia—and thus the seeds of intellectual life—in the child’s phantasies of getting inside the mother to explore and, as often, take over (as it were, to search and destroy) (Klein 1931; see also Spillius et al. 2011). As Toril Moi (1989) notes, epistemophilia is self-defeating, always frustrated by the limitations of the body. The Freudian drive for knowledge is structurally incapable of achieving total insight or perfect mastery.” ⤴️
“Often what can be known is presented as rational, while what cannot be known is characterised as emotional/subjective/irrational and associated with female subjectivity.” ⤴️
“he temporal coding of the affective reactions of the unknown and the unknowable: the fear or allure of unknown future knowledge that we do not know” ⤴️
“Dreams Rewired/Mobilisierung der Träume, which digs deep into the vaults of film archives from the 1880s to the 1930s and brings out lesser- known stories of technological utopianism and connectivity—in particular, the place of women in this history of technological progress” ⤴️
“big data archives increasingly record and sort such embodiments for the purposes of surveillance and profit.” ⤴️
“A new human right has even given a juridical name to this uncertainty: “the right to be forgotten,” which suggests that not all memory is desirable, and that it also matters in what context a memory is presented and into whose hands it falls (Sutherland 2017b)” ⤴️
“We may wish to unknow things, or we may wish for others to unknow things about us and our communities” ⤴️
“as even state archives are faced with new working practices in the digital realm, there is a need to problematise and reframe the stakes of archival memory and its unknowns” ⤴️
“When do we wish to be remembered, by whom, and in what contexts? Who decides the terms of remembrance? What are the tensions between the permanence of the digital sphere and the right to be forgotten (Sutherland 2017b; Caplan-Bricker 2018)?” ⤴️
“The central issues that emerge through the perspective of error are the processes for detecting the lacunae, slippages, or resistant material that haunt archival holdings, as well as potential errors in archival functioning in the form of technical malfunctions, information anomalies, and human wrongdoing.” ⤴️
“Wendy Hui Kyong Chun notes. Chun suggests that network analytics can be read as “the bastard child of psychoanalysis,” (2018: 69) in the sense that relationships and meanings are constantly being constructed out of seemingly disparate activities carried out by surveilled subjects.” ⤴️
“psychoanalysis, far from being an outdated mode of thinking in the digital age, can prompt scholars to think anew about big data and their analytics. We therefore welcome Chun’s proposal to maintain the presence of psychoanalysis in the study of contemporary archives, echoing previous works outlining the relations between archival logics and psychoanalytic perspectives (Spieker 2007).” ⤴️
“We propose thinking about errors in the contemporary archive not only in terms of the technical problems they can suffer, but also giving consideration to the psychopathological states of mind that digital archives might reflect or even display as cognitive agents themselves.” ⤴️
“The silent workings of today’s big data archives—constantly analysing and diagnosing data in order to detect new connections, trace new patterns, and generate new insights in the form of computational outputs—make Freud’s hermeneutic method of “evenly suspended attention” especially pertinent for a psychoanalytic reading of big data analytics.” ⤴️
“way of listening that consisted “simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly suspended attention’ […] in the face of all that one hears.” ([1912] 1956–1974: 111–112).” ⤴️
“too narrowly focused attention might fall prey to error, missing some crucial analytical clue.” ⤴️
““as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him.”” ⤴️
“(Freud [1912] 1956–1974: 112).” ⤴️
“to try to eliminate errors arising from biases in the mind of the analyst.” ⤴️
“today’s big data operations seem to aspire to that ideal in a no less utopian way.” ⤴️
“removing the risk of human error and asserting instead that the data speak—or even sing—for themselves (Anderson 2008; Veel 2018).” ⤴️
“At first glance, big data appear to offer a mechanical corrective, a concrete and technical method to analyse, detect, eliminate, and neutralise human error. As such, big data discourses on error belong to a long tradition of error studies as an applied science practised in a wide variety of fields, ranging from psychology and economics to engineering and business analytics, which address error as a practical question of detecting and preventing (or exploiting) unwanted occurrences.” ⤴️
“how can we conceptualise the epistemological and political implications embedded in these types of error regime, where uncertainty thrives on various scales? The problem at stake is what constitutes an error in the context of big data archives. What does the mode of detecting them entail? Which errors are tolerated in big data archives and which are feared? Which subjects are deemed errors by these archives?” ⤴️
“Archival errors can give rise to fabulations, including quasi-life forms such as glitches and viruses. But the ends to which such errors are employed depend upon how the errors are inscribed in various strategic programmes,” ⤴️
“neoliberalism and its subversive counter-replies, in which failure can be employed to produce critique, but not necessarily a critique that subverts the system.” ⤴️
“he experience of errors—the sensory mark that they make for statistical outliers in particular.” ⤴️
“the sensory mode in which error is a signal, the disruption of a flow, and a bodily experience all at once. As such, we may simultaneously desire and fear it.” ⤴️
“The difficulty of locating the political implications of error reflects how difficult it is to separate error detection from the political knowledge regimes of which those errors, whether productive or troubling, are a part.” ⤴️
“Sarah T. Roberts’s (2018) work on content moderation, which highlights the ideological framework of naming something an error as it plays out between humans, machines, and political regimes. As a form of uncertainty, error is thus simultaneously a spatial, structural, temporal, and political problematic.” ⤴️
“error is a key concept for understanding today’s data landscapes” ⤴️
“We regard what counts as an error in big data as an unresolved and complex question that pertains as much to the interdisciplinary realm of big data as to the conceptual landscape of error itself. In this way we think of errors in terms not only of technical problems but also of political conditioning and psychopathological states of mind that produce their own logics, which in turn have their own aesthetics and modes of resistance.” ⤴️
“etymology, the term error incorporates the mobile notion of erring, producing an understanding of error as a deviation from a route, a departure from a principle.” ⤴️
“St. Augustine linked the question of erring to the question of sin and morality, imagining God’s path as orderly and straight, and any deviation from it as sin” ⤴️
“With the Enlightenment,” ⤴️
“error was increasingly understood not in terms of sin, but rather as an inevitable part of progress. Yet the notion of error maintained its spatial dimension, albeit now in the form of a labyrinth rather than a straight line.” ⤴️
“Bates (2002) notes, knowledge in the Enlightenment was often imagined as a journey” ⤴️
“big data corporations are troubled by the same questions as Enlightenment thinkers: how to distinguish unproductive or aimless wandering from an adventure that might lead somewhere worth going?” ⤴️
“his becomes a question of how machines learn to detect information-bearing patterns from distracting noise.” ⤴️
“The notion of error, wherever it arises, invokes a sense of normativity and an anxiety about its transgression.” ⤴️
“contain deviant subjectivities” ⤴️
“the deviancy of the hysterical woman.” ⤴️
“the categorisation of error in knowledge production remains gendered and racialised: femininity and blackness are rendered as irritations to the norm, as something to be corrected or simply repressed. For instance, the notion of “outliers”—data points that do not conform to the rest—can be problematised insofar as these “errors” produce a norm, particularly in the categorisation of non-binary gender (D’Ignazio, forthcoming).” ⤴️
“With their methods of statistical aggregation, the analysis of big data archives can end up excluding outliers, extending and reifying existing norms, and producing marginalised subjects as error.” ⤴️
“over- representation of white men in benchmark data sets (Buolamwini 2017).” ⤴️
“to ask whether such technologies should be developed in the first place and to whose benefit.” ⤴️
“f facial recognition worked flawlessly, it would only make matters worse. It would simply ‘perfect’ unfair and stifling patterns of targeting and abuse aimed at historically vulnerable populations” (Hoffmann 2019: np)” ⤴️
“Amaro (2016), who considers how machine learning functions as a “threshold” through which blackness enters, often unwittingly, into social, political, and economic experience” ⤴️
“racism is seen as an error in algorithmic intentions or human judgement, instead of as a systemic reality from which the machine directly derives” ⤴️
“errors are often framed as malfunctions when they actually signify systemic features” ⤴️
‘the system is working exactly as designed’
“The Turing Normalizing Machine, reductive data sets and algorithmic bias are explored to look at precisely how machine learning builds an extensive database of what is deemed social normalcy and what counts as deviation from it” ⤴️
“errors can be regarded as an inroad into critical engagement with big data archives as political sites of information distribution” ⤴️
“archives as holding subversive potential that can be used against the prevailing epistemological order” ⤴️
“alternatives are embedded in the dominant culture—with the result that the power gathered by surveillance and stored in big data archives is never total, consistent, or omnipotent” ⤴️
“a subversive approach to error that recasts the potential for errors in the archive as a world of possibilities” ⤴️
“failure— an error that has become fundamental—can offer different kinds of reward: “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2011: 3).” ⤴️
““errantry introduces relatively unpredictable contact between different organisms thereby raising possibilities for new forms, intermixtures, knowledges and sensibilities to be crafted through the pressures, pains and pleasures characteristic of those contacts.” (2014: 51).” ⤴️
“system error as productive interruptions of seemingly liberal environments that nonetheless closely surveil human behaviour in order to control attempts at resistance.” ⤴️
“n their failure to communicate—signal “a path of escape” from the “predictable confines of informatic control: an opening, a virtuality, a poeisis” (2011: 4).” ⤴️
“glitches offer “a not yet defined break from a procedural flow, fostering a critical potential”” ⤴️
“clusters of scholarship that focus on the moments when digital media go awry, on moments of breakdown, glitches, errors, or bugs” ⤴️
“error is also an approach that can find itself in alliance with political economies in which performances of critique are praised as ventures whose pursuit promotes and strengthens the economy. Silicon Valley’s fetishisation of failure is a case in point (Harvard Business Review 2011).” ⤴️
“Errors can even be seen as a crucial computational function whereby machines used for algorithmic securitisation can learn more accurate methods of control.” ⤴️
“The category of vulnerability permits examination of the archival practice of subjecting and the conceptualisation of data subjects.” ⤴️
“Subjecting is taken here as the process of becoming subordinated, as well as the process of becoming a subject (Butler 1997: 2).” ⤴️
“not only is a subject formed in subordination, but this subordination provides the subject’s continuing conditions of possibility.” ⤴️
“archival power does not merely act on a subject but also forms and enacts the subject into being.” ⤴️
“subjects are always constituted in primary vulnerability, acted on from the start by norms they never chose” ⤴️
“If subjectivity is conferred from elsewhere, vulnerability or exposure to external forces—social norms, institutions, technologies—is necessarily a condition for becoming a subject.” ⤴️
“for Foucault this process of subjectification occurs primarily through the body. In Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1995), the prisoner’s body is the site of regulation and normalisation, but also the site of becoming a juridical subject.” ⤴️
“he individual is formulated by his or her discursively constituted identity as prisoner.” ⤴️
“individuals today readily subject themselves to the tracking, monitoring, and measuring whereby they become data subjects.” ⤴️
“If vulnerability is the essence of being acted on by norms we never choose, what kinds of vulnerability emerge from our quotidian voluntary and involuntary (or semi-voluntary) engagements with data, and through what vulnerabilities do we become data subjects? What kinds of vulnerability emerge when subjection no longer occurs only through the bodily encounter with the institution, but increasingly through data” ⤴️
“data doubles, a virtual and new site of vulnerability?” ⤴️
“vulnerability is a shared condition of human (and non-human) life” ⤴️
“the ontological notion of vulnerability foregrounds a common embodied humanity and equal susceptibility to suffering” ⤴️
“inequalities of power, capacity, or need render some subjects more vulnerable to harm (Taş, 2020).” ⤴️
“Browne (2015) traces biometric surveillance back through the surveillance of black bodies during slavery—for instance, the accounting of bodies through ledgers, the branding of enslaved bodies, or the institutionalisation of lantern laws in the eighteenth century, which subjected the enslaved to heightened visibility.” ⤴️
“current surveillance practices are part of a historical continuum of commodification and violence upon black bodies that render these subjects more vulnerable to current data archives.” ⤴️
“recentre the archival tension between capture and exclusion, that is, the dangers of being both included and excluded by data gathering processes, how datafication amplifies the commodification and visibility of specific bodies (Sutherland 2017b; Noble 2018)” ⤴️
“Belle’s (n.d.) artistic work, which uses the framework of the ledger to add alternative records to the archives of colonial history in the US Virgin Islands, while also exploring material remnants of colonial times that shed light on current capitalist extractive practices (see Navarro 2018).” ⤴️
“The differential distribution of vulnerability is key if we are to conceptualise and understand how data archives produce subjectivities by generating new vulnerabilities or reinforcing existing ones.” ⤴️
“technological infrastructures premised on the continuous exchange and flow of information ultimately subject the already vulnerable to new forms of vulnerability.” ⤴️
“rethink vulnerability as a way to disavow gendered violence and to fight for the right to be vulnerable, to be in public (both online and offline) and not be attacked” ⤴️
“the human body as dependent on and a part of infrastructure, technologies, organisations, life processes, and institutions” ⤴️
“How can we account for the datafied production of bodies without eviscerating the fleshiness of material lives and without reiterating soma-technical dualism?” ⤴️
“Data motility—the process through which the data one generates increasingly move out of one’s control as they are mobilised for specific ends and values” ⤴️
“function creep and social sorting [Lyon, forthcoming])” ⤴️
“a mode of vulnerability” ⤴️
“data shadows or data doubles articulate this anxiety about subjectivation and loss of control” ⤴️contacts#^aa88c2
“the “big data divide” that separates subjects from their data, a symptomatic condition of datafied subjectification.” ⤴️
“we are rarely granted access to the data, or to the purposes for which they are used, once they have been stored and rendered actionable by governments, institutions, companies, or acquaintances.” ⤴️
“embracing the “creepiness” (Chun 2016) of data motility, Erica Scourti’s book The Outage (2014) is a ghostwritten memoir based entirely on her digital footprint.” ⤴️
“we often lack the means and expertise to analyse them, make sense of them, or even recognise them as our own. This then creates new power differentials between those who (willingly and unwillingly) provide data and those who have the means to collect, analyse, and deploy them.” ⤴️
“our data gain a life of their own, circulate freely without our knowledge, and generate ever new data and unintended effects, ultimately creating a deeper and often imperceptible gulf between our embodied selves and our data lives.” ⤴️
“As Judith Butler (1997) reminds us, none of us is quite commensurate with the norms that govern who we are supposed to be” ⤴️
“subjection can be negotiated, that there is room for acting upon the processes of subjection that form us, and that identity can be shaped within a contingent space of subversion.” ⤴️
“performativity is being co-opted and rendered profitable by political economies and regimes of knowledge under late capitalism.” ⤴️
“digital archives are archives in motion, running on dynamic processes of data collection and reproduction” ⤴️
“a continuously generative process for profit and control” ⤴️
“Companies can now engage in pre-emptive personalisation, letting us know in advance what we might want to become and possess in the future.” ⤴️
“This capacity of data to move on from the original signature and produce new possibilities echoes, but also threatens, the performative strategies of individuals in their engagements with data processes, giving rise to unintended performativities” ⤴️
“Legal discourse thus attempts to intervene upon the conditions of possibility for subjects to engage with data, turning data vulnerability and risk into the very essence of online life by granting it legal protection.” ⤴️
“vulnerability as a touchstone for liberal ethics and legal frameworks has been questioned and challenged by intersectional feminist legal theory: there is a universalist quality to its implicit account of human nature, and biopolitics similarly depends on and profits from circulating narratives of risk and protectionism that are essential for legitimating discrimination and violence. These criticisms are often concerned with the conditions of possibility of becoming a vulnerable subject, with who is deemed vulnerable and worthy of protection, and with questions about who grants vulnerability status and how that vulnerability is reinforced rather than mended.” ⤴️
“we thus ask if vulnerability, rather than a shared ontological condition, can be recognised as an unevenly distributed and politically inflected condition of online and offline existence—and, hence, can be seen as a driver of responsibility and intervention” ⤴️
“the necessity for further cultural–theoretical inquiry into big data” ⤴️
“digital technologies continuously capture, process, and archive social, material, and affective information in the form of big data.” ⤴️
“to eliminate human error in large-scale information management” ⤴️
“new and important uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors, and, as a result, new ethical challenges” ⤴️
“show how cultural theories of the archive can be meaningfully applied to the empirical field of big data.” ⤴️
“address the uncertainties present in the storage and analysis of large amounts of information. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, we reveal a set of different, albeit intertwined, configurations of archival uncertainty that emerge” ⤴️
“digitally networked data archives that are a crucial component of today’s cultures of surveillance and governmentality.” ⤴️
“constantly growing data streams” ⤴️
“part of the history of archival phenomena” ⤴️
“which information is now gathered by means of surveillance and automation” ⤴️
“archival reason, a critique that was made possible first by post-structuralist thought and later by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories.” ⤴️
“the authority of the archive as a reliable repository: its capacity to produce truth, offer evidence, and categorise human identities.” ⤴️
“archives have always by definition been uncertain, and this uncertainty has not decreased as the archives have become larger.” ⤴️
“digital environments repurpose and refashion the logic of the archive under conditions of social, political, ecological, and technological uncertainty.” ⤴️
“Current practices of data production, collection, distribution, and consumption both build upon and draw from the cultural history of the archive, as well as raising pertinent new questions” ⤴️
“recognise the historical roots of current practices of data hoarding, storing, leaking, and wasting,” ⤴️
“today’s seemingly streamlined interaction with digital files and folders is every bit as messy, porous, and generative as archival encounters have always been.” ⤴️
“long negotiation between surveillance technology and its subjects (or objects),” ⤴️
“archival subjects, movements, and affects.” ⤴️
“not merely to regard artistic creation as a separate and objectified sphere for academics to critique, but to recognise and facilitate arts- based research as a productive mode of critique and knowledge production in itself (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2011).” ⤴️
“we address uncertainty through three related conceptual lenses—the unknown/unknowable, error, and vulnerability” ⤴️
“spatial and temporal connotations of each lens from a cultural-theoretical perspective,” ⤴️
“to think of big data as a regime of knowledge, power, and control.” ⤴️
“the epistemological decisions made in the compilation of an archive fundamentally define what is archivable, what is knowable, and hence what is deemed disposable and forgotten (Agostinho 2016; Ring 2014).” ⤴️
“questions about access, selection, exclusion, authority, lacunae, and silences.” ⤴️
“the etymological meaning of archive also stems from the Greek arkheion: the residence of the archons, the superior magistrates who command and guard the law, and who possess the “hermeneutic right” and competence to interpret it.” ⤴️
“The “violence of the archive” (Derrida 1995: 12) is played out in its selective operation (storing some elements at the expense of others) and its hermeneutic privilege (ascribing the stored elements with meaning).” ⤴️
“the now of whatever kind of power is being exercised, anywhere, in any place or time” (2001: 1,159).” ⤴️
“the moment when information is captured by means of surveillance technologies has particular significance for understanding how the logic of archiving shapes the operation of power (Ring 2014).” ⤴️
“selection and interpretation—gain new epistemological and political implications when we look at them in relation to surveillance in terms of the collection and use of big data.” ⤴️
“Taylor (2003) and Rebecca Schneider (2011) have questioned archival logic and its exclusion of (or failure to integrate) repertoires of embodied knowledge formed by gestures, voices, movement, flesh, and bone” ⤴️
“archival reason has overlooked the experiences of women and queers, and how these histories are often obscured within existing sources, or discarded altogether (Stone and Cantrell 2016).” ⤴️
“Literary theorist Ann Cvetkovich (2003) has famously argued for an “archive of feelings,” for the need to preserve everyday queer experiences that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a conventional archive;” ⤴️
“the traditional archive is often a queer body of knowledge in and of itself, a disorderly, contingently organised place” ⤴️
“the capture and exclusion of people of colour in and from archives and the kind of knowledge that can be gleaned from the archives of the ruling classes, archives that dehumanise those under colonial rule (Hartman 2008; Copeland and Thompson 2011; Helton et al. 2015; Edwards 2016).” ⤴️
“the archives of slavery and colonialism continue to inform who counts as a human subject today (Gikandi 2015)” ⤴️
“actively mobilise archives as instruments for social and restorative justice.” ⤴️
“the archive” emerges “as an abstract, depopulated space, untouched by human labor and laborers” (Whearty 2018).” ⤴️
“consider “actually existing archives,”” ⤴️
“the ethical challenges of archiving sensitive material, the need for collective work with marginalised and vulnerable communities, and the relevance of archives for human rights, social justice, and care (Caswell and Cifor 2016; Cifor and Wood 2017; Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand 2017; Sutherland 2017a).” ⤴️
“both capture and exclusion have important ethical consequences,” ⤴️
“archives are always contested sites of power, knowledge, possibility, and aspiration” ⤴️
“the emergence of datafication—and its embeddedness in regimes of neoliberal global governance and increasing precarity—means that uncertainty and risk have become functions of disruption complicit with power.” ⤴️
“Our present times are thus imbued with a “spirit of uncertainty” that animates the cultural backdrop of social life (Appadurai 2012: 7).” ⤴️
“the government of the incalculable, a regime in which one could only ever govern through estimation.” ⤴️
“Uncertainty, then, exists at the crux of today’s governance dilemma between security and freedom: if modernity’s governance systems had demanded scientific predictability, universality, and rationality, today’s globalised economies also celebrate uncertainies (O’Malley 2009).” ⤴️
“data companies and governments across the globe welcome big data as an effective solution to deal with informational uncertainty, risks, and unknowns. Its promise of accurate calculations, precise predictions, and pre-emptions speaks to contemporary concerns about the taming of social, economic, financial, environmental, and political risks.” ⤴️
“big data as drivers of creativity and high-gain opportunity. Uncertainty and control are thus equally embraced by techno-capitalism.” ⤴️
“reflections of a political and social reality where uncertainty is profoundly feared and yet simultaneously embraced as potentially disruptive (Thylstrup 2018).” ⤴️
“moments of resistance when individuals and collectives turn towards uncertainty” ⤴️
“the potential to change the way information is held and employed and to provide marginalised individuals and groups with opportunities to contest dominant organisations of information” ⤴️
“remobilisation of uncertainty” ⤴️
“André Breton’s ([1924] 1969: 9) criticism of realism in his “Manifesto of Surrealism”: “our brains are dulled by the incurable mania that consists in reducing the unknown to what is known, to what can be filed.”” ⤴️
“The surrealists were concerned with the high degree of structure found in unconscious objects such as dreams and subconscious actions, as well as with the impossibility of capturing and showing it fully. For them, archival practices were devoted not so much to imposing order on contingencies, but rather to how to work with the existing order of the unconscious (Spieker 2008).” ⤴️
“The unknown and unknowable are the ultimate generators of uncertainty.” ⤴️
“This is a spatial as well as a temporal problematic, and it represents the other side of the coin from the extensive mapping practices of information- intensive environments.” ⤴️
“Thinking about unknowns invariably leads on to thinking about maps. We suggest that mapping is a fundamental archival–technological function and indeed is a drive to make unknowns known and render them available for detection and domination.” ⤴️
“depiction of uncertain and speculative territories by ancient Roman and medieval cartographers, occasionally with the phrases hic sunt leones (here be lions) or hic sunt dracones (here be dragons). Rather than leaving unknown territories blank, these cartographers populated them with fantastical creatures that would instil in the map’s readers both a fear of the unknown and a desire to colonise it.” ⤴️
“an attempt to justify the history of violence in the conquest of those lands” ⤴️
“At the end of the seventeenth century, sea monsters gradually disappeared from maps.” ⤴️
“more emphasis was placed on the colonial imaginary of humans’ ability to master the water: to sail on it, conduct trade on it, and colonise it” ⤴️
“introducing new kinds of uncertainties (Kwan 2016).” ⤴️
“the motivations have expanded from colonial conquest to encompass societal securitisation, civic management, capitalist exploitation, healthcare advancement, the handling of climate change, and crisis prevention (Halpern and Günel 2017).” ⤴️
“algorithmic mappings chart not only spaces but also temporalities (Parisi 2013). They create new archival folds in time: the future is folded back into the past, insofar as the future that an algorithmic system can predict is limited by the historical data used to train that system” ⤴️
“If the input data are racist and sexist, the output will most likely also be racist and sexist.” ⤴️
“the conquest of unknowns is a highly generative and speculative act that gives rise to spatial and temporal imaginaries and a wide variety of coping and exploitation strategies (Kwan 2002). These imaginaries function as mirrors of our societies: they tell us something about how to cope with unknowns and about our affective relationship with the unknown.” ⤴️
“Mimi Onuoha (2016) points directly at the unknown in her project The Library of Missing Data Sets, a list of data that go uncollected because of lack of political will, discrimination, or systemic neglect. The list includes topics such as “unarmed civilians killed by police” and “unpaid internships.”” ⤴️
“In mid-twentieth-century metaphorical terms, the black box is the paramount symbol of that about which we can only know the input and the output. It has come to represent what we do not—or cannot—know. The black box expresses not only the unknown and unknowable, but also the human desire to know more, to make the opaque at least predictable, if not transparent. It is a question of how we cope with the invisible—with that which has a presence, yet which is not present or comprehensible with the tools at our disposal (Steiner and Veel 2018).” ⤴️
“a question of methodologies—of the tools available to us to understand the world” ⤴️
“new archival mapping mechanisms embedded in big data have not only created new forms of knowing and predictability, they have also given rise to new modes of unknowing (Rosenberg 2014; Murakami Wood 2015).” ⤴️
“significant challenge in the use of big data: namely, that the empirical past, no matter how comprehensively collected, can never preclude the arrival—or attack—of the unknown and the unexpected.” ⤴️
“the emergence of epistemophilia—and thus the seeds of intellectual life—in the child’s phantasies of getting inside the mother to explore and, as often, take over (as it were, to search and destroy) (Klein 1931; see also Spillius et al. 2011). As Toril Moi (1989) notes, epistemophilia is self-defeating, always frustrated by the limitations of the body. The Freudian drive for knowledge is structurally incapable of achieving total insight or perfect mastery.” ⤴️
“Often what can be known is presented as rational, while what cannot be known is characterised as emotional/subjective/irrational and associated with female subjectivity.” ⤴️
“he temporal coding of the affective reactions of the unknown and the unknowable: the fear or allure of unknown future knowledge that we do not know” ⤴️
“Dreams Rewired/Mobilisierung der Träume, which digs deep into the vaults of film archives from the 1880s to the 1930s and brings out lesser- known stories of technological utopianism and connectivity—in particular, the place of women in this history of technological progress” ⤴️
“big data archives increasingly record and sort such embodiments for the purposes of surveillance and profit.” ⤴️
“A new human right has even given a juridical name to this uncertainty: “the right to be forgotten,” which suggests that not all memory is desirable, and that it also matters in what context a memory is presented and into whose hands it falls (Sutherland 2017b)” ⤴️
“We may wish to unknow things, or we may wish for others to unknow things about us and our communities” ⤴️
“as even state archives are faced with new working practices in the digital realm, there is a need to problematise and reframe the stakes of archival memory and its unknowns” ⤴️
“When do we wish to be remembered, by whom, and in what contexts? Who decides the terms of remembrance? What are the tensions between the permanence of the digital sphere and the right to be forgotten (Sutherland 2017b; Caplan-Bricker 2018)?” ⤴️
“The central issues that emerge through the perspective of error are the processes for detecting the lacunae, slippages, or resistant material that haunt archival holdings, as well as potential errors in archival functioning in the form of technical malfunctions, information anomalies, and human wrongdoing.” ⤴️
“Wendy Hui Kyong Chun notes. Chun suggests that network analytics can be read as “the bastard child of psychoanalysis,” (2018: 69) in the sense that relationships and meanings are constantly being constructed out of seemingly disparate activities carried out by surveilled subjects.” ⤴️
“psychoanalysis, far from being an outdated mode of thinking in the digital age, can prompt scholars to think anew about big data and their analytics. We therefore welcome Chun’s proposal to maintain the presence of psychoanalysis in the study of contemporary archives, echoing previous works outlining the relations between archival logics and psychoanalytic perspectives (Spieker 2007).” ⤴️
“We propose thinking about errors in the contemporary archive not only in terms of the technical problems they can suffer, but also giving consideration to the psychopathological states of mind that digital archives might reflect or even display as cognitive agents themselves.” ⤴️
“The silent workings of today’s big data archives—constantly analysing and diagnosing data in order to detect new connections, trace new patterns, and generate new insights in the form of computational outputs—make Freud’s hermeneutic method of “evenly suspended attention” especially pertinent for a psychoanalytic reading of big data analytics.” ⤴️
“way of listening that consisted “simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly suspended attention’ […] in the face of all that one hears.” ([1912] 1956–1974: 111–112).” ⤴️
“too narrowly focused attention might fall prey to error, missing some crucial analytical clue.” ⤴️
““as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him.”” ⤴️
“(Freud [1912] 1956–1974: 112).” ⤴️
“to try to eliminate errors arising from biases in the mind of the analyst.” ⤴️
“today’s big data operations seem to aspire to that ideal in a no less utopian way.” ⤴️
“removing the risk of human error and asserting instead that the data speak—or even sing—for themselves (Anderson 2008; Veel 2018).” ⤴️
“At first glance, big data appear to offer a mechanical corrective, a concrete and technical method to analyse, detect, eliminate, and neutralise human error. As such, big data discourses on error belong to a long tradition of error studies as an applied science practised in a wide variety of fields, ranging from psychology and economics to engineering and business analytics, which address error as a practical question of detecting and preventing (or exploiting) unwanted occurrences.” ⤴️
“how can we conceptualise the epistemological and political implications embedded in these types of error regime, where uncertainty thrives on various scales? The problem at stake is what constitutes an error in the context of big data archives. What does the mode of detecting them entail? Which errors are tolerated in big data archives and which are feared? Which subjects are deemed errors by these archives?” ⤴️
“Archival errors can give rise to fabulations, including quasi-life forms such as glitches and viruses. But the ends to which such errors are employed depend upon how the errors are inscribed in various strategic programmes,” ⤴️
“neoliberalism and its subversive counter-replies, in which failure can be employed to produce critique, but not necessarily a critique that subverts the system.” ⤴️
“he experience of errors—the sensory mark that they make for statistical outliers in particular.” ⤴️
“the sensory mode in which error is a signal, the disruption of a flow, and a bodily experience all at once. As such, we may simultaneously desire and fear it.” ⤴️
“The difficulty of locating the political implications of error reflects how difficult it is to separate error detection from the political knowledge regimes of which those errors, whether productive or troubling, are a part.” ⤴️
“Sarah T. Roberts’s (2018) work on content moderation, which highlights the ideological framework of naming something an error as it plays out between humans, machines, and political regimes. As a form of uncertainty, error is thus simultaneously a spatial, structural, temporal, and political problematic.” ⤴️
“error is a key concept for understanding today’s data landscapes” ⤴️
“We regard what counts as an error in big data as an unresolved and complex question that pertains as much to the interdisciplinary realm of big data as to the conceptual landscape of error itself. In this way we think of errors in terms not only of technical problems but also of political conditioning and psychopathological states of mind that produce their own logics, which in turn have their own aesthetics and modes of resistance.” ⤴️
“etymology, the term error incorporates the mobile notion of erring, producing an understanding of error as a deviation from a route, a departure from a principle.” ⤴️
“St. Augustine linked the question of erring to the question of sin and morality, imagining God’s path as orderly and straight, and any deviation from it as sin” ⤴️
“With the Enlightenment,” ⤴️
“error was increasingly understood not in terms of sin, but rather as an inevitable part of progress. Yet the notion of error maintained its spatial dimension, albeit now in the form of a labyrinth rather than a straight line.” ⤴️
“Bates (2002) notes, knowledge in the Enlightenment was often imagined as a journey” ⤴️
“big data corporations are troubled by the same questions as Enlightenment thinkers: how to distinguish unproductive or aimless wandering from an adventure that might lead somewhere worth going?” ⤴️
“his becomes a question of how machines learn to detect information-bearing patterns from distracting noise.” ⤴️
“The notion of error, wherever it arises, invokes a sense of normativity and an anxiety about its transgression.” ⤴️
“contain deviant subjectivities” ⤴️
“the deviancy of the hysterical woman.” ⤴️
“the categorisation of error in knowledge production remains gendered and racialised: femininity and blackness are rendered as irritations to the norm, as something to be corrected or simply repressed. For instance, the notion of “outliers”—data points that do not conform to the rest—can be problematised insofar as these “errors” produce a norm, particularly in the categorisation of non-binary gender (D’Ignazio, forthcoming).” ⤴️
“With their methods of statistical aggregation, the analysis of big data archives can end up excluding outliers, extending and reifying existing norms, and producing marginalised subjects as error.” ⤴️
“over- representation of white men in benchmark data sets (Buolamwini 2017).” ⤴️
“to ask whether such technologies should be developed in the first place and to whose benefit.” ⤴️
“f facial recognition worked flawlessly, it would only make matters worse. It would simply ‘perfect’ unfair and stifling patterns of targeting and abuse aimed at historically vulnerable populations” (Hoffmann 2019: np)” ⤴️
“Amaro (2016), who considers how machine learning functions as a “threshold” through which blackness enters, often unwittingly, into social, political, and economic experience” ⤴️
“racism is seen as an error in algorithmic intentions or human judgement, instead of as a systemic reality from which the machine directly derives” ⤴️
“errors are often framed as malfunctions when they actually signify systemic features” ⤴️
‘the system is working exactly as designed’
“The Turing Normalizing Machine, reductive data sets and algorithmic bias are explored to look at precisely how machine learning builds an extensive database of what is deemed social normalcy and what counts as deviation from it” ⤴️
“errors can be regarded as an inroad into critical engagement with big data archives as political sites of information distribution” ⤴️
“archives as holding subversive potential that can be used against the prevailing epistemological order” ⤴️
“alternatives are embedded in the dominant culture—with the result that the power gathered by surveillance and stored in big data archives is never total, consistent, or omnipotent” ⤴️
“a subversive approach to error that recasts the potential for errors in the archive as a world of possibilities” ⤴️
“failure— an error that has become fundamental—can offer different kinds of reward: “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2011: 3).” ⤴️
““errantry introduces relatively unpredictable contact between different organisms thereby raising possibilities for new forms, intermixtures, knowledges and sensibilities to be crafted through the pressures, pains and pleasures characteristic of those contacts.” (2014: 51).” ⤴️
“system error as productive interruptions of seemingly liberal environments that nonetheless closely surveil human behaviour in order to control attempts at resistance.” ⤴️
“n their failure to communicate—signal “a path of escape” from the “predictable confines of informatic control: an opening, a virtuality, a poeisis” (2011: 4).” ⤴️
“glitches offer “a not yet defined break from a procedural flow, fostering a critical potential”” ⤴️
“clusters of scholarship that focus on the moments when digital media go awry, on moments of breakdown, glitches, errors, or bugs” ⤴️
“error is also an approach that can find itself in alliance with political economies in which performances of critique are praised as ventures whose pursuit promotes and strengthens the economy. Silicon Valley’s fetishisation of failure is a case in point (Harvard Business Review 2011).” ⤴️
“Errors can even be seen as a crucial computational function whereby machines used for algorithmic securitisation can learn more accurate methods of control.” ⤴️
“The category of vulnerability permits examination of the archival practice of subjecting and the conceptualisation of data subjects.” ⤴️
“Subjecting is taken here as the process of becoming subordinated, as well as the process of becoming a subject (Butler 1997: 2).” ⤴️
“not only is a subject formed in subordination, but this subordination provides the subject’s continuing conditions of possibility.” ⤴️
“archival power does not merely act on a subject but also forms and enacts the subject into being.” ⤴️
“subjects are always constituted in primary vulnerability, acted on from the start by norms they never chose” ⤴️
“If subjectivity is conferred from elsewhere, vulnerability or exposure to external forces—social norms, institutions, technologies—is necessarily a condition for becoming a subject.” ⤴️
“for Foucault this process of subjectification occurs primarily through the body. In Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1995), the prisoner’s body is the site of regulation and normalisation, but also the site of becoming a juridical subject.” ⤴️
“he individual is formulated by his or her discursively constituted identity as prisoner.” ⤴️
“individuals today readily subject themselves to the tracking, monitoring, and measuring whereby they become data subjects.” ⤴️
“If vulnerability is the essence of being acted on by norms we never choose, what kinds of vulnerability emerge from our quotidian voluntary and involuntary (or semi-voluntary) engagements with data, and through what vulnerabilities do we become data subjects? What kinds of vulnerability emerge when subjection no longer occurs only through the bodily encounter with the institution, but increasingly through data” ⤴️
“data doubles, a virtual and new site of vulnerability?” ⤴️
“vulnerability is a shared condition of human (and non-human) life” ⤴️
“the ontological notion of vulnerability foregrounds a common embodied humanity and equal susceptibility to suffering” ⤴️
“inequalities of power, capacity, or need render some subjects more vulnerable to harm (Taş, 2020).” ⤴️
“Browne (2015) traces biometric surveillance back through the surveillance of black bodies during slavery—for instance, the accounting of bodies through ledgers, the branding of enslaved bodies, or the institutionalisation of lantern laws in the eighteenth century, which subjected the enslaved to heightened visibility.” ⤴️
“current surveillance practices are part of a historical continuum of commodification and violence upon black bodies that render these subjects more vulnerable to current data archives.” ⤴️
“recentre the archival tension between capture and exclusion, that is, the dangers of being both included and excluded by data gathering processes, how datafication amplifies the commodification and visibility of specific bodies (Sutherland 2017b; Noble 2018)” ⤴️
“Belle’s (n.d.) artistic work, which uses the framework of the ledger to add alternative records to the archives of colonial history in the US Virgin Islands, while also exploring material remnants of colonial times that shed light on current capitalist extractive practices (see Navarro 2018).” ⤴️
“The differential distribution of vulnerability is key if we are to conceptualise and understand how data archives produce subjectivities by generating new vulnerabilities or reinforcing existing ones.” ⤴️
“technological infrastructures premised on the continuous exchange and flow of information ultimately subject the already vulnerable to new forms of vulnerability.” ⤴️
“rethink vulnerability as a way to disavow gendered violence and to fight for the right to be vulnerable, to be in public (both online and offline) and not be attacked” ⤴️
“the human body as dependent on and a part of infrastructure, technologies, organisations, life processes, and institutions” ⤴️
“How can we account for the datafied production of bodies without eviscerating the fleshiness of material lives and without reiterating soma-technical dualism?” ⤴️
“Data motility—the process through which the data one generates increasingly move out of one’s control as they are mobilised for specific ends and values” ⤴️
“function creep and social sorting [Lyon, forthcoming])” ⤴️
“a mode of vulnerability” ⤴️
“data shadows or data doubles articulate this anxiety about subjectivation and loss of control” ⤴️
reminds me of my ‘contact’ concept that allows for data shadows but raises a lot of questions on unhealthy shadows
“the “big data divide” that separates subjects from their data, a symptomatic condition of datafied subjectification.” ⤴️
“we are rarely granted access to the data, or to the purposes for which they are used, once they have been stored and rendered actionable by governments, institutions, companies, or acquaintances.” ⤴️
“embracing the “creepiness” (Chun 2016) of data motility, Erica Scourti’s book The Outage (2014) is a ghostwritten memoir based entirely on her digital footprint.” ⤴️
“we often lack the means and expertise to analyse them, make sense of them, or even recognise them as our own. This then creates new power differentials between those who (willingly and unwillingly) provide data and those who have the means to collect, analyse, and deploy them.” ⤴️
“our data gain a life of their own, circulate freely without our knowledge, and generate ever new data and unintended effects, ultimately creating a deeper and often imperceptible gulf between our embodied selves and our data lives.” ⤴️
“As Judith Butler (1997) reminds us, none of us is quite commensurate with the norms that govern who we are supposed to be” ⤴️
“subjection can be negotiated, that there is room for acting upon the processes of subjection that form us, and that identity can be shaped within a contingent space of subversion.” ⤴️
“performativity is being co-opted and rendered profitable by political economies and regimes of knowledge under late capitalism.” ⤴️
“digital archives are archives in motion, running on dynamic processes of data collection and reproduction” ⤴️
“a continuously generative process for profit and control” ⤴️
“Companies can now engage in pre-emptive personalisation, letting us know in advance what we might want to become and possess in the future.” ⤴️
“This capacity of data to move on from the original signature and produce new possibilities echoes, but also threatens, the performative strategies of individuals in their engagements with data processes, giving rise to unintended performativities” ⤴️
“Legal discourse thus attempts to intervene upon the conditions of possibility for subjects to engage with data, turning data vulnerability and risk into the very essence of online life by granting it legal protection.” ⤴️
“vulnerability as a touchstone for liberal ethics and legal frameworks has been questioned and challenged by intersectional feminist legal theory: there is a universalist quality to its implicit account of human nature, and biopolitics similarly depends on and profits from circulating narratives of risk and protectionism that are essential for legitimating discrimination and violence. These criticisms are often concerned with the conditions of possibility of becoming a vulnerable subject, with who is deemed vulnerable and worthy of protection, and with questions about who grants vulnerability status and how that vulnerability is reinforced rather than mended.” ⤴️
“we thus ask if vulnerability, rather than a shared ontological condition, can be recognised as an unevenly distributed and politically inflected condition of online and offline existence—and, hence, can be seen as a driver of responsibility and intervention” ⤴️
“the necessity for further cultural–theoretical inquiry into big data” ⤴️
“digital technologies continuously capture, process, and archive social, material, and affective information in the form of big data.” ⤴️
“to eliminate human error in large-scale information management” ⤴️
“new and important uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors, and, as a result, new ethical challenges” ⤴️
“show how cultural theories of the archive can be meaningfully applied to the empirical field of big data.” ⤴️
“address the uncertainties present in the storage and analysis of large amounts of information. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, we reveal a set of different, albeit intertwined, configurations of archival uncertainty that emerge” ⤴️
“digitally networked data archives that are a crucial component of today’s cultures of surveillance and governmentality.” ⤴️
“constantly growing data streams” ⤴️
“part of the history of archival phenomena” ⤴️
“which information is now gathered by means of surveillance and automation” ⤴️
“archival reason, a critique that was made possible first by post-structuralist thought and later by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories.” ⤴️
“the authority of the archive as a reliable repository: its capacity to produce truth, offer evidence, and categorise human identities.” ⤴️
“archives have always by definition been uncertain, and this uncertainty has not decreased as the archives have become larger.” ⤴️
“digital environments repurpose and refashion the logic of the archive under conditions of social, political, ecological, and technological uncertainty.” ⤴️
“Current practices of data production, collection, distribution, and consumption both build upon and draw from the cultural history of the archive, as well as raising pertinent new questions” ⤴️
“recognise the historical roots of current practices of data hoarding, storing, leaking, and wasting,” ⤴️
“today’s seemingly streamlined interaction with digital files and folders is every bit as messy, porous, and generative as archival encounters have always been.” ⤴️
“long negotiation between surveillance technology and its subjects (or objects),” ⤴️
“archival subjects, movements, and affects.” ⤴️
“not merely to regard artistic creation as a separate and objectified sphere for academics to critique, but to recognise and facilitate arts- based research as a productive mode of critique and knowledge production in itself (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2011).” ⤴️
“we address uncertainty through three related conceptual lenses—the unknown/unknowable, error, and vulnerability” ⤴️
“spatial and temporal connotations of each lens from a cultural-theoretical perspective,” ⤴️
“to think of big data as a regime of knowledge, power, and control.” ⤴️
“the epistemological decisions made in the compilation of an archive fundamentally define what is archivable, what is knowable, and hence what is deemed disposable and forgotten (Agostinho 2016; Ring 2014).” ⤴️
“questions about access, selection, exclusion, authority, lacunae, and silences.” ⤴️
“the etymological meaning of archive also stems from the Greek arkheion: the residence of the archons, the superior magistrates who command and guard the law, and who possess the “hermeneutic right” and competence to interpret it.” ⤴️
“The “violence of the archive” (Derrida 1995: 12) is played out in its selective operation (storing some elements at the expense of others) and its hermeneutic privilege (ascribing the stored elements with meaning).” ⤴️
“the now of whatever kind of power is being exercised, anywhere, in any place or time” (2001: 1,159).” ⤴️
“the moment when information is captured by means of surveillance technologies has particular significance for understanding how the logic of archiving shapes the operation of power (Ring 2014).” ⤴️
“selection and interpretation—gain new epistemological and political implications when we look at them in relation to surveillance in terms of the collection and use of big data.” ⤴️
“Taylor (2003) and Rebecca Schneider (2011) have questioned archival logic and its exclusion of (or failure to integrate) repertoires of embodied knowledge formed by gestures, voices, movement, flesh, and bone” ⤴️
“archival reason has overlooked the experiences of women and queers, and how these histories are often obscured within existing sources, or discarded altogether (Stone and Cantrell 2016).” ⤴️
“Literary theorist Ann Cvetkovich (2003) has famously argued for an “archive of feelings,” for the need to preserve everyday queer experiences that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a conventional archive;” ⤴️
“the traditional archive is often a queer body of knowledge in and of itself, a disorderly, contingently organised place” ⤴️
“the capture and exclusion of people of colour in and from archives and the kind of knowledge that can be gleaned from the archives of the ruling classes, archives that dehumanise those under colonial rule (Hartman 2008; Copeland and Thompson 2011; Helton et al. 2015; Edwards 2016).” ⤴️
“the archives of slavery and colonialism continue to inform who counts as a human subject today (Gikandi 2015)” ⤴️
“actively mobilise archives as instruments for social and restorative justice.” ⤴️

Resources

Uncertain Archives