Tagged: memory Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• 

  Mark 4:51 pm on October 29, 2017 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Archive ( 1,263 ), archives ( 2 ), Archiving ( 115 ), Becoming Who We Are ( 54 ), biography ( 22 ), blogging ( 60 ), cory doctorow ( 2 ), Digital Universities ( 221 ), memory, Social Media for Academics ( 293 ), Thinking ( 628 )   

  Some thoughts on intellectual self-archiving 

  Anyone who has read my blog for a while will be aware that I use it to self-archive. As Cory Doctorow explains in this wonderful piece, it’s a mode of information storage suitable for those whose working lives revolve around the identification, evaluation and retrieval of information:

  I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I’m writing science fiction, editorials, columns, or tech books, whether I’m speaking from a podium or yammering down the phone at some poor reporter, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.

  As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.

  Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

  Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters.

  Blogs are far from the only way to produce what Doctorow describes as “a central repository of all of the fruits of my labors in the information fields”. The commonplace book is an obvious precursor to the research blog. Luhman used a terrifyingly intricate filecard system. C. Wright Mills advocated a file or journal to keep track of ‘fringe thoughts’. Any system will entail certain constraints and affordances for your self-archiving. However, the usefulness of an archiving system will depend as much on how you use it as on which system you choose.

  It occurred to me recently that my self-archiving has become inconsistent. Whereas I went through a phase of putting everything on the blog, often leading to five or six posts per day, it’s now spread across a number of systems:

  1. Highlights and notes in Amazon Kindle
  2. Ideas grouped together in talks on Artefact cards
  3. Resources archived in a number of e-mail folders
  4. Points to explore archived in Notability
  5. Ideas placed directly into ongoing writing

  The first point troubles me because I despise Amazon yet become more dependent upon them with each day I use this system. The latter one in particular troubles me because I tend to over-write. I find producing words relatively easy and it’s only in the few years since my PhD that I’ve learned to edit myself properly. Therefore ‘fringe-thoughts’ that immediately find expression might end up being lost.

  The urge to capture everything might seem obsessive. However, there’s something genuinely exciting about the idea of building a living archive of your thought over a period of decades. This blog has been active since 2010, encompassing 3426 posts over almost 7 years. Looking back on it, I’m struck by how much my thought has changed in that time but also how many continuities there are. Things I struggled to express years ago are now clearly defined questions I’m addressing in my research.

  Perhaps I need to put more effort into this, embracing intellectual self-archiving as a commitment rather than merely a habit. Though it seems possible that simply having written this post, articulating the issues and archiving it in my ‘outboard brain’, might be sufficient to change my practice. It often is and that’s one of many things which is so engrossing about intellectual self-archiving.

   

  Reply Cancel reply

  Name

  Email

  Website

  Notify me of new comments via email.

  Notify me of new posts via email.

  This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

• 

  Mark 11:02 am on April 7, 2016 Permalink
  Tags: Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? ( 48 ), cultural dynamics, dispute, ideology ( 10 ), memory, memory wars, philosophy of technology ( 26 ), The Technological History of Digital Capitalism ( 137 )   

  Why digitalisation gives rise to ‘memory wars’ 

  It’s a common place to recognise that digitalisation makes it easier to encounter the views of others, particularly those who we might not find within our locality. However an important dimension of this is how it also encourages competition between views, as tensions which might not have previously been ‘activated’ become so. I thought ‘memory wars’ was a really evocative concept for a particular class of the ensuing disputes. By Andrew Jakubowicz, on loc 1791-1806 in Save As  Digital Memories, edited by Hoskins et al:

  Many protagonists in these memory wars look for ways to foreground particular perspectives or truth claims, and elbow out their competitors. Arguments over the authentic historical record are particularly volatile in ethno-cultural and religio-political situations, where ‘truth’ becomes a contested space.

  User-created content brings into stark relief the more general argument about memory being a process of the here and now, in which the past is sequestered into defended packages of claims to truth. Because digital technology in a sense democratises the process of memory-legitimation, or at least reduces to near-zero the costs of entry, it fundamentally transforms the dynamic of testing truth claims and securing

   
• 

  Mark 10:52 am on March 29, 2016 Permalink
  Tags: biography ( 22 ), Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science ( 128 ), digital data ( 8 ), digital traces, digitalisation ( 7 ), life writing, memory, philosophy of technology ( 26 ), The Technological History of Digital Capitalism ( 137 )   

  Digital Data, Epistemic Gain and Epistemic Loss: we need to stop seeing digitalisation in epochal terms 

  I’m reading an interesting chapter, by Paul Longley Arthur in the collection Save As… Digital Memories, concerning digitalisation and its implications for biography and life writing. It discusses the challenges that the dominance of digital data poses for life writing:

  • Some forms of digital data being impossible to access
  • Other forms of digital data being so easy to access, edit and disseminate that it’s hard to know how to evaluate it
  • Digital data displacing more established modes of writing and correspondence on which biographers have tended to rely
  • Obsolescence of early digital formats precluding access
  • Unreliability or non-existence of archiving procedures for digital data
  • The unevenness of existing archiving procedures and epistemic problems that causes
  • Storage of data is conditioned by user-defined privacy settings, inflected through a continually changing series of options within the interface
  • Not all modalities are equally likely to be archived or susceptible to being deciphered: yet digital communication often multimodal and meaning lost if this isn’t recognised
  • Plural online identities complicate inference from available digital data
  • Most people lack adequate strategies for the management of digital data, particularly in the long term

  This results in what he describes as a ‘great paradox’:

  It is a great paradox that, at a time when there is an unprecedented amount of textual interaction and information about our lives, if the current pattern persist we are in danger of leaving fewer personal textual traces than ever before and those we do leave may well be either inaccessible to indecipherable by others.

  It’s so usual to see digitalisation framed as an epistemic gain: we can now see what people do and this observation is unobtrusive. It’s refreshing to focus upon the epistemic loss entailed by digitalisation. Doing so helps us detach a methodological appraisal of the phenomenon from the epochal theorising in which it is too often bound up.

   
• 

  Mark 9:45 am on July 20, 2015 Permalink
  Tags: memory, reflexivity ( 45 ), temporality ( 14 ), Uncategorized ( 1,962 )   

  the synchronised society 

  I went to see an excellent exhibition about children’s television yesterday afternoon, intended to explore “how the magical programmes of our childhood have created memories and nostalgia in adults and children alike”. The possibility of such explanation presupposes some degree of collectivity. The exhibition was ambiguous at points but there was a clear undercurrent of ‘our memories’ informing the curation, something which was particularly pronounced for me given I was seeing it with a Polish friend for whom many of these were not her memories. It would be possible to interpret such shared cultural reference points as collective memories or collective horizons, albeit ones delineable by age cohort, but it occurred to me that we could more usefully read this in terms of temporality and routine. This snippet stood out to me yesterday and I’ve been thinking about it since:

  

  This degree of synchronisation, perhaps itself dependent upon a long discarded Reithian vision, seems jarringly anachronistic in retrospect. But it’s also much easier to recognise it empirically than is the case for contemporary routines of cultural consumption and the aggregate patterns they produce in wider social life. I’m not just talking about ‘our’ having watched the same television at the same time, but rather that ‘same time’ as being embedded in a broader cluster of routines which constitute the texture of everyday life.

  To be clear: I’m not suggesting that the existence of the “toddler’s truce” necessarily brought about its supposed effect. Nor that cultural consumption, or its highly synchronised and normatively charged absence from 6pm to 7pm, necessarily anchored routines or was even a particularly significant component of them. But it’s left me thinking about how temporal structures can be used to understand cultural memory, as well as how these are both facilitated by but also work to encourage clusters of everyday routines which will, at least as a whole, contribute over time to the constitution of the people who are leading them.