Book dossier

The Politics of Mass Digitization

by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

"Today, anyone with an internet connection can access hundreds of millions of digitized cultural artifacts from the comfort of their desk. And every day cultural institutions and private bodies add thousands of new cultural works to the digital sphere. Mass digitization is forming new central nexuses of knowledge and new ways of engaging with that knowledge. What at first glance appears to be a simple act of digitization (a transformation of singular books from boundary objects to open sets of data), at closer examination reveals a complex process teeming with diverse political, legal, and cultural investments. This book argues that mass digitization has become a global cultural political project. It offers an in-depth examination of mass digitization of cultural memory in the West and beyond. It suggests a new approach to the study of digital cultural memory archives, proposing to understand mass digitization not as neutral technical processes, but rather as distinct subpolitical processes that build new kinds of archives and new ways of interacting with these archives. And it seeks to develop a critical theoretical framework for understanding the new archival apparatuses and the politics and memory dynamics they give rise to"--