Supplemental Resources

In designing this course I examined a crapload (that’s a library-science term) of texts. What follows is a list of those that have informed my own understanding of archives and libraries, but which I simply couldn’t squeeze onto the syllabus. I’ll share them here in the hopes that they may be of use to you as you create your own reading lists and pursue your final projects.

Historicizing Information Overload

John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000); “The Data DelugeThe Economist (25 February 2010); “Data, Data Everywhere” Special Report The Economist (25 February 2010).

What’s In the Archive?

Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005): 1-24; Wolfgang Ernst, “Beyond the Archive: Bit MappingMedia Art Net (2004); Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, Ed. Jussi Parikka(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2012); Wolfgang Ernst, “Order by Fluctuation? Classical Archives and Their Audio-visual Counterparts,” Archives Aesthetic Practices Seminar, National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden, May 19, 2009 [dead link!]; Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad” (1925) In General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Collier, 1925): pp?; Robert Gehl, “YouTube as Archive: Who Will Curate This Digital Wunderkammer?” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12:1 (2009): 43-60; Elizabeth Honer & Susan Graham, “Should Users Have a Role in Determining the Future Archive?…” Liber Quarterly (2001): 382-4 [libraries vs. archives]; Boris Groys, “What Carries the Archive – and For How Long?” In Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder, Eds., Information is Alive (Rotterdam: V2_Publishers/NAI, 2003): 178-93 [media ontology + the archive]; Geert Lovink, Interview with German Media Archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst, Nettime (26 February 2003); Tim Maly, “Dark Archives” Contents 5 (March 2013) [the unknown]; Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archives from Across the Disciplines” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4:1 (2004): 9-25; Jussi Parikka, Excerpt from “Archive Dynamics: Software Culture and Digital Heritage” In What Is Media Archaeology? (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012): 113-122 [preservation, memory, storage]; Sven Spieker, “Freud’s Files” In The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2009): 34-49; Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust” The American Historical Review 106:4 (October 2001): 1159-1180; John Tagg, “The Archiving Machine; or, The Camera and the Filing Cabinet” Grey Room 47 (Spring 2012): 24-37 [archival “furniture”].

Who’s In the Archive?

Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Inspiration” In Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder, Eds., Information is Alive (Rotterdam: V2_Publishers/NAI, 2003): 14-25 [the trace + migrant archive]; Ariella Azoulay, “ArchivePolitical Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (December 2011) [right to deposit + access archival material]; Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 2013); Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, Trans. Thomas Scott-Railton(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) [embodied archival research; voices in the archive]; Verne Harris, “The Hospitable Archivist” Volume 15 “Destination Library” (2008): 96-9 [archives for justice]; Benjamin C. Hutchens, “Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-Archive” SubStance 36: 2 (2007): 37-55 [anarchism; the an-archive; forgetting];Tina M. Kampt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012): Dragan Kujundzic, “Archigraphia: On the Future of Testimony and the Archive to Come” In Charles Merewether, Ed., The Archive: Documents in Contemporary Art (MIT Press 2006): 172-6 [IBM + Holocaust]; Tan Lin, “Archives of Memory” (8 March 2010) [Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg – archiving “moods” in the form of porcelain]; Brian Massumi, “The Archive of Experience” In Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder, Eds., Information is Alive (Rotterdam: V2_Publishers/NAI, 2003): 142-51 [archiving affect + movement]; D. T. Max, “Final Destination” New Yorker (June 2007) [on the Ransom Humanities Research Center]; Paul Ricoeur, “Archives, Documents, Traces” In Charles Merewether, Ed., The Archive: Documents in Contemporary Art (MIT Press 2006): 66-69 [trade, evidence, testimony]; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Simur: An Essay in Reading the Archives (Introduction)” In Charles Merewether, Ed., The Archive: Documents in Contemporary Art (MIT Press 2006): 163-9 [literary criticism + the archives]; Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3-64; Ann Laura Stoler, “Prologue in Two Parts” & “The Pulse of the Archive” In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009): 1-53; Francesca Veronesi & Petra Gemeinboeck, “Disembodied Landscapes” Performance Research 14:4 (2009): 74-80 [on Aboriginal Songlines]; Emily Wroczynski, “Walid Raad and the Atlas GroupThird Text 25:6 (November 2011): 763-773.

Archival Aesthetics

Sue Breakell, “Perspectives: Negotiating the ArchiveTate Papers (Spring 2008); Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’: The Anomic Archive” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117-45 [Richter, Warburg, Höck, Rodchenko]; Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (Steidl/ICP, 2008) [Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jef Geys, Zoe Leonard’s Fae Richard Photo Archive”, Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas]; National Archives of Australia, Visible Archive Series Browser; Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, “Innovative Forms of Archives” Series, e-flux; Ingrid Schaffner & Matthias Winzen, Eds., Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art (New York: Prestel, 1998) [Warhol’s Time Capsules, Arman, Douglas Blau, Jennifer Bolande, Christian Boltanski, David Bunn, Joseph Cornell, Hanne Darboven, Aby Warburg]; Sven Spieker, “1970-2000: Archive, Database, Photography” In The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2009): 130-171 [Hans-Peter Feldman, Susan Hiller, Gerhard Richter, Walid Raad, Boris Mikhailov]; Domietta Torlasco, The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) [Monica Bonvicini, Pierre Huyghe, Agnès Varda, Marco Poloni, Chris Marker].

Organizing Media’s “Innumerable Species”

Clare Beghtol, “Classification Theory” Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd Ed. (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010): 1045-1060; Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700” Journal of the History of Ideas 64:1 (2003): 11-28 [Conrad Gessner, Bibliotheca Universalis]; Geoffrey Bowker & Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Suzanne Briet, What is Documentation? Trans. Ronald E. Day, Laurent Martinet & Hermina G. B. Anghelescu (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006); Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Malden, MA: Polity, 2000): 9-110 [on the relations between the organization of libraries and that of university curricula; on reorganization]; Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From the Encyclopedia to Wikipedia, Vol. 2 (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012): 52-6 [on classification, including that of images]; 149-50 [on deletion/purging]; Cory Doctorow, “Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta Utopia” Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications: 2008):95-103; Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980):97-8 [Conrad Gessner, Bibliotheca Universalis]; Melanie Feinberg, “Organization as Expression: Classification as Digital Media” In Bill Aspray and Megan Winget, Eds., Digital Media (Scarecrow Press, forthcoming); Barbara Fisher, “The Dewey DilemmaLibrary Journal (1 October 2009); Birger Hjørland, “Is Classification Necessary After Google?” Journal of Documentation 68:3 (2012): 299 – 317; Clay Shirky, “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and TagsShirky.com (2005); Elaine Svenonius, “Information Organization” + “Bibliographic Languages” In The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (Cambridge, MA: 2000): 1-14, 53-66; Couze Venn, “The Collection” Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3 (2006): 35-40;
David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (New York: Holt, 2008): “The Three Orders of Order”: 17-23 + “The Geography of Knowledge”: 46-57, 61-3 [Dewey, Amazon]; “Nests in Trees”: 68-71; Linneaus’s Paper-Based List: 77; “Trees Without Paper”: 77-83 [Linneaus à Raganathan] + “New Properties, New Strategies, New Knowledge”: 100-6 + “The Span of Meaning”: 169-72 + “Shared Knowledge”: 201-5; “Knowledge, Essence, and Meaning”: 222
Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008): “From Aristotle to Alexandria”: 66-70 [Aristotle’s work on categorization] +“The Astral Power Station”: 136-40 [modes of cataloguing human knowledge – Bacon, Wilkins] + “Diderot’s Encyclopedia”: 147-51; “Jefferson’s Library: 161-4 [Linnaeus + Bacon] + “The Industrial Library”: 167-80 [Panizzi, Cutter, Dewey, Raganathan].

Libraries: From Mesopotamia to Madison Avenue

Jan Assman, “Libraries in the Ancient World – with Special Reference to Ancient Egypt,” Trans. Robin Benson, In Susanne Bieri & Walther Fuchs, Eds., Building for Books: Traditions and Visions (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001): 51-67; Thomas Augst & Kenneth Carpenter, Eds., Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Thomas Augst & Wayne E. Wiegand, Eds., Libraries as Agencies of Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale 2001); Roger Chartier, “Libraries Without Walls” Representations 42 (Spring 1993); Sean Cubitt, “Library” Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3 (2006): 581-606; Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Tradition’s Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria” October 100 (Spring 2002): 133-153; Edward Howland, “The Public Libraries of the United StatesHarper’s New Monthly Magazine  (April 1877): 722-30; Fred Lerner, The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age (New York: Continuum, 1999); Alberto Manguel, “The Library as Myth” [Tower of Babel & Library of Alexandria] + “The Library as Space” [on Diderot’s Encyclopedie] The Library at Night (Toronto Knopf Canada, 2006): 6-34, 81-89; Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (New York: Vintage, 1999); Konstantinos Sp. Staikos, The Great Libraries: From Antiquity to the Renaissance (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2000); Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008): “The Universal Library”: 70-5 [Alexandria] + “After Alexandria”: 75-7 [Roman libraries] + “Houses of Mumblers”: 86-91 [Cassiodorus, Vivarium scriptorium, subject-level classification, annotation, craft textual production].

Idiosyncratic and Unorthodox Libraries

Terry Belanger, Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books (New York: Oak Knoll Press, 2003); Melanie Feinberg, “Information System Design for Communication: The Use of Genre as a Design Element” [unpublished manuscript; on Prelinger & Warburg libraries]; Nina Katchadourian, “Sorted Books Project”; Alberto Manguel, “The Library as Order” The Library at Night (Toronto Knopf Canada, 2006): 36-63; Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, “Every Shot, Every Episode”; “There Is Nothing Wrong In This Whole Wide World” McSweeney’s (n.d.): http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/events/chriscobb.html [color classification].
PRELINGER: Melanie Feinberg, “Classificationist as Author: The Case of the Prelinger Library” [unpublished manuscript]; Megan Shaw Prelinger, “On the Organization of the Prelinger Library”; Megan Shaw Prelinger, “To Build a LibraryBad Subjects 73 (April 2005); Marie L. Radford, Jessica Lingel & Gary R. Radford, “Alternative Libraries as Heterotopias: Challenging Conventional Constructs” Paper presented at Library Research Seminar V, University of Maryland, College Park, October 6-9, 2010.
WARBURG: Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas,” Frieze 80 (January-February 2004; Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science” In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Ed. & Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, “On the Warburg Humanities Library,” Trans. Mark Walz, In Susanne Bieri & Walther Fuchs, Eds., Building for Books: Traditions and Visions (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001): 253-267; Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’: The Anomic Archive” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117-45; Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive” In Charles Merewether, Ed., The Archive: Documents in Contemporary Art (MIT Press 2006): 85-102; Common Knowledge 18:1 (Winter 2012): Warburg Special Issue; E. H. Gombrich, “Warburg: A Historical Witness” In Ingrid Schaffner & Matthias Winzen, Eds., Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art (New York: Prestel, 1998); Ernst Gombrich, “The Warburg Institute: A Personal MemoirThe Gombrich Archive: http://www.gombrich.co.uk/showdoc.php?id=108; Philippe-Alain Michaud, “Hamburg: The Art History Scene” In Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, Trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2007): 229-46; Fritz Saxl, “The History of Warburg’s Library” in E. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1980).

The Future Library

Robert Darnton, “The Library in the New AgeThe New York Review of Books (12 June 2008) [history of writing, books; inherent instability of texts; unreliable news; editions of canonical texts; library as citadel of learning;  incompleteness of record created by Google Books; shore up the library]; Robert, Darnton, “The Library: Three Jeremiads” The New York Review of Books (23 November 2010): [cost of journals; “settlement” btw Google Books and academic library partners; proposal for National Digital Library]; Holmes Films, The Librarian, 1947; Daniel Mendelsohn, “God’s Librarians” The New Yorker (3 January 2011): 24-30; innumerable recent links in Pinboard.

Tabula of Relationships, Orders of Things

[1] Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 3-25; Victoria Vesna, Excerpts from “Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand: The Database Aesthetics of Everything” In Vesna, Ed., Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 22-31 [Bucky Fuller’s Chronofile + Libraries as Information Containers]
OTLET: W. Boyd Rayward, “The Case of Paul Otlet, Pioneer of Information Science, Internationalist, visionary: Reflections on Biography” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 23:3 (September 1991): 135-45; Charles van den Heuvel, “MundaneumVolume 15 “Destination Library” (2008): 48-53; Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Brith of the Information Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Alex Wright, “The Forgotten Forefather,” Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008): 184-92; Alex Wright, “The Web Time ForgotNew York Times (June 17, 2008);
BUSH: Vannevar Bush, “Memex Revisited” (1967) Reprinted in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Thomas Keenan, Eds., New Media Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006): 85-95; J. C. R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965); Alex Wright, “Memex Redux,” Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008): 192-203.

Database Episteme

Leslie Johnston, “From Records to Data: It’s Not Just About Collections Any MoreThe Signal: Digital Preservation (Library of Congress blog) (November 4, 2011); Scott Lash, “Information Flows and Involuntary Memory” In Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder, Eds., Information is Alive (Rotterdam: V2_Publishers/NAI, 2003): 194-205; Bill LeFurgy, “Linked Open Data: A Beckoning ParadiseThe Signal: Digital Preservation (Library of Congress blog) (June 22, 2011); M. Lynne Neufeld & Martha Cornog, “Database History: From Dinosaurs to Compact Discs” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 37:4 (July 1986): 183-90; Trevor Owens, “The Metadata Games Crowdsourcing Toolset for Libraries & Archives: An Interview with Mary FlanaganThe Signal: Digital Preservation (Library of Congress blog) (April 3, 2013); Ed Summers & Dorothea Salo, “Linking Things on the Web: A Pragmatic Examination of Linked Data for Libraries, Museums and Archives” (unpublished, 2013); Eugene Thacker, “Database/Body: Bioinformatics, Biopolitics, and Totally Connected Media SystemsSwitch 5:3; Kazys Varnelis, Review: Google Images and Flickr Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69:4 (December 2010): 580-3.

Database Aesthetic

Grahame Weinbren, “Ocean, Database, Recut” In Victoria Vesna, Ed., Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 61-85. [Database vs. Narrative – in response to Manovich].

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