Pink-Slipped by Jane M Gaines

Author:Jane M Gaines
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

THE ARCHIVE: FROM STORAGE TO TRANSMISSION

It may be clear from my comparison between “counting” and “telling” as a means to historical knowledge that I am still weighing both methodological approaches as solutions to the problem of what to say “happened” to the women in the silent film industry. Yet the verdict is still out on “digital histories” as the critique of traditional history, and we have only just begun to tap the creative uses of data, including the myriad possibilities of programmed visualization. The data list may represent a challenge to or a check on the narrative means of making sense of historical fragments, which, historians may concur, is never an easy task (Lovink 2013, 196). Then, as soon as we raise the question of fragments, we have raised the problem of forms, formats, order, and storage spaces. Adjacent to the problem of the list is then the issue of the archivization of data or of whatever it is that is kept, a “what” that determines how that “what” goes in, gets processed, and is taken out.

While Ernst's more controversial challenge is to storytelling, he also stirs up thought about the storage function of the archive, given the gigantic capacities of the internet. In an interview conducted in 2003, he describes the ways in which he sees the archive as transformed, especially in a transition from inaccessible to instantly available. In contrast with the old archive as boxed up, vaulted, and hidden away, he wants to consider the archival function of digitized records online as “no longer forgotten,” no longer unaccessed, and no longer the “final destination of the document”(Lovink/Ernst 2013, 193). And his prediction? The earlier notion of the archive will “dissolve into electronic circuits and data flow.” The “dissolution” of that musty space, as Ernst envisions, signals the end of the archival function as defined by storage conditions (ibid., 202). The internet as space for the relay of data represents the great shift from finite storage to infinite transmission. But what replaces that space is enough unlike what it has been for centuries that the continued use of the term “archive” can seem absurd.

Ernst, following Foucault, wants to see the archive as a “discontinuity.”42 And yet, the archive as a “discontinuity” and therefore the antithesis of “narrative closure” may now be too predictable a point.43 More problematic, even Ernst's insight about archival “discontinuity” is lost if we don't know whether by “archive” is meant the traditional “archive” or the online “archive,” the difference between the two starkly contrasted in the theorization of the digital archival.44 What media archaeology that follows Ernst and Foucault most usefully takes up is the logic of informatics and the hardware that supports the multimedia retainer, the arché of source codes focused on storage and rereading functions (Lovink 2013, 196). That is, this archaeology aims to study what are basically algorithmic tasks or computer operations (Ernst 2013, 150).

Here is where I begin to think about the disjuncture between computer operations, the material now archived

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