Automating the Achive: From Card Catologues to Computer Bots

Description

Speaker: Dr Siddharth Soni (Cambridge Digital Humanities)

One of the enduring fantasies of technological automation is a ‘total’ archive. An archive without gaps or fissures or lacunae. An Archive that is intelligent, self-aware, and even sentient. One that can write its own story without historians and scholars dawdling in its dusty entrails. From card catalogues to computer bots, this talk explores the extractive, military, and colonial genealogies of the idea of automation within the archive.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars series.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Stefanie Ullmann.