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Category Archives: Memory

Curation, Museums, Memory

09 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by John in Curation, Memory

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The following is a reading response to a number of readings I read for Introduction to Digital Curation I’m taking through the University of Maine’s Digital Curation Graduate Certificate Program.

I’m tempted to discuss Harvey Ross’ “Digital Curation: Scope and Incentives”1.  because it won me over with the first sentence which argues that digital curation is “central to professional practice in all digital environments” (3). Before class started, I’d already decided this is going to be the central argument in the presentation I’m proposing for next year’s Computers and Writing conference. Ross’ first chapter has already offered me plenty of ideas to develop a presentation for members of the computers and writing, digital rhetoric, and digital humanities communities. In spite of that, however, I am instead going to focus my response on Rahel Aima’s “Desiring Machines” and Edward Alexander and Mary Alexander’s “What Is a Museum?”2 Both illustrate key issues in Justin Wolff’s lecture and do so in ways that particularly resonated with me.

Aima’s “Desiring Machines” caught my attention off the bat, starting off as it did with an image from the Atari arcade game Battlezone. Battlezone, you see, was the first video games I was really good at. Good enough that I could walk up to any Battlezone game in any arcade and get myself on the high score list. While the image caught my attention, what I want to highlight is Aima’s discussion of curation within the context of the New Aesthetic, coded space, and the panoptic nature of both.

I read Bruce Sterling’s Wired article on the New Aesthetic when it was released and I’ve seen Bridle’s tumblr, so I was familiar with what was being discussed. As I started reading, I began to wonder why we were assigned this article, and then, about the time of the pull-out quote, it hit me: Through gathering all these disparate images, video, and quotes – “Drones mapping, mirror worlds, machine vision, surveillance infrastructure..render ghosts, nostalgia for the glitch, 8-bit reveries, #botiliciousness…” – Bridle wasn’t just collecting or aggregating; in creating The New Aesthetic Tumblr Bridle was defining a new artistic sensibility. In other words, by bringing all these things together in once Tumblr under the title “The New Aesthetic,” Bridle was adding value to all these digital objects by presenting them as parts of a whole.

Adding value to data and objects, Wolff stressed in his lecture, is one of the key features that differentiates acts of mere collecting or aggregating from acts of curation. (Ross and the DigCurV “What is Digital Curation” video stress the importance of adding value as well.) Important to note here is that through his acts of curation, Bridle both made us aware of this new artistic sensibility and shaped our perceptions about our relationship with these “eruptions of the digital into the physical,” our digital environment, and our existence within coded space. And it is here that we see the power inherent in the privilege of curation that Wolff warns against in his lecture, that is a key concern in Tony Bennett’s “The Political Rationality of the Museum,” and is discussed in the Alexanders’ “What Is a Museum?”

A page 137 from McLuhan and Fiore's The Medium Is the Massage

McLuhan and Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage, p. 137

While I was familiar with The New Aesthetic, the terms “code/space” and “coded space” are new to me, but I’m finding them useful terms to think about in a number of contexts from my professional and personal life, everything from studying, teaching, and exploring networked writing environments; to my consumer habits being tracked and logged; to my current hobby of playing with Arduinos. (A regular joke in our household revolves around the idea of me rigging up an internet-connected Arduino to send us text messages when the mail is delivered, but I could just as easily have that information sent to an online data logging tool like Phant, and then use that information to look for trends in our mail delivery times.) Coded space is inherently networked, and just as I could easily use my coded space to surveil my mail deliverers, others can, and are, using their coded spaces to surveil me. My go-to example about how retailers track our buying habits for predictive purposes is the story of how a father learned that his teenaged daughter was pregnant because Target told him she was based what they were buying at Target – and no, they weren’t buying baby stuff. Wolff touches on this in his lecture as well, in the context of Foucault, noting that Foucault argued that we would move from a centralized panoptic structures to more fluid, dispersed forms.

Also of great interest to me this week was the Alexanders’ “What Is a Museum?” I have a particular interest in rhetorical and social memory, and I couldn’t help but read the article within that context. Just as the image of Battlezone caught my attention at the start of “Desiring Machines,” the connection between the origins of museums and the muses immediately caught my attention in both Wolff’s lecture and in “What Is a Museum?” The Muses, you see, are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the personification of memory in Greek mythology. (In Wax Tablets of the Mind Jocelyn Penny Small connects the domains of each of the Muses to a different form or channel of mnemonic encoding – dance to movement, epic poetry to writing (Calliope’s emblem is a writing tablet), lyric poetry to rhythm, etc. – noting that the more channels of mnemonic encoding we engage at one time, the easier it is to commit something to memory.) With that connection between the memory and museums already established, how could I avoid thinking about museums as anything other than artificial memory systems?

I should probably point out here that our notion of memory is far more narrow than it was during the Classical and Medieval periods. Back then, memory was not just about storing and retrieving information but was regarded as something more akin to our contemporary notion of creativity. While mnemonic practices were concerned with storage and retrieval, the goal was not rote memorization and remembering in and of itself but to use one’s memory inventively. (See Mary Carruthers’ The Craft of Thought or ask me to rant sometime – we still use our memory systems inventively, it’s just that we don’t recognize most of our practices and technologies of memory as practices and technologies of memory.)

So, as I’m thinking about “What Is a Museum?” and thinking about the museum as an artificial memory system, I’m thinking about what I call the rhetoric and poetics of memory as curation.3 The museum, as an institution involved in the collection, conservation, research, exhibition and education of artifacts (both natural and human created) and information, is a space of memory, an institution of memory, and a system of memory wrapped all in one.

While we tend to think of memory as something that just happens (we remember), memory is actually an active process regardless of whether we’re talking about our personal memories or social memory. As an active process, it’s something we curate if for no other reason than we are interpreting what we remember and applying it or repressing it for a specific purpose. Memory, as I like to argue, is about making meaning, both for ourselves and for others. (It is, after all, one of the canons or parts of rhetoric.)

So, museums, as institutions of memory, are institutions of curated memory. And, likewise, curation is itself a practice of memory. As both Wolff’s lecture and various readings argue, curation is more than archiving and preservation. It’s about the whole lifecycle of an artifact (physical or data) and adding value to that artifact for reuse. People of the Classical and Medieval worlds, as I’ve noted above, regarded memoria as more than issues of archiving and preservation. They understood memoria to be about using our memory systems to make meaning (adding value) through reuse.

Postscript: The New Aesthetic, in making us aware of the “eruptions of the digital into the physical,” functions as what Marshall McLuhan calls an anti-environment. “Environments,” McLuhan explains, “are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall paterns elude easy perception” (The Medium Is the Massage, 84-85). Art, McLuhan argues, has the ability to reveal our environments to us, and we see that in Justin Wolff’s discussion of the art of Mark Dion which focuses on the environment of the museum itself. While McLuhan’s never that far from my mind, I lectured today on the sections of The Medium Is the Massage that includes environments, the role of art, and, yes, museums.

  1. from Harvey Ross’ Digital Curation: A How-to-Do-It Manual. ↩
  2. From Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Foundation of Museums. 2nd ed. ↩
  3. It may help to know that Classical and Medieval thinkers were concerned not with memory in terms of what we held in our personal memory and what was outside us, but in terms of natural memory (unaided remembering) and artificial memory (memory that relies upon a mnemonic, with the understanding that a mnemonic includes writing, monuments, song, mementos, etc. ↩

Oliver Sacks on the Unreliable Nature of Memory

10 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by John in Memory

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Or, if you prefer, the creative nature of memory. We are populated selves, as Kenneth Gergan might say.

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened — or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten. [Read more.]

Intertext as Memory Palace

25 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by John in Memory, Mnemonic Practices, Social Memory

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From Renate Lachmann’s “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature”1

All texts participate, repeat, and constitute acts of memory; all are products of their distancing and surpassing of precursor texts. In addition to manifest traces of other texts and obvious forms of transformation, all contain cryptic elements. All texts are stamped by the doubling of manifest and latent, whether consciously or unconsciously. All texts make use of mnemotechnic procedures, in sketching out spaces, imagines, and imagines agents. As a collection of intertexts, the text itself is a memory place; as texture, it is a memory architecture, and so forth. All texts, furthermore, are indebted to transformatory procedures that they employ either covertly or ludically and demonstratively. (305)

  1.  Lachmann, Renate. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010. 301-310. [↩]

Collin Brooke’s Twitter Summary of Lingua Fracta

06 Monday May 2013

Posted by John in Computers and Writing, Digital Studies/New Media, Memory, Rhetoric and Composition

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Twitter Summary of Lingua Fracta On May 3, 2013, Collin Brooke (@cgbrooke) took up the challenge of summarizing his book Lingua Franca: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media in a few tweets. The three tweets are as follows:

  1. Tweet 1: @kristinarola New media require us to acknowledge that technology and rhetoric are inextricable. #LF
  2. Tweet 2: @kristinarola A rhetoric of new media attends to interfaces (vs objects) that manifest ecologies of code, practice, and culture. #LF
  3. Tweet 3: @kristinarola The classical canons of rhetoric are an ecology of practices that help us map the affordances of all media. #LF

Collin then captured the three tweets in the pic you see above.

I’m particularly struck by the third tweet which is a nice summary of what I’m doing when I’m working to tease out various conceptions and practices of memoria.

“The Internet”: Part poem, part meditative salve

20 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by John in Life, Memory, Reading

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An interesting claim, don’t you think, calling the Internet “part poem, part meditative salve”? At first I was going to start by telling you that the Internet referred to in the title isn’t the Internet, the global computer network through which you have reached this blog post, but, in a way, it is. You see, the title of this post refers to an essay entitled “The Internet,” written by Lisa Schamess and published in the inaugural issue of TOSKA Magazine last Friday.1 While it was Lisa’s friend Kevin McMamara who called her essay “Part poem, part meditative salve,” Lisa, I think, would argue that our shared global computer network is “Part poem, part meditative salve.”

The essay is one of her memoir pieces, and those are always hard for me, have always been hard for me, for a number of reasons. They’re hard for me because they focus on the 13 months between the birth of Miss Mo, Lisa’s daughter, and the death of Gil, Lisa’s husband. At first I found them difficult because Lisa has always been a real person to me, a friend whose writing I began reading because she was a friend, and so the struggles and difficulties and pain and loss she writes of have never been experiences of a stranger but of someone I cared about. And now there’s lots of layers. With each new piece I learn more about a pivotal event in the life of the woman I shall marry in 25 days, and I learn more about the man whose daughter I am raising, a daughter, I’m realizing, I will soon have been actively parenting longer than he was able to. They’re hardest on me, though, because while Lisa has made peace with her past, I feel an intense need to reach out and comfort the woman she was 12 years ago, a woman I wouldn’t even know for another 5 years, a woman who is very real and is very much in need of comfort. I want her to be spared from that pain and loss. I want her to have the life with her husband and her daughter denied to her. And much of my reaction is rooted in the fact that I love her so deeply. There’s no easy way to navigate that.

“The Internet” is different from her other memoir pieces, though. Different than pieces like “Light & Shadow” or “House of Memory” or the unpublished pieces that are making up the memoir. It is part poem, part meditative salve. It’s also got force to it. I want to say it has an edge. It does, but it’s not all edge. Somehow Lisa’s made some of the gentlest parts hard and the hardest parts gentle. It’s an attempt to capture and share something that can’t be captured and shared. It’s not quite like anything I’ve read by her. While “Light & Shadow” and “House of Memory” are my favorite published pieces, “The Internet” surpasses them as a work of art. And it is very much a work of art.

But don’t just listen to me. I’m biased. I mean, I am marrying her. You could also say that her friends and my friends are biased, and they are, but in sharing her essay on Facebook last Friday, they didn’t need add comments like these: “This is big in all the beautiful ways that matter”;2 “Sad, sexy, sweet and smart. Read it”;3 and “Brilliant, clever, and painful – the kind of writing that stays in my head long after I’ve read it.”4 I could go on, but I won’t. I think you’ve got the idea. So just read it and find out for yourself how the Internet and “The Internet” are part poem and part meditative salve.

And take a look at the rest of TOSKA while you’re at it. They’ve produced a good inaugural issue. It’s worth reading and they are worth following.

  1. Yes, yes, yes, Lisa is my fiancée. As I’ve said before, I was a huge fan and promoter of her writing long before I had any clue I’d be marrying her. [↩]
  2. Bernard Balizet  [↩]
  3. Tammy Seltzer [↩]
  4. Liza Potts [↩]

Mediated Memories

27 Sunday May 2012

Posted by John in Media Ecology, Memory, Mnemonic Practices, Social Memory

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In her book, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, José van Dijck introduces the concept of “mediated memories,” media-produced personal mementos such as those one might keep in a shoe box.1 “These items,” she explains, “mediate not only remembrances of things past; they also mediate relationships between individuals and groups of any kind (such as family, school classes, and scouting clubs)” (1). As memory objects, van Dijck argues, mediated memories represent both our autobiographical memories and cultural identity.

While social memory studies has always claimed that autobiographical memory—personal remembering—is entwined with the social,2 her focus on these mediated memory objects which have a simultaneous personal and cultural connection has led her to also coin the term “personal cultural memory,” which she defines as “[t]he acts and products of remembering in which individuals engage to make sense of their lives in relation to the lives of others and their surroundings, situating them in time and place” (6). She then explains that within this construct the terms personal and cultural are “threads that bind memory’s texture: they can be distinguished, but they never can be separated” (6).

This conception of personal cultural memory is important she argues because it

allows for a conceptualization of memory that includes dimensions of identity and relationship, time and materiality […] The term emphasizes that some aspects of memory need to be explained from processes at work in our society that we commonly label as culture—mores, practices, traditions, technologies, mechanics, and routines—whereas the same processes contribute to, and derive from, the formation of individual identities. Yet by advocating a definition of cultural memory that highlights the significance of personal collections, I do not mean to disavow the import of collective culture. Quote to the contrary, if we acknowledge that individual preferences are filtered through cultural conventions or social frameworks, we are obligated to further explore the intricate connection between the individual and collective in the construction of cultural memory (8).

I’ve been greatly enjoying reading van Dijck’s book as it compliments, complicates, overlaps, and extends my own thinking on mnemonic practices and mnemonic objects and the complicated and blurry boundary between autobiographical and social memory. I find particularly useful her conception of the relationship between the personal and the cultural as threads that can be identified but can not be separated.

  1. With this post, I hope to be getting back to one of the original functions of this blog: that of a commonplace book for my thinking about and research into memoria. [↩]
  2. Quite literally: this claim was first made by Maurice Hawlbachs, the sociologist who proposed the concept of collective memory. [↩]
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