In the Cloud: Nineteenth-Century Visions and Experiments for the Digital Age

Abstract

What shapes does the nineteenth-century paper archive take in the twenty-first century digital cloud? Luisa Calè and Ana Parejo Vadillo situate the crafts, experiments, and visions discussed in this anniversary issue in the wider context of questions raised by the emergence and possibilities of nineteenth-century archives for the digital era. What happens when objects float free of their bibliographic and museum anchorings? What is gained and lost in the digital transformations? What new imaginary spaces open up in the transition from the book to the virtual codex and from the terrestrial library to cloud-sourced collections? What formations does the nineteenth century take in digital discourse networks? How are nineteenth-century objects made digital, and through what crafts, skills, and disciplines? How are they shaped by circulation through digital platforms, social media, and remix on the semantic web? What kinds of authoring, what structures of labour, what kinds of making and knowing shape agency in the nineteenth-century digital archive