Remembrance, Commememoration, Oversight and Oblivion: Collective Cultural Archives over the Millennia

Geof Bowker (Department of Communication University of California, San Diego)

New media for recording, storing and then accessing cultural content of any form (epics, pens, gestetners, the printing press, library catalogs, the internet and so forth) have each brought there own modality of oblivion and remembrance to cultural productions. I give a brief history of the dream of the perfect archive of a civilisation, drawing on examples from different cultural groups and different media. This builds to a general discussion of the infrastructure of the archive.