THE INVENTION OF the “Great Books” curriculum nearly one hundred years ago in the United States has been almost forgotten. According to this curriculum, all of Western culture is condensed into a collection of specially selected literature that ranges, for example, from Homer to Hemingway. Nowadays, this nostalgic book utopia looks like a dated Sunday School where allegedly Western values, norms, and traditions replace religion. Nonetheless, without reassurance of a meaningful past, there is only an overrated form of presentism. But how is this past accessible in a way that the significant not only is separated from the less significant but above all retains its quality for the here and now. Simply glorifying the past by recommending the works of “great” authors as a timeless treasure will not be sufficient. The following argument is not focused on the treasure itself, understood as the norms, values, and esthetic preferences of a past era. Rather, light is shed on the “Great Book” as a specific media format as a cultural technology that is widely practiced but little understood in its operational logic. In plain language, as a historian of media practices I am interested in advanced forms of book-reading as a way to collect and store cultural heritage.

We do not know exactly what quality storage could mean. Something that would provide our society with a type of storage that collects ideas and objects that have been important, even irreplaceable, in the past and should still be accessible today. What would be required to create an allinclusive storage of such extent? In a Western society that is characterized by accelerating technologies, there is an easy solution for everything. Just believe in the militant technological optimism of Silicon Valley and push a button: To save everything, click here! Storage is always within reach, just click and it is done. Anywhere and anytime. Neither expertise, nor practice is needed. Effortlessly and instantly. Even the problem of selection is solved thanks to the low cost of storage. Do not bother to select, just save it all. No special skills required.

To go beyond such oversimplified approaches, one must first understand “quality storage” as a challenging problem. Because wherever specific demands are made regarding the quality of storage, things proceed differently.

THERE ARE MANY THEORIES about why people collect art. But whatever subjective reason or desire motivates an individual collector, their collection invariably becomes an object of public scrutiny. Art is a public affair—and sooner or later every collection becomes presented to the public view. And in the public space, every collection becomes an exhibition, and every collector becomes a curator. Some collectors try to avoid this moment of turning a collection into an exhibition. Other collectors build private museums or donate their collections to public museums but at the same time try to secure that their collections will not be dispersed and, thus, continue to demonstrate the personal tastes of and choices by their collectors/curators. Private collectors and curators are also often subjected to a similar critique: they are accused of being selective and imposing their personal taste on the general public. The history of collections and exhibitions is the history of struggle against selectivity and for more inclusivity. However, today this struggle seems to have reached its endpoint and lost its relevance. The reason for this development is the emergence of the Internet.

The Internet has no curators. Here everyone can produce texts and images—and make them accessible to the whole world. As a result, the Internet offers the technology that makes art production and distribution relatively cheap and easily available for an individual. Potentially everyone can use a photo or video camera to produce images, a text-processing program to add commentaries, and the Internet to distribute the results on a global scale—avoiding any kind of censorship or selection process. At first glance the Internet seems to be the end of all selectivity. The relationship between the space of museum or private collections and the Internet is, as a rule, imagined as a relationship between the global, unified space of the Internet and the “limited” space of the museum and, for that matter, the limited space of the whole art system.

In practice, however, the Internet leads not to the emergence of a universal public space but to the tribalization of the public. The Internet is an extremely narcissistic medium—it is a mirror of our specific interests and desires.

IN THIS ESSAY I EXAMINE select museum responses to new media in order to develop ways of thinking about the changing contours of institutionalized collecting in the digital age. My approach is grounded in a conception of the museum as a discrete medial form whose operations have been and will remain crucial in shaping important aspects of collecting as a social practice and form of cultural memory. As I think of them, museums operate by means of key processes, practices, and competencies involved in organizing, classifying, assigning meaning, and remembering objects, both materially in space and in interaction with medial forms prevailing at particular historical moments. Conceived this way, museum processes and competencies are not the sole purview of museums as we have come to know them, nor have they been in the past. As an analysis of select historical junctures of medial rupture and institutional change shows, these processes and competencies have at times been shared with, or shaped by, other discrete media, institutions, and actors beyond current configurations of museums as they are known today. In addition to illuminating why museums are unlikely the victim of media substitution outright, an analysis of such a juncture raises the expectation that museums can and will experience reconfigurations relative to other entities with which they share their key processes.

I will present my argument in three parts. First, I will briefly delineate my conception of the museum as medium, with an eye toward linking museal processes with long-standing functions museums have had in arbitrating the world and organizing knowledge about it. As the analysis in part 2 will make clear, these functions remain connected with collecting through several historical junctures, in ways related to memory and knowledge production that can be expected to persist into the digital age in significant ways. To demonstrate this, the analysis will mark shifts in what Paula Findlen has described in terms of a dispositif manifested by various forms of media of memory and learning from the Renaissance to the present. Here I will focus on two points: first the intertwined and privileged roles collecting and earlier conceptions of the “museum” have had in generating the value and meaning of objects. And second, how collections-based practices helped develop cognitive capacities to cope with the increasing amount of knowledge created by forms of new media that today is called “information overload.”

Memory and Memoranda

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN to depend on machine-retrieval of past experiences rather than on personal recollection? How might changes in the phenomenology of memory affect archival practices and, by extension, reshape our collective memory of the past? In Phaedrus (written around 370 BCE), Plato famously dwelled on the claim that literature is injurious to memory, relating the discussion between Theuth, an Egyptian God, and Thamus, King of Egypt, about the invention of writing:

By the end of antiquity, the debate between Thamus and Theuth had been decisively resolved in favor of Theuth. While the written record may not have made us wise, this record and related forms of tangible media have vastly extended our cultural knowledge. As Abby Smith Rumsey remarks in When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future, Socrates's “prediction that external memory systems would hurt us as a species completely missed the mark. If we had not turned mind into matter, our biological memory would have been stuck forever in the present, small of scale and leaving little behind when we die.” The resolution of the argument also gave birth to the memory institutions of Western culture.

ON THE FOURTH DAY of December 1893, Joseph Friedrich Nicolaus Bornmüller bent down and picked leaves from a low shrub with small white flowers. Bornmüller was on a botanical collecting trip through the Middle East, and he had just discovered a new species of pennycress. The dried specimen of Thlaspi syriacum he preserved on a sheet of paper is now housed in the herbarium of the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Museum of the Freie Universität Berlin. These crumbling leaves are the holotype of the Thlaspi syriacum species. The word holotype is derived from the Greek ὅƛος—“whole, entire.” Bornmüller's sample was the basis for the description of the whole species. Every subsequent identification of an individual plant as Thlaspi syriacum or not Thlaspi syriacum is, in theory, based on whether or not that individual conforms to the appearance of the leaves Bornmüller plucked somewhere in what is now Syria. Holotypes are artificial. Bornmüller's hand was not guided to the most perfect specimen of Thlaspi syriacum. Rather, he anointed one individual plant to be the representation of a schema of botanical collecting and categorizing. This artificial creation and use of a holotype works for botanists, since they (usually) care more about the ways in which individual plants of the same species are similar rather than the ways in which they are different. They ignore the differences between individual embodiments (this patch of Thlaspi syriacum by the side of the road) and the abstract generalization (the Berlin holotype).

Cultural artifacts do not admit of so easy a negation of the value of the individual. We would rightly hesitate to discard even very similar cultural artifacts. Even reprintings of the same text can each have different value. The text of Alexander Pope's poem “The Rape of the Lock” is the same in the volume of John Bell's Travelling Poetic Library, bound in elaborately gilt calfskin and purchased in Paris in October 1785 by Thomas Jefferson for his twelve-year old daughter Martha, and in the battered paperback that I bought for a dollar from the bins of a used bookstore. But each of these volumes has a different history and a different set of relationships with the people who produced and used them. Some of these histories are more interesting than others.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to collect in the digital age? Abundance inheres in digital objects through the possibility of their limitless duplication, a fact which should represent a challenge for collection. In this essay I will consider an attempt to make digital objects collectible by artificially imbuing them with scarcity, and thus making them discrete. Manufacturing that “digital scarcity” will in turn depend on an enormous energy investment, on the mobilization of collections of natural resources for the production of data. This process serves as an example of what I term the Data Anthropocene, the condition in which humans have taken on geological agency, and in which our data appear as a primary locus of that agency. In this time, a different sort of collection, the gathering together of water and mineral deposits, powers both digital abundance and digital scarcity, and the question of the collection of digital objects recedes behind the question of the collection of natural resources. My essay thus moves from the question of collecting in the digital age to the question of digital collecting in the Anthropocene.

Collecting Digital Cats

If our current moment is remembered at all, will it be remembered as the golden age of cat imagery? So great is the present glut of digital cats that “cat video” has become a byword for gratuitous digital imagery in general, and the mammal threatens to become little more than a corporeal extension of the meme. “The contemporary Internet was designed, in no small part, for the dissemination of cute pictures of cats,” writes Ethan Zuckerman, without a hint of hyperbole. The shift to “Web 2.0,” in which platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter depend on users’ uploaded content in remaking the landscape of the Internet, relies on the proliferation of digital objects—whether cat video, 3D tour, album track, or discursive essay—that are understood as having little inherent value. These websites, as we are by now all too aware, sell not their content to users but their users to advertisers. The value resides not in the cat video, but in the cat video watcher. Cat pictures, like all digital objects, thrive under the sign of abundance, appearing as weightless and free.

LIBRARIES HAVE BEEN building and cultivating collections of trustworthy print publications to fulfill their function as reliable storage facilities for centuries. The scope and selectivity of the collection were always criteria for the library's rank. Collection development has typically been regarded as the noblest task of the academic librarian. Today, digital publications are ubiquitously available. Funding agencies consider the continued collection of printed materials by libraries to be problematic, because there is no guarantee that there will be a future demand for them. From this perspective, it seems reasonable for libraries to care only about information and texts in electronic/digital format as currently needed by their users. In this essay I argue that library collections, which are a combination of printed books, other media, and digital resources, still add great value to research. Every single library, however, can fulfill its task only within a network of other libraries.

There is no other institution for which the question of collecting is so existentially important as it is for libraries. Government archives receive their material more or less automatically through the administrative activity of the institution to which they belong. The reason for most museums’ existence is similar: to add original objects to their holdings and to develop them into unique collections. For them, digital media are only the means to an end, to improve users’ access to those objects. Academic libraries predominately deal with non-unique objects that are accessible from many different places. Thus it remains completely open as to whether or not libraries should develop their own collections for the future. At any given moment in the here and now, thousands of decisions for or against collections are being made that will be pivotal for the future of libraries, their function, and appearance.

Collecting in Anticipation of Demand versus Just-in-Time-Delivery

Funding agencies complain the loudest about the alleged “waste” of money by libraries. Financial experts accuse libraries of purchasing sources for an uncertain demand without being able to promise that they will ever be read. They ask if libraries could not acquire just the publications that are currently necessary for teaching and research purposes.

This chapter explains what corporate surveillance is, describes the corporate surveillance ecosystem and its evolution, and analyzes the human rights risks associated with corporate surveillance. The chapter also motivates the need for transparency and accountability in the modern ecosystem of big technology companies.

This chapter explains how the collected data can be processed with the aim of extracting meaningful measures, and how statistical analysis can be used to support significant conclusions. This chapter first introduces common quantitative measures for transparency research, including measures for tracking, privacy, fairness, and similarity. To compute most of these measures, data need to be preprocessed to extract the response variables of interest from the raw collected data, for example using simple transformations or heuristics, machine learning classifiers or natural language processing, or static and dynamic analysis methods for mobile apps. Finally, the chapter explains statistical methods that allow to make meaningful and statistically significant statements about the behavior of the response variables in the experiment.

This chapter examines the formidable challenges that remain in transparency research, not least due to the rapid evolution of technology. This chapter highlights four areas of challenges: methodological challenges that call for new methods for transparency research; open research questions related to existing systems; research questions related to new and emerging systems such as the internet of things; and challenges related to systems that are pervasively embedded into real-world systems and infrastructure, such as smart cites.