The Arcades Project Project.

Make a visit to Heather Marcelle Crickenberger's dissertation project on the Arcades Project. You can read here about how the project evolved to its present state.

A gaping hole in the middle of digital archives

The sheet that allowed the meeting of Aadam and Naseem is hardly the only historical fabric defined by its holes. Note this from the business section of the NY Times, 11 March:

As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes.

"There's an illusion being created that all the world's knowledge is on the Web, but we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries," said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. "Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users."

The article adds later:

The ultimate fate of information relating to potentially valuable but obscure people, places, events or things like the Silenus highlights one of the paradoxes of the digital era. While the Internet boom has made information more accessible and widespread than ever, that very ubiquity also threatens records and artifacts that do not easily lend themselves to digitization -- because of cost, but also because Web surfers and more devoted data hounds simply find it easier to go online than to travel far and wide to see tangible artifacts.

How do we respond to this situation? Have we been infected with a disease of digital optimism, where we see only the hopes of democratization that digitization advertises, paying no attention to the tyranny behind the curtain? Or does this aspect of digitization simply emphasize again the extent to which a digital archive is, like any other archive, defined as much by its holes as its fabric?