The Anthology in Digital Culture

Abstract

Academic writing is about the world as we collectively know it and understand it, but it is also, inevitably, about ourselves and our own systems of knowledge. As such, it is never complete. It always needs to be revised, redefined, rewritten. A palimpsest model would be perfect to erase the original words that we no longer recognize, those sentences that do not match with our present thoughts, with our new discoveries, and with our developing perception of reality. It would be a manuscript, which means it might contain errors. But, then, so does our memory. As needed, the text could be scraped or washed off, resurfaced and the material reused anew. Some traces of earlier versions might be still visible. There might be remains of ancient marks, drafts, and records, like an old magnetic drawing board that no longer functions properly. But the entire primitive text would be lost or corrupted forever. It could be incomplete or unintelligible. The palimpsest model is multilayered, and yet each version lives in some sort of isolation from previous ones. Each narrative exists on the premises of another narrative's erasure. The reasons for overwriting can be tied to the mere diachronic privilege granted by temporality: the most recent text will be the easiest to read. Or, perhaps, it is a way to correct inaccuracies. Or else, in more extreme cases, survival might depend on acts of dominance, authority, recognition, disapproval, even violence. Such record-keeping system would require little or no classification. There would be no complex archival system to keep track of multiple versions of the same text, no errata corrige detailing corrections to a published paper, but just a series of writings perpetually striving for permanence. In the lexicon of Italian television, the term palinsesto came to be commonly used to define the programming schedule. In a way, linear media do superimpose, day by day, a new broadcasting flow to the former one in a relation of posteriority. In the case of broadcasting, some form of organization or ordering is imposed, via the hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, season-long schedule that articulates mediated time. Yet, this is not quite the model we have chosen for our archives of the future. The digital has shifted oral, ephemeral, transient practices into an incessant process of documentation. The cultural repository continuously grows to satisfy the human impulse to collect and store artifacts as permanent records. In digital culture, the palimpsest model ultimately left space for the anthology model, for the synchronous accumulation and sorting of objects. With it, we have achieved access to the possibility of a deeper understanding: not only can we see the things of my own education and upbringing. So I will start from the roots. This book is dedicated to my "forms of knowledge", those I was born into and those I was able to create. To my origins, my family -the close ones and the extended ones, the past ones and the future ones -and to the forms of true and honest kinship I shared. Writing ...