The Politics of Mass Digitization. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018. 216 pp. $35.00 (hardcover). (ISBN 9780262036870)

Abstract

The Politics of Mass Digitization is a watershed work of scholarship that establishes a new theoretical discourse on the wholesale digital transformation of cultural heritage resources. The particular focus of this book, worked out through three case studies and framed by innovative theoretical synthesis and insight, is on the socio-political complexities of digitized content aggregated and networked at scale. The analysis functions simultaneously under the surface of technical processes, at the boundaries of statecontrolled intellectual property regimes, and at the borderless domain of global information infrastructures. As such, the book provide a needed intellectual and conceptual reorientation of the cultural meaning of mass digitization.Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her book is a thorough reconfiguration of her dissertation from the University of Copenhagen, properly updated with facts and new developments practically up to the point of publication. The author structures her argument in three parts. Part 1 is a new framing of the intellectual challenges of mass digitization through the theoretical constructs of "assemblage" and "infrapolitics." In Part 2, Thylstrup interrogates Google Books and the Europeana Collections in this new light and contrasts the corporate and collaborative nature of these two well-known projects with a selection of community-driven shadow digital libraries. Part 3 applies the conceptual frameworks introduced in Part 1 by cutting across and extending the interpretation of the three case studies.