A1-“I shall extract this memory from you now”
In her article, "Archives in Context and as Context", Kate Theimer looks at coming from outside of the digital humanities realm. She recognizes that the definition of Archive has not changed since becoming digitized. She also challenges the idea of what archives mean in context of the work other digital humanist are doing. Which may not seems strange but often times it seems that that term gets thrown around lot especially in digital spaces, "it is important to note that the formal definition of “archives” used in the archival community cited here recognizes no differences for electronic records, born digital material, or materials presented on the web" Many times we see archivist put together an archive of the interests they have in a subject. That does not help with preserving the media What does it mean to archive in a completely digital space though?
In World of Tomorrow the way things are preserved and put into archives is a little different than what we have seen. Usually there is some sort of transference of thoughts whether it is into writing or speaking. When entering the "outernet" Emily Prime can have her memories taken from her through a ray that Emily III can take and archive. Talk about a game changer. If Emily III can move other people through time and extract memories from them she can potentially create an archive from anyone at anytime. The fact that it is digitally uploaded also removes the transference from words on a page or from the audio the memories or thoughts can be input into anything, which we see Emily do discusses later.
The uploading and extraction is invasive but does not seem to harm Emily Prime. Because everything becomes a digital space what is truly off limits to upload and attach.
Archival work becomes less of finding what to store more about what becomes uploaded and what collection it goes into. The path of archives comes alters it's path. Whereas we can see out memories thoughts and ideas in our head Emily III can take them from the mind and stored either within her own mind or from others. Emily III describes a process that they can perform on dead bodies that extracts thoughts and ideas as well from the subconscious.
More about this to come...
