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From Object to Information: The End of Collecting in the Digital Age

  • Christoph Zeller EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 4, 2015
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Abstract

The cultural skill of collecting changes fundamentally with the rise of digital technology. Once closely related to material objects, collecting takes on an altered nature in digital environments. Commonly seen as a way to re-assign meaning, to create a new order, and to display things to educate and to amaze, collecting relies on the sensuous qualities of objects whose actual presence is required to establish the reality of collection. In opposition to this definition, virtual objects can be understood as a temporary actualization of binary code referring to databases. However, these databases have no material quality even if hardware is needed for storage. Their existence relies on digits that can be translated into representations of objects, but not into the objects themselves. In a digital environment, information supersedes material things and reduces objects to providers of data. A discussion of theoretical approaches to collecting problematizes the long-upheld distinction between subject and object and will help to analyze the shift from object to information as well as the role of museums as publicly sanctioned institutions of collecting.

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Published Online: 2015-11-4
Published in Print: 2015-11-1

© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Contributions
  4. The Changing Vocabulary of Literature: On the Migration and Transformation of Literary Concepts in Europe (1900–1950) – an Introduction
  5. A New ‘Rhetoric’ for Modernism?
  6. « Littérature pure » et « cinéma pur » dans les années 1920: La réponse du berger à la bergère?
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  18. Matthew Potolsky: The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. 232 pages.
  19. Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, eds. Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 320 pages.
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  23. Gernot Wimmer, Hg.: Ingeborg Bachmann und Paul Celan. Historisch-poetische Korrelationen. Berlin und Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. 200 Seiten. (Untersuchungen zur Literaturgeschichte Bd. 145)
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