Abstract

CEVOLINI, Alberto. Archive as Historical Machine: Selection System and Information in Cataloguing Practices. Hist. graf [online]. 2016, n.47, pp.251-276. ISSN 1405-0927.

When we speak of social memory, it is said that it will always remain a skill of communication in support of communication. Increasing the skill of information processing, on equal terms, is the result of the system’s complexity increase. It is not just the observer depending on information, but first of all the information depending on the observer; and this concept makes visible how the issue consists in the circle throughout which the observer builds up autonomously all information from which his decisions depend on. In order to make possible this kind of interaction, we need to conceive memory not just as a simple sum of records: what is inside memory must be relied to a net of self-referential cross references which makes possible to retrieve the information through a machine. Using the theory of society, this text studies the selection of information and its cataloguing in Early Modernity. The keyword to point this matter out is “order”.

Keywords : archive; machine; memory; library; information; communication; reference; order.

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