The Art of Archives

UMass Boston || English 600 || Spring 2015 || Prof. Erin Anderson

Category: Posts (page 7 of 11)

Farm Animal Rights Social Media Archive

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The history of the animal rights movement has interested me for some time, but I have so far focused on animals research and the anti-vivisection movement from the 1800’s through today. I wanted to explore a different side of the animal rights movement, and so decided to collect images related to farm animal rights and factory farming. I find animal rights/welfare organizations’ use of social media platforms an interesting use of our society’s available technology and methods of communication. This “Farm Animal Rights Social Media” collection consists of photos, primarily “memes,” shared on the social media accounts by various animal rights and animal welfare organizations. These materials are taken from the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram accounts and blogs of organizations including Mercy for Animals, Vegan Outreach, Vegan Publishers, Evolve! Campaigns, as well as others. Wherever possible, links to the original content and social media account information have been linked in the description.

Though the animal rights and welfare organizations share materials on a variety of animal rights issues on their social media accounts, the images selected for this collection are focused solely on farm animal rights and factory farms. Some of the images address the concepts of “speciesism” and “anthropocentrism,” exploring why certain animals have been deemed food by humans while others have not. The memes include messages that attempt to convey the current condition of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or factory farms. Many of the images contain information that reveal the reality of conditions animals are kept in on meat and dairy farms, and include photographs of the animals in these conditions. Issues related to CAFOs are addressed in the text of some of the images, in the hope that this method of sharing information will effectively reach the general public and educate them about this subject. Some of the memes are humorous, while others certainly are not. This demonstrates how animal rights organizations seek to play off of the different emotional responses of the public in these images.

This collection serves as a sample of the types of visual materials shared by animal rights organizations on social media outlets. Social media in its various forms has become an important mode of communication, and it is important to document how different social groups communicate to the public using these platforms. The content of the images can also tell a lot about the current condition of our society and how people communicate. Furthermore, this particular collection can reveal how humans view farmed animals and their status in our anthropocentric society. The content of the images provides a sample of the types of issues deemed most important to the animal rights movement today (farm animal rights.welfare). This archive would permit potential researchers to understand how organizations use social media platforms to advocate for their goals. The messages and quotes also reflect various public attitudes humans have toward farmed animals, and how these attitudes are (or are not) changing and evolving.

Link: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/farm-animal-rights

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to convert the bin # to text

all Olson references are from the the first page

The Incompleteness of Film Archives and YouTube as Archive

The two readings from this week had me considering several things about audiovisual installments in both traditional and digital archives. On page 90 of Digital Memory and the Archive, Ernst reiterates Volker Kahl’s idea that “…electronic communication ‘is based on time. It leaves no traces apart from the result, which lies outside this process, unless traces are deliberately laid…’ Audiovisual media art is, by its nature, transient and unarchivable.” Applying this idea to film archives, such as the Scottish Screen Archive, discussed by Roscaroli, Young, and Monahan, seems to become particularly problematic (252). For, if audiovisual media art is “transient and unarchivable” then a film is, in essence, a highly incomplete text, missing not only the process that led up to the resultant film, but the contextual data—political, historical influences and the like—that spurred on the creation of the film before the process even began. Thus, what exists in the film archives is (contentually, not materially) a single version of a film, vacant of the multiplicity of narratives that were involved in its composition; it is a captured moment in the transient process that has been archived and considered the totality of the film, a “latent archive” (Ernst, 82). Thought of in this perspective, brought about by Kahl and Ernst, can it then be said that the film archive is merely a great collection of last pages torn from thick manuscripts? There is, of course, the possibility of bridging this incompleteness with written documents to scaffold the unseen/unheard political unconscious, and to supply for viewers deliberately laid traces of the process. Would this not, though, disrupt the precedent of the films in the film archive, making traditional documentation of equal importance in the archiving of the films, and thus transforming the film archive into more of an archive that contains some films, amongst other things?

The second main idea I was forced to contemplate with these readings was the idea of YouTube as an archive (Roscaroli, 252). Brought up by Roscaroli, Young, and Monahan, I quickly began to consider the immateriality of the site’s archived videos. Like the three authors also discussed, digital records in past forms, such as reels, VHSs—even on the personal level—are collected and archived for both their form and content. Items like these—and like someday soon, I’m sure, the floppy disk and CD-ROM—are not recognized for their formal archival value until they are part of a closed historical era of technology. For, in the yet-open present, they cannot be recognized or known as something that will soon pass away in light of the next technological advance. In the case of websites like YouTube, however, how should such an archive be preserved in an open present? And, when it is a member of a closed historical era, won’t it have progressed to the then-present, disrupting the data and metadata of its archive as a representative of the historical moment of the then-past? Obviously, as Ernst notes, the Internet is transient along with its audiovisual content, but if something, like YouTube, is to be named an archive, should it be made latent at some point before potentially valuable archival material is lost? If so, would this mean recreating YouTube ever few years, or is their no proper answer for the transient, archival site, but to let it continue moving through time with little trace of its origin and process?

Defending Digital

Our reading for this week seemed to stress the impermanence of digital formats, and for good reason – it’s already become hard to reconstruct files from the obsolete systems and bizarre programs of a decade or two ago, and yes, the medium of an archive changes at least its user experience, if not its broad philosophical scope. But I wonder whether some of it is technophobia masquerading as authorial panic.

I’m not an archivist, but I like poking around in classical and medieval studies, and so I can’t help but hold our halcyon analog past up to the same scrutiny: there are enough palimpsests out there that the “trouble-free erasure” of videotapes (90) doesn’t necessarily panic me, for example. Paper decays, or molds, or gets destroyed by flood or fire; the Library of Alexandria burned with probably tens of thousands of documents and manuscripts lost (or did it? – because we don’t even have good enough records to know what we lost, or even what century it was lost in. We do, though, have an incomplete but pretty substantial record of e.g. what public and university libraries in New Orleans lost after Hurricane Katrina.)

And as much as “a medieval document on or of parchment indissolubly fuses materiality and message” (88), a good deal of the content – literature, scripture, important letters – was copied, and often altered in the copying, and our trusty, reliable vocalic alphabet system was subject to profound human error in storage and distribution. And, of course, although it’s obviously the case that the sheer amount of data to potentially archive has grown exponentially with the rise of “user-generated content” and the audiovisual medium’s sudden entrance into legitimacy, the production of paper material was rapidly reaching that point as well before the switch to digital storage. I’m not sure I buy, at all, the “difference between the effects of Renaissance print and contemporary computer technologies” (122), or at the very least I want to also seriously look at that summary’s limitations, how reductive it is to the many print and literacy culture(s) there have been. And in fact Ernst seems to move to acknowledge this, before wandering off elsewhere: “of course there is a constant and permanent movement between the media-archaeological layers of writing.”

(Plus, of course, material degradation aside, learning paleography to actually read a medieval hand – and what is that if it’s not being able to access the information in the outdated medium it’s stored in – is as tricky to anyone working more than a few centuries out as finding the floppy drive or creating a virtual machine for an obsolete file is to a technology specialist.)

In case anyone else needs to wash their mouth out with a shot of technology after having read all of that meandering around the problems of the medieval archive, now you too can be the sort of person who reads about ISO standards for the PDF/A long-term archival file format. I like the standards they suggest for digital preservation: a file format designed for long-term use should be device-independent, self-contained, self-documenting, unfettered, publicly available, and widely adopted. This is the sort of practicality that I think broad-reaching claims about the authoritativeness or underlying assumptions of “cyberspace” tend to miss: rather than saying, for example, “the Internet can’t transmit the semantic content of pauses and silences,” we could say, yes, that’s true, but has any archive ever been able to do that? And if it’s important, how might we try to archive that? (My inner cranky tech hipster wants very badly to point out that data transfer — in particular of, say, film or audiovisual material — is probably a lot less “incapable of transmitting noninformation” (139) than, say, paper. )

Social Media Apps as Archives: Capturing A Community’s Connections Outside of Time

In “Saving Private Reels: Archival Practices and Digital Memories (Formerly Known as Home Movie) in the Digital Age,” Susan Aasman defines cinema as “the perfect instrument for making a record of fleeting moments, of time itself” and describes the movement from the archive’s pre-modern concern with evidence to its post-modern concern with collective memory (245, 247). This new digital archive, with a “‘democratic’ spirit” that reveals the “inner life of people,” can be seen today in social media applications such as Instagram and Vine. Through these two specific applications, individual users can post short videos (as well as photos), typically taken on their smart phones, to their network of “followers” and any public audience that they may allow to view their content. Each clip is a ‘digital memory’—of a home-cooked dinner with friends, a drunk night at the club, a Sunday hike with the dog, grandma’s 75th birthday party, an ephemeral sign seen on a morning commute, or the most recent snow bank formed silently overnight. As an aggregate, these Instagram and Vine accounts are “keeping a record of our lives,” individually and collectively (253). But as Aasman points out, it’s more complicated than the good old days of storing our memories as we would have in a printed photo Screen Shot 2015-03-04 at 5.34.55 PMalbum or a home movie tape. Purely digital, Instagram and Vine are “fluid archives” (255). They’re open (changing and accumulating constantly), communal and diverse (accessible to many users who can ‘connect’), self-referential (hashtags can be seen as “finding aid[s] in the documents themselves”), and allow for simultaneous collection and reflection  (photos and videos are capture, shared to networks, repopulated on other devices, and stored as data in the same two exchanges) (Ernst 84). As Aasman and Ernst both point out, these “archives” are not designed for long-term storage and memory, but for “immediate reproduction and recycling” (95). The structure and function of Instagram and Vine carry the added goal of communication. In fact, Instagram’s tagline is “Capture and Share the World’s Moments.”

When considering the traditional intention of archives to keep documents as “proof” of events, the temporality of applications such as Instagram and Vine become problematic. If collected documents are always being reproduced (posts can be “re-grammed” or “re-posted” days, months, even years later and show up in today’s “news feed”) and don’t have clear origins (posts do not need to be credited with an original author or date/time—everything pretends real-time “news”), videos on these two applications cannot be trusted to authenticate an event with a specific time and location, especially a “live” event. This seems to be the “permanent broadcast” that Ernst speaks of (111). However, unlike the traditional home video, these digital posts capture the myriads of connections surrounding a particular “document.” The videos aren’t screened to an audience in a concrete location, they shared in cyberspace. Instagram and Vine both have data trails ( or data mazes maybe) that show who posted what when, who liked or commented on particular posts when, and who reproduced the images with their own accounts when. As Aasman describes, using these apps is a practice, each one “a democratized archive that embraces new methods of participatory and collaborative archival work” (255).

The libertarian socialist in me cannot help but think of the political implications of archiving data about networks of users instead of the documents themselves. On my Instagram, I have recently seen videos of organizations and individual activists unionizing adjunct professors, promoting the Fight for 15 campaigns to raise fast food workers’ wages, and celebrating MLK Day by protesting against police militarization. Historians and archivists may not always have the benefit of hunting down “original copies” of protest clips or the “first instance of instant replay” of a poet performing on the National Mall, but they may someday (legal and copyright ownership pending) have a list of usernames that connect to individual IP addresses and the timestamp for when those IP addresses connected . Using metadata, archivists may be able to track how the NAACP or Fight for 15 campaign shared information in 2015. Furthermore, Instagram and Vine as archives could include, similar to a record of written correspondences, the representational network of individuals who may have attended a protest. We can see who is responsible for archiving our cultural heritage, which may in fact be more valuable than what’s being collected.

While the videos of the real-life actions are a “performative form of memory,” the metadata from Instagram and Vine could provide pertinent information to an archivist or historian who would like to capture records of who was doing what with whom. If we embrace these new digital spaces as archives of transfer rather than storage, can’t we track the movement of discourse, even if the temporality and document ownership are wonky (Ernst 100)? If the goal of this digital video medium is different than analog media—based on participation in democracy, perhaps—the goal of the archive and the purpose of reviewing the archive itself must be different. The records may become less of a “he said, she said” and more about whose IP address was connecting to whom and why. Does a collected object’s temporal location really matter during an era when every reproduction is “news”?

Netflix: Collaboration with Code

For this week’s blog post, I thought that I’d revisit my exploration of Netflix as a creative archive because Ernst has complicated my first attempt to characterize its “archive”.

 

download

 

In my first blog post I discussed the many varieties of genres available on Netflix, how movies/TV shows are selected for display on their streaming site, and the process of collecting subscriber data to create original TV shows. I characterized the Netflix “archive” as if it were a material collection, an archive created by the marketplace. I had not considered the possibility that “net archives are a function of their software and transmission protocols rather than of content […]” (Ernst, 84). The actual organization and ordering of Netflix is not, at its most fundamental levels, dictated by its genres or movies, but by the source codes and algorithms that compose Netflix’s website.

 

“On the one hand, the Internet extends the classical space of the archive, library, and museum by an extra dimension. On the other, its technological organization and more (graphical) mathematical than classificatory topology undermine this tripartite division, because digital code renders commensurate texts, images, and sounds. Through physical modeling it can even resolve physical objects into numbers and then re synthesize them.

The archival infrastructure in the case of the Internet is only ever temporary, in response to its permanent dynamic rewriting. Ultimate knowledge (the old encyclopedia model) gives way to the principle of permanent rewriting or addition (Wikipedia)” (Ernst, 85).

 

Netflix, at its core, does not contain movies and television: it contains different bits and processes that are only reintegrated into audiovisual entertainment by the click of the mouse or a strike of the “enter” key. There is plenty of “memory” for this audiovisual entertainment, but what is actually being stored is not audio or the visual, but the processes that create them.

 

There are two layers of creation here. 1) Every movie or TV show be created millions of times by the processes of its algorithms and 2) new TV shows are created by human beings according to the data that is collected by these creative algorithms.

 

This makes for an interesting complication in translation. Let’s start at the beginning. In order for Netflix to even exist, programmers must have a goal in mind. That goal is formed in an alphabetic language. This language is then translated into the programming code that displays a collection of movies.

There must also be an alphabetic language describing the process of data collection which is then translated into an algorithm. When enough data has been collected from Netflix subscribers, the algorithm outputs a statistical value. This statistical value must be translated again into an alphabetic language when deciding to create a new show based upon those values. Then the show is created by human beings.

 

What we have in this incredibly dynamic “archive” then, is collaboration between humans and algorithms to create entertainment. Algorithms are not only constantly rewritten to determine the content, organization, and data collection of a website, but it outputs popular genres that are taken seriously into consideration when creating a new show.

 

What does this mean? I’m not sure. It’s either an unsettling dependence on machines for creativity, or a Utopian cooperative project between humans and computers. Either way, it’s fascinating that entertainment that is creatively conceived is under-girded by algorithms, both in its presentation and in its initial creation (genres/subgenres/qualities/themes).

Digital Memory: More Than Just Metaphorical Method

While reading Aasamn’s Saving Private Reels, I’m interested in the four successive archival frameworks: archive relating to the state-an institution of power; archive representing a more historical perspective on the nature of records; archive reflecting society more than before in all its pluralism, diversity, contingent nature; archive collecting documents about the inner life of people. The archives, though evolving separately from raw materials to digital memories in these four different stages, reveal themselves in a way of embracing the four frameworks together with the help of modern technology. The definitions by UNESCO that explains the considerations about the moving images as an archiving tool impressed me a lot as well. The technology has made it possible for films and videos to establish the cultural identity of the public and to “form an integral part of a nation’s cultural heritage”. Storing the moving images, as an important part of digital memory, has reconstructed the way we record our history and culture and built up a new form to voice for the ideas and thoughts not only by professional archivists but also by ourselves, which seems like a victory of “democratic spirit”.

What Ernst has discussed is thought-provoking for me: “…the technology is not an archive”, for “Net archives are a function of their software and transmission protocols rather than of content, to which technology is indifferent” (Ernst). Actually, Aasam also comes up with the similar idea that“…further consideration should be given to recent shifts in memory recording practice and memory archiving practice”. On social network, like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, people prefer to upload audio or video record to track their lives, which are much more vivid and direct than texts, but not all of these records, in my opinion, can’t be regarded as archive, for a certain number of videos are uploaded just out of personal preference and interest. Only by collecting in a logical and technological way, can these self-made multimedia become a rich resource for researchers.

Aasman argues that films go through a long time shifting from collectible items to archives, during which people need to “be willing to hand over their personal material, and archives” and “be willing to accept intimate images that may directly represent public historical events”. It is true that we have to face these problems, while posting the videos of ourselves. Basic historical perspectives on archives and technology skills are both needed in order to better archive the history we live through. My understanding is that it seems that there is still a long way to go to achieve the goal of “archive now makes itself responsible for safekeeping our culture and identity ‘and personal and collective memory” by Aasman, which is presumed to be a whole new dynamic concept of archives.

I’m curious about Ernst’s words “the archival regime is being extended from text to audiovisual data…this extension changes and dissolves the very nature of the archival regime”, which inspires me to reconsider the “nature of archival regime”: namely, does this kind of nature really exist in spite of the developing method of archive? Or the nature of archival regime change itself as time goes by?

Under the Continuous Monitoring of a Camera

Forgetting has become a gradually hard matter. If an old picture fails to represent a past buried in the rubble, a video clip can always tell its own story. The ubiquitous cameras at every corner of the street conscientiously fulfill their duties to watch everybody passes by and forth and records everything down to the smallest detail. The modern city seems to base itself on the framework of a Panopticon in which the inmates are constantly being watched and examined. The reinforced monitoring of the highly regulated society forms a vast quantity of archives based on the social scene of the unremarkable day-to-day existence in a modern era. The database is huge while the content is enormously rich. Memory cannot fade in a surveillance tape where one can always spot the tracks of the old times. The moment in an immediate past is frozen in the unexpected shots.

 

A whole chapter of the book called “modern age” is devoted to the cultural memory practice of archiving on various levels. The advent of audiovisual records has brought some transformative advances into the way memory is stored and preserved. One picture presented to the eyes fades out while another one grows clearer. The fleeting moments are composed upon the reels. The practice of audiovisual archiving connects the fixed moments of the old photos in the stream of time and refill the imagination tank of the curious minds. The experience of watching oneself in the surveillance tape stimulates one to think about the blurring boundary between the past and the present. The person who appears in the camera seems nothing more than a phantom, something less than human and hard to define. Just imagine the scene: a person happens to be the spectator of the video in which he acts out a part in the past. This is a totally brand new experience offered only to the modern human being who ever watches around while being watched himself.

 

Forgetting is being dreaded in this age. Not even a single day has ever been passed without being recorded and examined. The archive fever extends itself incessantly in the modern era while gathers its momentum in an even stronger manner. The death drive to possess an immediate past pushes one even further in recording every detail of the fleeting moments of time. In the battlefield of memory, people fight to get the upper hand. The idea of collecting the fragments of a past in the surveillance footage serves to take control of a society in a real sense of the word. The loss of a single tape cuts off a portion of the memory. One who is devoid of the ability to recall the past is impotent in some sense. The person who passes by the camera registers himself as a member of the community who stores his memory in the collective archives of the government. He never intends to show his face in front of the camera yet he becomes an actor in the motion picture directed by an invisible powerful hand. No one can ever escape the memory of a surveillance camera.

L. P. Hartley has once said in The Go-Between that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The past is no longer the past in the ancient times. It has become a past under the continuous monitoring of the camera. The advances of the modern era give rise to a detailed record-keeping of an immediate past which could be otherwise different. If there is no surveillance camera, would a past be rewritten somehow? Those who behave themselves under the constant monitoring might change into another person if there is no camera at all. The “impossibility of verifying the reality” (556) of a past still remains. I am just thinking about in an era of 24/7 monitoring, a person is becoming more and more like an actor in front the camera, even if he intends the least to be one. But the camera is there, the time one gets used to it, one runs the risk of becoming a person acting out in the stage.

 

What I am also thinking about is our excess dependence on the technique means for storing the memory which will inevitably engender the danger of memory descend of a whole generation free from the fetters of “physical record-keeping”. The memory machine will always be there for help, so what is the big deal for memorizing the things by heart? That would be the one of the most crucial predicaments which human beings aspire to extricate themselves from in a modern era. The surveillance camera fulfills its task of archiving the details of the everyday scene of unimportant lives and it even does a better job than most of us could ever have done. The human beings still need to maintain themselves a little bit so as not to be overwhelmed by the memory machines. As we are entrusting our memories to the technique means, there might exist the possibilities to turn the memory away from us too far.

Digital Media, Memory, and the “Archive”

There are a number of issues related to “current” digital formats because technology changes so rapidly. When technology is advancing so rapidly and “entire generations of data carriers are made obsolete by hardware developments” (90), how will future generations access these types of digital media? I think this is part of why Ernst believes that the Internet is not, in fact, an archive. “The archive is defined as a given, preselected quantity of documents evaluated according to their worth for being handed down,” he says. “The Internet, on the other hand, is an aggregate of unpredictable texts, sounds, images, data, and programs” (86). If our society is shifting toward a primarily digital interface for communication, however, this raises a lot of questions about the status of “archives” in our society what will happen to the “traditional” archive in the future. It indicates that a number of changes will be necessary in archival procedures/standards in the future if archives are to successfully adapt and evolve significantly in order to remain relevant in the future.

Ernst noted that “it is not the data here, however, but their metadata that are the archival elements” (89). The random assortment of material on the Internet is not organized in any way to construe meaning. It is simply collecting items, but “cyberspace has no meaning” (138). The metadata is required to introduce meaning and context for the assortment of materials on the web. Through the metadata, one can learn far more about the multimedia, why it was shared, who shared it, why it was important to them or why they felt it may be important to others. The metadata proves crucial to defining and “cataloging” the Internet’s contents. I personally am finding writing succinct and informative metadata for digital objects a challenge, in trying to find the best way to both describe the digital item and also explain its digital provenance. In describing the provenance of digital items I’ve been archiving I have certainly found myself contributing to hyperlinkability. While collecting images from the web, in describing them I try to link back to the original source page or to other descriptive media, thus contributing to the “interconnectivity of different media” (119) on my own inconsequential blog. I can see now that in doing this, the emphasis on this digital archiving has indeed shifted to regeneration and I am “(co)producing” by using these materials for my own needs (95). Do my references and descriptions now make this collection of random multimedia “self-operant and self-aware” and does this Tumblr page now constitute “a self-referent archive” (84)?

Ernst argues “the so-called cyberspace is not primarily about memory as a cultural record but rather about a performative form of memory as communication” (99). On sites like Facebook users are not recording memory on their pages for the sake of recording memory. They do so in order to share and communicate their memory and experience to others. Your Facebook friends were not on that vacation with you, but you attempt to document and thus communicate your own memories through your photos, posts, etc. These repositories of one’s personal life experiences are not “final destinations” for memory storage like traditional archives, but are “frequently accessed sites” (99) of communicated memory. If “memory is literally permanently in transition” (97) and constantly being constructed in our digital world, what can accurately be identified as “memory,” and what does this mean for collective memory and the historical cultural record as well? Maybe Ernst is right and the internet “will turn memory itself into an ephemeral, passing drama” (117).

We consider our personal computers, or at least I know I do, as safe and permanent storage for documents, photographs, etc. A lot of Ernst’s arguments made me entirely reevaluate that view, and wonder about the inherent impermanence of digitized items I consider important and worth saving. Ernst says that “your own private computer as a mere temporary holding tank for data, not as a permanent file cabinet” (120). If “cyberspace has no memory” (138) and your personal computer is a “mere temporary holding tank” and a media machine that will soon be obsolete, what would be an actual safe and “permanent file cabinet” or “memory spaces geared to eternity” (86) for these digital materials? Do we need to in fact, archive the protocols and algorithms that make our digital memory creation possible in order for future generations to access these? I wished Ernst would discuss and explore the specific protocols and formats he frequently mentioned in more detail in these chapters, and he did not really explore the fact that these formats and protocols are themselves the products of social, political, and economic factors that speak about our current culture. I was hung up on Doron Swade’s observation that “the operational continuity of contemporary culture cannot be assured” (93) any longer, and wondered what others’ thoughts were about this in relation to constantly changing technologies, protocols, and formats.

“Dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening”

**Hi all – I posted my post #3 response to the wrong blog site last week. My bad!**

The Arcades Project represents a collection of Walter Benjamin’s notes, organized into “convolutes,” concerning the Paris arcades. Benjamin considered the arcades to be “the most important architectural form of the nineteenth century” (ix) that embodied the social, political, and cultural trends of the time. The arcade, as the physical representation of bourgeois and capitalist ideals, provides evidence of the growing gap between the public and private spheres. The advent of capitalism and consumerism complicated and changed conceptions of the public and private, and how individuals identified and defined themselves within the workplace and the domestic sphere. (There was a quote somewhere about increasing tobacco use and its popularization by Louis-Philippe’s sons I found interesting. It described how practice started in smaller, private establishments and then spread into more generally accepted public use, and it made a brief comment on the impact on human health from this increased sale and use of tobacco.)

Benjamin’s text is a varied, though ordered, collection of images and cultural traces of the nineteenth century. There were various new types of cultural materials that could be produced with new technologies, like the daguerreotype, and these new technologies and trends are the topics of many featured quotes in the text. All of the documented quotes and objects are connected to particular historical trends, technologies, and moments in the nineteenth century. In this way, the reader is able to reconstruct the changes taking place during this time period, viewing and comprehending them through the eyes (or voices) of its contemporaries.

Benjamin includes a quote from Grenoble that states: “The past has left images of itself in literary texts” and the “future alone possess developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly” (482). In Arcades, Benjamin attempted to recreate the arcades and Paris with a structure of meaning within this particular historical context. These he compiled for future “developers” to interpret and reconstruct this society for themselves. The concept of official “history” is part of the dream that Benjamin wanted readers to use dialectical thinking to awaken from.

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