TITLE:
Reading against the Digital Archive: Historiography and What Is Not
AUTHORS:
Amy Young, Joshua Gunn, Jon Hoffman, Barry Brummett
KEYWORDS:
Homology, Buzzfeed, Twitter, Historiography, Digital Archive
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.2 No.4,
April
7,
2015
ABSTRACT:
Social media sites like Buzzfeed and Twitter
provide significant opportunities for understanding circulation of meaning in
our contemporary media ecology. Aligning these social and viral media with
cultural productions and reproductions, we argue that Heidegger’s theoretical
frame of historiography illuminates the ways in which genres are created, memed
and mutated across the digital archive. A homological historiography, then,
highlights social and viral media as those that require constant feeding,
expanding the digital archive and calling upon scholars and lay audiences to
consider the limits of the form.