Cultural Politics and the Born Digital

On May 14, 2010, UC Irvine hosted a symposium to celebrate the opening of the Richard Rorty Papers in the UC Irvine Libraries Critical Theory Archive for research. Rorty was a pragmatist philosopher, critical theorist, and public intellectual who is commonly described as one of the most important thinkers of his era. In addition to almost 25 linear feet of papers, the Richard Rorty Archive also include over 1,000 born-digital word processing files that were preserved from Rorty's floppy disks in UCIspace @ the Libraries.

Participants in the Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't symposium addressed a number of key questions for criticism in the era of computational media. What is an archive if it includes “born digital” materials? How do new forms of digital production and reception change the character of scholarly discourse? What is the relationship between public memory and computer memory? How should teaching materials be handled in the age of open courseware? How can Rorty’s ideas about philosophy as cultural politics be read in both the liberal and the academic blogospheres? How can more dialogue between critical theory and the digital humanities be fostered?

The symposium was sponsored by the UC Irvine Libraries, the UC Irvine Humanities Center, the UC Irvine Critical Theory Emphasis, the UC Irvine Department of Philosophy, the UC Irvine Department of Comparative Literature, the Office of the Campus Writing Coordinator, and the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Speakers included Elizabeth Losh (UC Irvine), David Theo Goldberg (UC Irvine), Mary Rorty, (Stanford), Michelle Light (UC Irvine), Dawn Schmitz (UC Irvine), Erin Obodiac (UC Irvine), Tom Hyry (UCLA), Christine Borgman (UCLA), Iain Thomson (University of New Mexico), Mark Wrathall (UC Riverside), Margaret Gilbert (UC Irvine), Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech), Steven Mailloux (Loyola Marymount), Ali M. Meghdadi (UC Irvine), Brian Garcia (UC Irvine), Tae-Kyung Timothy Elijah Sung (UC Irvine), and Michael Bérubé (Pennsylvania State).

Digital Immunity

Obodiac, Erin

(2010)

Although digital archives appear to herald a golden age of public access to the res publica, they might also institute an immunitarian logic that subtracts the deed of gift and the obligation of public service—the munus—from the scholarly community, adding instead a potentially endless stockpile of private digital property to an aggregate of exempted individuals.

The Born-Digital Manuscript as Cultural Form & Intellectual Record

Schmitz, Dawn

(2010)

Archives and manuscript librarians use the term "born digital" to refer to personal papers that were created using a computer, received by the archives as computer files, and accessed by researchers electronically. Using Richard Rorty's word-processing files as illustration, this paper discusses the significance of these technological conditions of production and reception for how this type of manuscript may be handled by an archivist and presented to researchers seeking to learn about a scholar's intellectual work. The author works as an archivist at the University of California, Irvine Libraries, where she processed the Richard Rorty Papers for the Critical Theory Archive.

"Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: In Memory of Richard Rorty" A Symposium to Celebrate Richard Rorty's Archive