Phenomenology of Memory in an Age of Big Data

Edmund Husserl described the act of remembering as essentially curatorial: we judiciously relive past ’nows’ to hold onto significant experiences, allowing everything else to fade into indistinction. Archivists work similarly, selectively retaining objects while consigning whole classes of other materials to oblivion. Contemporary data-intensive culture challenges both Husserl’s phenomenology of recollection and traditional archival practice: as techniques for capturing experiences proliferate and storage costs drop, saving everything—the ephemeral and the trivial alongside the vital and the critical—becomes possible. This chapter asks what it would mean phenomenologically to depend on machine-retrieval of past experiences rather than on personal recollection, and how changes in the phenomenology of memory might affect archival practices and, by extension, reshape our collective memory of the past.

Collecting in the Twenty-First Century: From Museums to the Web, edited by Johannes Endres and Christoph Zeller. Rochester, NY: Camden House