Includes bibliographical references and index.

Intro; Contents; Acknowledgments; I Framing Mass Digitization; 1 Understanding Mass Digitization; Introduction; Framing, Mapping, and Diagnosing Mass Digitization; Setting the Stage: Assembling the Motley Crew of Mass Digitization; Interrogating Mass Digitization; Assembling Mass Digitization; Politics in Mass Digitization: Infrastructure and Infrapolitics; Power in Mass Digitization; II Mapping Mass Digitization; 2 The Trials, Tribulations, and Transformations of Google Books; Introduction; The New Librarians; The Scaling Techniques of Mass Digitization; Infrastructural Transformations

The Infrapolitics of ContractThe Politics of Google Books; 3 Sovereign Soul Searching: The Politics of Europeana; Introduction; A European Response; The Infrastructural Reality of Late-Sovereignty; Harmonizing Europe: From Canon to Copyright; The Infrapolitics of Interoperability; The "Work" in Networking; Collecting Europe; 4 The Licit and Illicit Nature of Mass Digitization; Introduction: Lurking in the Shadows; Lib.ru; Monoskop; UbuWeb; The Infrapolitics of Shadow Libraries; III Diagnosing Mass Digitization; 5 Lost in Mass Digitization; The Desire and Despair of Large-Scale Collections

Too Much-Never EnoughThe Ambivalent Fl�aneur; Labyrinthine Imaginaries: Infrastructural Perspectives of Power and Knowledge Production; The Architecture of Serendipitous Platforms; The Infrapolitics of Platform Power; 6 Concluding Remarks; Notes; Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4; Chapter 5; Chapter 6; References; Index

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A new examination of mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon that alters the politics of cultural memory. Today, all of us with internet connections can access millions of digitized cultural artifacts from the comfort of our desks. Institutions and individuals add thousands of new cultural works to the digital sphere every day, creating new central nexuses of knowledge. How does this affect us politically and culturally? In this book, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup approaches mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon, offering a new understanding of a defining concept of our time. Arguing that digitization has become a global cultural political project, Thylstrup draws on case studies of different forms of mass digitization -- including Google Books, Europeana, and the shadow libraries Monoskop, lib.ru, and Ubuweb -- to suggest a different approach to the study of digital cultural memory archives. She constructs a new theoretical framework for understanding mass digitization that focuses on notions of assemblage, infrastructure, and infrapolitics. Mass digitization does not consist merely of neutral technical processes, Thylstrup argues, but of distinct subpolitical processes that give rise to new kinds of archives and new ways of interacting with the artifacts they contain . With this book, she offers important and timely guidance on how mass digitization alters the politics of cultural memory to impact our relationship with the past and with one another.

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