The Total Archive: Dreams of Universal Knowledge from the Encyclopaedia to Big Data

The Total Archive @ CRASSH, Mar 19 – 20

17 March 2015

The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) is hosting a two-day conference exploring the idea of archivization, taking place in the Alison Richard Building on March 19 and 20.

 The conference, titled The Total Archive: Dreams of Universal Knowledge from the Encyclopaedia to Big Data, is organized by Boris Jardine, Matthew Drage and Ruth Horry of the University of Cambridge. The two-day event invites a series of lecturers to explore the “techno-utopian” dream of a complete system of knowledge – the ideology “of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance”.

Various speakers throughout the two days – including Joanna Radin of Yale and Rebecca Lemov of Harvard – investigate the social and political consequences of increasing archivization, exploring the “philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval”.

See the event programme for details. **

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