RESOURCE: Mashups and Matters of Concern: Generative Approaches to Digital Collections

Mitchell Whitelaw (Australian National University) has just published an article in the Open Library of the Humanities on remaking digital collections. Whitelaw examines how projects like Drifter (2016) and Succession (2014) remix  sources to create new kinds of digital collections. He argues:

Such approaches generate an expansive range of unforeseeable outcomes, while retaining a highly authored character. Here these projects are analysed through three key constituents: the troublesome trace of data; their extraction of digital samples; and their generative recomposition of samples into emergent outcomes. These techniques remake collections in a way that addresses the intrinsically complex, entangled and heterogeneous nature of what Latour terms ‘matters of concern’.

This piece will be of interest to readers who want to learn more about the possibilities of remixing large digital collections.