Columbus to Google: A Critical History of the Archive (LITR 455/ CPLT 567/ SPAN 361/ SPAN 753/ HUMS 161)

Modern libraries and archives cannot be understood without steady reference to the history of European conquest and colonial expansion. In the 21st century, we are as likely to mourn its evident gaps and silences as to rejoice in its feats of accumulation. Scholars today train to read between the lines, against the grain, to mind the gaps, even to critically fabulate in order to be able to reconstruct the lived world and knowledges lost in the wake of European genocide and erasure. Not far from his father’s desire to see and own all, Ferdinand Columbus imagined and went out of his way to build a universal library of all that was known and could be known. We begin our course here, at the encounter, when cosmography and bibliography seem to collapse into each other, driven by the Euro-Christian will to conquer. We end in the present, when companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Clarivate and other specific actors have gained enormous power through their ability to aggregate, index and manipulate massive corpora; now, when the cultural and historical record of humanity has become a hybrid construct, part analog, part digital; but also when so-called generative AI begins to make its hallucinatory contributions to that very record. Instead of tracing a prefabricated history of libraries and archives, we will revisit key episodes, tropes, ideas and practices from the past 500 years in order to investigate how the de-facto archive of humanity came to be the way it is today. We will also encourage and hopefully inspire each other to imagine new ways of understanding how the human record is not only a simple byproduct of human activity, but often produces and frames that very activity, helping us connect our historical and theoretical sketches to contemporary concerns: the Anthropocene, the corporate threat to research and education, persistent inequalities, neo-colonialism and more.