The digital transformations of recent decades have radically changed the ways archives are produced, preserved, classified, and accessed. Beyond celebratory discourses about the democratization of information, it is necessary to ask what operations of selection, standardization, and linguistic reduction accompany these processes. This symposium proposes to rethink the digital notion of the archive not only as a technical expansion of storage and circulation capacities, but as a device that reorganizes the relationships between orality, writing, memory, and power.
The proposal takes as its starting point two complementary lines of reflection. On the one hand, the notion of “reduction,” to think about historical forms of classification and control of the word; on the other, recent debates around the new documentary ecologies produced by digitization, the automation of classification systems, and data infrastructures. From this perspective, it is of interest to analyze how digital technologies extend — albeit under new conditions — historical operations of reduction: from voice to text, from event to data, from experience to record, from document to metadata, from writing to orality?
The symposium invites papers addressing these questions from diverse perspectives — anthropology, linguistics, glottopolitics, history, library science, archival science, information science, media studies, digital humanities, sociology, or philosophy of technology — that put historical and contemporary archives, institutional and community memories, and written documents, sound, audiovisual, and digital records into dialogue. It especially seeks to encourage research on minoritized languages, documentary heritage, private and public archives, preservation policies, classification of knowledge, and sovereignty over cultural data.
The symposium also proposes to open a discussion on an emerging problem for archival theory and practice: the production of documents through artificial intelligence systems. If for centuries the archive was organized around the preservation of what was considered unrepeatable, the automatic generation of texts, images, sounds, and videos forces us to revisit that assumption. What does it mean to preserve a document that can be produced again indefinitely? Should the generated result be preserved, the model that produced it, the prompt that originated it, or the conditions of its creation? Rather than offering closed answers, these questions seek to broaden reflection on contemporary forms of inscription, authenticity, and memory.
The aim of the symposium is to build a space for interdisciplinary exchange that allows us to think of the archive as a field of technical, political, and cultural disputes. More than a repository of documents, the archive constitutes a technology for the production of memory, the legitimization of knowledge, and the organization of the future. Interrogating current digital transformations therefore also means asking which voices are preserved, which remain invisible, and under what criteria the collective memories of the present are constructed.
