Rogue Archives

An examination of how nonprofessional archivists, especially media fans, practice cultural preservation on the Internet and how “digital cultural memory” differs radically from print-era archiving. The task of archiving was once entrusted only to museums, libraries, and other institutions that acted as repositories of culture in material form. But with the rise of digital networked media, a multitude of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet. These nonprofessional archivists have democratized cultural memory, building freely accessible online archives of whatever content they consider suitable for digital preservation. In Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik examines the practice of archiving in the transition from print to digital media, looking in particular at Internet fan fiction archives. De Kosnik explains that media users today regard all of mass culture as an archive, from which they can redeploy content for their own creations. Hence, “remix culture” and fan fiction are core genres of digital cultural production. De Kosnik explores, among other things, the anticanonical archiving styles of Internet preservationists; the volunteer labor of online archiving; how fan archives serve women and queer users as cultural resources; archivists' efforts to attract racially and sexually diverse content; and how digital archives adhere to the logics of performance more than the logics of print. She also considers the similarities and differences among free culture, free software, and fan communities, and uses digital humanities tools to quantify and visualize the size, user base, and rate of growth of several online fan archives.

Following Art Spiegelman's declaration that 'the future of comics is in the past,' this book considers comics memory in the contemporary North American graphic novel. Cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Seth, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and others have not only produced some of the most important graphic novels, they have also turned to the history of comics as a common visual heritage to pass on to new readers. This book is a full-length study of contemporary cartoonists when they are at work as historians: it offers a detailed description of how they draw from the archives of comics history, examining the different gestures of collecting, curating, reprinting, swiping, and undrawing that give shape to their engagement with the past. In recognizing these different acts of transmission, this book argues for a material and vernacular history of how comics are remembered, shared, and recirculated over time.

Archival Silences demonstrates emphatically that archival absences exist all over the globe. The book questions whether benign ‘silence’ is an appropriate label for the variety of destructions, concealment and absences that can be identified within archival collections. Including contributions from archivists and scholars working around the world, this truly international collection examines archives in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, India, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, The Philippines, Scotland, Turkey and the United States. Making a clear link between autocratic regimes and the failure to record often horrendous crimes against humanity, the volume demonstrates that the failure of governments to create records, or to allow access to records, appears to be universal. Arguing that this helps to establish a hegemonic narrative that excludes the ‘other’, this book showcases the actions historians and archivists have taken to ensure that gaps in archives are filled. Yet the book also claims that silences in archives are inevitable and argues not only that recordkeeping should be mandated by international courts and bodies, but that we need to develop other ways of reading archives broadly conceived to compensate for absences. Archival Silences addresses fundamental issues of access to the written record around the world. It is directed at those with a concern for social justice, particularly scholars and students of archival studies, history, sociology, international relations, international law, business administration and information science.

Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate terms relevant to critical studies of big data, from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. This pathbreaking work offers an interdisciplinary perspective on big data, interrogating key terms. Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate concepts relevant to critical studies of big data--arranged glossary style, from from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability--both challenging conventional usage of such often-used terms as prediction and objectivity and introducing such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm. The contributors include both leading researchers, including N. Katherine Hayles, Johanna Drucker and Lisa Gitelman, and such emerging agenda-setting scholars as Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts and Nicole Starosielski.

This book focuses on the culture and politics involved in building hip-hop archives. It addresses practical aspects, including methods of accumulation, curation, preservation, and digitization and critically analyzes institutional power, community engagement, urban economics, public access, and the ideological implications associated with hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values. The collection of essays are divided into four sections; Doing the Knowledge, Challenging Archival Forms, Beyond the Nation and Institutional Alignments: Interviews and Reflections. The book covers a range of official, unofficial, DIY and community archives and collections and features chapters by scholar practitioners, educators and curators. A wide swath of hip-hop culture is featured in the book, including a focus on dance, graffiti, clothing, and battle rap. The range of authors and their topics span countries in Asia, Europe, the Caribbean and North America.

Now a limited series on Prime Video! SAS: ROGUE HEROES, starring Connor Swindells, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Allen, and Dominic West The incredible untold story of World War II’s greatest secret fighting force, as told by the modern master of wartime intrigue. Ben Macintyre's latest book of derring-do and wartime intrigue reveals the incredible story of the last truly unsung secret organization of World War II—Britain's Special Air Service, or the SAS. Facing long odds and a tough slog against Rommel and the German tanks in the Middle East theatre, Britain turned to the brainchild of one its most unlikely heroes—David Stirling, a young man whose aimlessness and almost practiced ennui belied a remarkable mind for strategy. With the help of his equally unusual colleague, the rough-and-tumble Jock Lewes, Stirling sought to assemble a crack team of highly trained men who would parachute in behind enemy lines to throw monkey wrenches into the German war machine. Though he faced stiff resistance from those who believed such activities violated the classic rules of war, Stirling persevered and in the process created a legacy. Staffed by brilliant, idiosyncratic men whose talents defied both tradition and expectations, the SAS would not only change the course of the war, but the very nature of combat itself. Written with complete access to the never-before-seen SAS archives (who chose Macintyre as their official historian), Rogue Heroes offers a powerfully intimate look at life on the battlefield as lived by a group of remarkable soldiers whose contributions have, until now, gone unrecognized beyond the classified world. Filled with wrenching set pieces and weaving its way through multiple theatres of our grandest and most terrible war, this book is both an excellent addition to the Macintyre library and a critical piece in our understanding of the war's unfolding.

In Rogue Revolutionaries, Vanessa Mongey revives a lost and fleeting world of cosmopolitan radicalism through the stories of "foreigners of desperate fortune" who sought to ignite revolutions and create their own independent states. Their quest for recognition clashed with the growing power of nation-states and a new international order.