ABSTRACT
The many forms of public knowledge accessed through memory institutions may be understood as data and yet little attention has been given to those existing materials that may be reconstituted by novel uses and research methods made possible by big data. Access to this knowledge has historically been mediated by the decision-making of human gatekeepers. As the cultural sector witnesses a re-making of the historical record as a data mine, the politics of digital knowledge and machine learning disrupt the hierarchical conventions of the analogue and pose questions of what new routes to knowledge may be opened up – and what possibilities may be closed off. This chapter explores what the decision-making processes of big data may mean for the capacity for researchers to discover and be inspired by diverse historical resources and how a knowledge commons governed by machine will affect the intellectual autonomy of future generations.
