Amalia S. Levi

I've contributed an essay to this DEPENDENT issue:

"Archival Trajectories: Information Beyond Content"

It gives an overview of my PhD research that focuses on why we find what we find, i.e., the many recordkeeping and archival dependencies that underpin what is visible and accessible today.

Now also in English! Including eight stories by yours truly, about Rembrandt’s Black neighbours, Armenian merchants fighting at the stock market, indigenous Surinamese leaders in 17th century Amsterdam and more.

🤗 Thank you so much for reading!

Probably a study written by people who have never set foot in an achives, thus are totally oblivious that the *vast* majority of...history isn't digitized, has minimal descriptions, often is 'hidden' etc. etc. etc.

O--and no "history" is complete if it doesn't account for what's missing and why...

Knowledge infrastructures we rely upon today reflect and perpetuate dependencies and technologies of imperial power and colonial control.

🧵

10/10 "Models make words, but people make meaning."

AI can never be representative because 95% of human wisdom and knowledge has not yet been digitized and is not accessible to LLMs.

arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 Explore how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries in this large-scale research visualization.

9/ Project such as Calculating Empires allows us to visualize how technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 still subjugate.

calculatingempires.net

8/ To resist the coloniality of data, scholars suggest "possible alternative data epistemologies that are respectful of populations, cultural diversity, and environments."

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Network Sovereignty In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly determined that affordable Internet access is a human right, critical to citizen participation in democratic gov...

7/ Many marginalized communities strive to harness control of information flows and information systems for "sovereignty, and toward self-governance, self-determination, and decolonization."

uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295...

6/ In fact, "digital colonialism" means that today imperial control is translated into a system of global surveillance capitalism.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Digital cultural colonialism: measuring bias in aggregated digitized content held in Google Arts and Culture Abstract. In February 2011, Google launched its Google Art Project, now known as Google Arts and Culture (GA&C), that currently hosts approximately six

5/ Today "digital cultural colonialism" translates in uneven (augmented) visibility of dominant cultural systems, and the further marginalization of others.

academic.oup.com/dsh/article-...

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat How one crew risked radiation, storms, and currents to save Japan from digital isolation.

4/ And of course, infrastructure, particularly the one under the sea, is invisible to most people because it works smoothly thanks to the labor of unseen heroes.

www.theverge.com/c/24070570/i...

3/ Empires have not disappeared but are now in "the cloud," and data center infrastructures follow the global expansion of super powers.

dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

2/ In Africa, Internet infrastructure managed by private Western big tech corporations "not only replicates colonial logic but also follows the same infrastructural path laid during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Colonial Topographies of Internet Infrastructure: The Sedimented and Linked Networks of the Telegraph and Submarine Fiber Optic Internet The global digital divide, referencing inequalities in Internet access between countries in the Global North and the Global South, has been the topic of conversation for several years international...

1/ Digital infrastructures in India and the region today follow the telegraph system built in the 1800 s "and its strategic deployment in places of military and commercial importance to the colonial administration."

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Knowledge infrastructures we rely upon today reflect and perpetuate dependencies and technologies of imperial power and colonial control.

🧵

"Archives are not inert historical collections. They always stand in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the presents puts to the past; and the present always puts its questions differently from one generation to another."

Stuart Hall, "Constituting an archive"

🤗 Thanks, Fiona!

Of course, these are only some of information that are concealed--and not an exhaustive list. I'm adding here the link to the original post and also another one.

bsky.app/profile/amal...

bsky.app/profile/amal...

Evidence of destruction Among the artefacts in the Roth Collection is this child's shoe sole, cut from a Sefer Torah. Roth himself records acquiring it from a peddler in post-Holocaust Salonika during a brief visit in 1946. He recognised its extraordinary value as a symbol of the near-destruction of Sephardi Jewry in Nazi-occupied Europe. The sole has never been exhibited and research on it has only just begun, undertaken by Dr Prosser. Beneath is a picture of the Torah fragment in the shape of a shoe sole.

In a few week I’ll be teaching a Rare Books School course on medieval manuscripts. One skill I’ll be teaching is how to recognize manuscript fragments. While this account here is rare, it’s a reminder of why the histories of scraps matter. www.leeds.ac.uk/news-arts-cu...

Painting: Claude Lorrain: Port de mer avec la villa Médicis, Painting, 1637 © Galleria degli Uffizi.

Excited to kick off our workshop today at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg: Transient Communities and Spaces of Mobility: Theories, Methods, and Themes in Early Modern Mobilities History, organized with my colleague Dr Sarah Lentz from the University of Bremen #earlymodern #history #mobility #history 🗃️

For those many, many of you newly here (very exciting, a little overwhelming!), I'd love to offer my project's blog on medicine, race-making, and slavery as teaching resource, research inspiration, and testament to an exciting community of new and established scholars

#EarlyModern

Maybe @cliocontemporary.bsky.social might be a possible venue for what you have in mind.

Wragge Labs A compilation of things I've built over the last 30 years to help people see and use the online collections of libraries, archives, and museums.

For 30 years I've been experimenting with ways to see & use the online collections of libraries, archives & museums. I've made useful things, playful things, & weird things. Here's a big list of them for you to explore! https://wraggelabs.com #GLAM #histodons #digitalHumanities

;) me too!

🙃 I can imagine!

What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders?

Archives are not dusty! We take good care of them and that's why users can access centuries-old material today.

O! And *even* dust adds context ;)

Looking forward to being part of this!

This.

Also:

- Very (very!) little of archives is digitized (let alone datafied)
- Information is not always in what's written but between the lines
- Context of a document's creation, preservation, transmission is crucial.

No AI can access + understand humanity's memory for the forseeable future.

Periodic PSA 🙃:

Reminder that whenever you "discover" something at the archives, it's been made available to you through the physical and intellectual labor of archivists.

This is beautiful!!! So much to see in there! Thanks for posting, Mark.