The Politics of Mass Digitization

“Like the great libraries of the past, all mass digitization projects have a political context. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup combines insightful analysis of how cultural and political themes are interwoven with in-depth case studies of projects like Google Books and Europeana, and contrasts these projects with 'shadow libraries.' Thylstrup draws on a wide range of earlier work, from Voltaire to Borges and many modern scholars, but we always hear her voice. It is good to have a book on this topic written by a scholar who is deeply knowledgeable, but slightly removed from the projects they describe.”
—William Y. Arms, Professor Emeritus, Computing and Information Science at Cornell University

“Thylstrup's elegantly written and precise analysis unfolds the implicit cultural, media-economical and legal 'infrapolitics' of the mass digitization assemblage of human and non-human agencies. Re-actualizing Walter Benjamin's figure of the 'flâneur,' this study discusses strategies of how not to get lost in the labyrinth of Google Books or Europeana mass digitization. This qualitative analysis offers critical answers to the 'big data' avalanche of digital text quantification and to the phantasma of the 'total archive.'"
—Wolfgang Ernst, Professor of Media Theories at Humboldt University of Berlin and author of Digital Memory and the Archive

“ In this timely polemic, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup shows how the increased access to information enabled by mass digitization is transforming our engagement with cultural works. In the process, clear distinctions between 'legal' (Google Books, Europeana) and 'pirate' (Monoskop, lib.ru) projects and platforms are becoming much harder to maintain. The Politics of Mass Digitization deserves to be read, cited —and digitized massively!”
—Gary Hall, Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK and author of Pirate Philosophy