Images of Text : Digitisation as Remediation

The subject of this master's thesis is how digitisation changes the understanding of textual archival matter. Drawing on document theory and media theory, the concept of digitisation is analysed as remediation, the repro - duction of one medium in another. A key theoretical assumption is that digitisation is not a neutral process, and conceptualising digitisation as remediation is a way of analysing the changed charasteristics of archival matter when represented in another medium. A tentative model for analysing remediated archival matter is presented, identifying three aspects or dimensions as crucial in understanding how remediation affects the interpretation of archival matter: the document dimension, the media dimension and the institutional dimension. The source material for this thesis are four instances of digitised archival material, each conceptualised and analysed as a case study. The four case studies are: a digitised archival volume from the archives of Swedish art museum Moderna Museet; the digitised typewritten manuscript of the poem ”De sju dödssynderna” (”The seven deadly sins”) by Swedish author and poet Karin Boye, available on the cultural heritage portal Alvin; a digitised handwritten notebook forming part of the manuscript for the novel To the Lighthouse by English author Virginia Woolf, available on the website Woolf Online; the digitised verdict from Swedish court of justice Kammarrätten (Administrative Court of Appeal) regarding the age rating for the film The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One. It is argued that the digitised archival material in each case study has the character of a digital facsimile, whose charasteristics are dependent upon choices made in its production as well as mode of presentation. It is further argued that the characteristics of each digital facsimile shape and mediate the understanding of the archi - val matter, and that some kinds of information, e. g. textual information, are more easily represented than others, e. g. material information. In the light of these results, the changing role of the archive and the possibilities of different kinds of rese - arch are discussed. The original value of this master's thesis lies in its further development of the concept of re - mediation as a concept in archival science as well as deepening the understanding of the interpretative fra - meworks surrounding digitised archival matter. This is a two years master's thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies