Nina Lager Vestberg: Materialities and Temporalities of Digital Research Practices – Recording, Reading, Writing

The digital mediation of archival sources is today so ubiquitous as to have become virtually transparent. Taking as its starting point a research project on the relationship between digitisation and the archival cultures of photography, this presentation will explore more broadly the relationship between digitisation and the research cultures of the humanities. The talk will focus on the encounter between researcher and research object, drawing on examples from a variety of sources, including sound recordings, book reproductions, and photographic transparencies. Taking into account the different affordances of originals and surrogates, as they are experienced at different historical moments, it will be argued, among other things, that the digital is not necessarily the most derivative format, and that there are times when digital originals may best be consulted throug the medium of analogue surrogates.

Nina Lager Vestberg is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Art and Media Studies at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Trondheim. She was educated in the UK, where she studied photography and multimedia at the University of Westminster (BA Hons), history of art at Birkbeck College, University of London (MA and PhD). She is currently completing a monograph on digitisation and the archival cultures of photography. Nina is also interested in the environmental aspects of media technologies, and her most recent journal publication is "There Is No Cloud": Toward a Materialist Ecology of Post-Photography, Captures 1:1 (2016).