Popular culture, digital archives and the new social life of data

A CModS Postgraduate Forum Event

New sources of data have become available in recent years that are generated in the cultural sphere not only as a result of routine interactions with various digital media but also, and crucially, as a result of what some would want to view as a shift towards popular cultural forms dominated by processes of, what has been termed, "prosumption."

This talk will reflect on the accumulation of this data in what might be thought of as cultural archives. Alongside this it will also explore how these data then fold back in to culture in various ways.

The talk will hopefully be used to stimulate some debate about what this means for culture itself and for how contemporary culture might be studied (both from social scientific and historical perspectives).

Centre for Modern Studies Postgraduate Forum