Dear AOIRers, Boris Jardine and I just finished editing a great set of short (teachable!) articles on the past and present of vast accumulations of data, informaion, samples, records, books and many other things. It’s a whirlwind tour, we hope you will take a read, and share with people who might be interested. Christopher Kelty -------------------------------------------- Limn Number 6: The Total Archive http://limn.it/issue/06/ Edited by Boris Jardine and Christopher Kelty Vast accumulations saturate our world: security agencies want every phone call and email, advertisers want every preference of every individual; India wants to give everyone a number, and maybe an iris scan; hundreds of thousands of whole genome sequences; seed banks of all existing plants, and of course, books... all of them. Just what is the purpose of these optimistically total archives, and how are they changing us? This issue of Limn asks authors and artists to consider how these accumulations govern us, where this obsession with totality came from and how we might think differently about big data and algorithms, by thinking carefully about archives. http://limn.it @limnmagazine http://facebook.com/limnmagazine