Digital Archives of Science

The archive of science preserves the sediments of scientific practices: drafts, protocols of rejected hypotheses and failed experiments, obsolete instruments and other vestiges of knowledge-making. As science becomes increasingly digital, so does its archive – transforming not only how the scientific past is preserved, but how it is interpreted and engaged with. Digital collections clearly differ from the traditional lieux de mémoire . Rather than tangible and authentic objects, they store data – processable, mutable, and dependent on computational infrastructures. How do these infrastructures shape our encounters with the scientific past? What happens to the vestiges of science when they turn into data? Positioned at the intersection of Science Studies, Media Studies, and Digital Humanities, this book critically examines digital archives of science as infrastructures that mediate memory and knowledge. Drawing on a large corpus of scientifi c collections across disciplines and combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, it explores the boundaries and possibilities introduced by these digital repositories. Ultimately, it asks what it means to do history in and through digital archives.