The world digital library and the politics and promises of knowledge societies
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Authors
Mason, Caroline
Issue Date
2024-08
Type
Electronic thesis
Thesis
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Science and technology studies
Alternative Title
Abstract
The World Digital Library (WDL) was a joint project by UNESCO and the LOC aimed at creating a unitary digital repository of the ‘world’s most important cultural treasures’ through a cooperative global undertaking. The stated objective of the WDL was to contribute to UNESCO’s global policy agenda of building of inclusive knowledge societies. This agenda, as articulated within UNESCO’s 2005 World Report, Towards Knowledge Societies, sought to enhance international cooperation in the digital information landscape, increase the variety and volume of cultural content and heritage available online, and promote intercultural understanding. Situating the emergence of the WDL in the context of UNESCO’s Knowledge Societies policy agenda, this dissertation approaches the WDL as a site for investigating the practicalities, politics, and power dynamics implicated in international cooperation in digital cultural projects. Accordingly, this dissertation offers an infrastructural analysis and history of the WDL project itself and, simultaneously, positions the WDL as a case study of the implications of UNESCO’s Knowledge Societies agenda. I ultimately argue that UNESCO’s calls for enhanced international cooperation in digital cultural/heritage projects, bereft of direct intergovernmental oversight and de jure standard-setting, serves to reproduce the de facto hegemony of dominant ways of organizing, classifying, and presenting cultural heritage online. To illustrate this, I explicate and historicize the power dynamics that shaped the WDL’s efforts to actualize the objectives and the policy recommendations of UNESCO’s Knowledge Societies agenda.
Drawing on oral testimonies from key actors and participants in the WDL project, I show that, despite having been proposed and framed as a shared global undertaking, the LOC ultimately took a dominant position in content selection and processing, thereby wielding hegemonic control over the curation and presentation of the WDL and its international collections. Because of this untoward influence of the LOC, the WDL not only failed to foster international cooperation but, moreover, reproduced the LOC’s ways of knowing and constructing ‘the Other,’ falling short of actualizing its stated objective of fostering intercultural dialogue and understanding. Through this analysis, I highlight the power-dynamics implicated in and trace the conditions of impossibility for fostering international cooperation in the project.
Approaching this topic through a history of the present, I trace the historical arrangements and conditions upon which the power-dynamics embedded in the design and development of the WDL have been built and made possible. I argue that, in addition to socio-economic and structural inequities, the conditions of impossibility for international cooperation have been sustained and enabled through the diminishing role and influence that international institutions hold in shaping norms for the international library and bibliographic community. Furthermore, I show that the decreased influence of international institutions has been accompanied by the de facto hegemony of US and US industry-based standards for organizing and classifying information in both digital and physical libraries worldwide. In doing so, I highlight the somewhat paradoxical relationship between decentralization and hegemony and position the WDL as a case study of the broader socio-cultural and epistemic consequences of this relationship on the construction of the ‘digital cultural record’.
Description
August 2024
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Full Citation
Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY