Paper Machines allows the reader to identify and pursue particular moments of dissent, schism, and utopianism – zeroing in on conflicts between the pesticide industry and the Appropriate Technology movement or between the World Bank and the Liberation Theology movement over exploitative practices, for example. Digitally structured reading means giving more time to counterfactuals and suppressed voices, realigning the archive to the intentions of history from below.

anyone, scholar or citizen

But doing so runs into problems of selection and representativity. I’d be loath to say that any argument could be made from the satires that Isaac Cruikshank designed, but many differing and contradictory interpretations could be made depending on the hand curated corpus of prints that was chosen

A digital archaeology that sat within the digital humanities would worry less about that, and concentrate more on discovery and generation, of ‘interesting way[s] of thinking about this’. So too with digital history.