By its very nature, the digital archive allows for the forsaking of context in the effective hunt for content. What we are afforded in convenience, breadth, and immediacy of data, we must balance with risks of anachronism, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation of said data.

After spending roughly six months helping to arrange the paper files in the Richard Rorty archives, this group found themselves privy to the minutiae of Rorty’s thoughts as well as their place in the macrocosm of the works collected therein. Likewise, they immediately recognized the potential for disastrous misreadings of particular pieces of that collection if removed from their context in the body en masse.

In this presentation, they will exhibit some of the problematics as well as the benefits of the digital archive in regards to its pedagogical use, the fostering of a personal relationship with a no longer living thinker, and even some of the theological issues implicated in this form of research on Rorty’s works.

Some of the issues we will probe range from questions about how much a thinker like Rorty ought to be mediated; having straddled the analog and digital age, where his scholarship as well as its reception fit; whether the salient features of a digital archive, moreover those of a such a controversial and significant thinker, lend themselves to being misconstrued; and ultimately, how some of these pitfalls challenge the wealth of insight and information that we gain.

No longer standing upon the precipice, but rather well within the rabbit-hole of a world fast re-conceiving itself in the milieu of 1’s and 0’s, we hope to open a lively debate about the facility and utility of digital archiving.