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Towards an intellectual history of digitization: Myths, dystopias, and discursive shifts in museum computing

Recent contributions have highlighted that the advent of digital technologies in the humanities is the object of different and even polarized narratives, which frame the effects of digitization either in utopian or dystopian terms. In this light, technology-centred narratives should be complemented by an intellectual history of technology-related «myths and dystopias», in order to increase our understanding of how digital technologies are presented in the disciplinary and public debates. Whereas this type of analysis has taken its start from library science and the digital humanities, however, it is still in its infancy within the field of museum computing. To this purpose, the article provides an interpretive and critical review of the debate on the automated cataloguing and digitization of museum collections. It highlights a sequence of discursive shifts in time since the 1960s to the present decade are identified and discussed: namely, a phase of «standardization», followed by «the museum of the Information Society» and, most recently, a «post-modernist utopia» which dominates the current debate. Each new paradigm tends at the same time to reverse and «re-mediate» some characteristics of former phases, generating controversies that are likely to proceed until more empirical knowledge is collected about the actual impacts of digital media on museums.