The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a technoutopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard.

— Introduction to The Total Archive (special issue of History of the Human Sciences, 2018)

• Special issue of History of the Human Sciences

  • Interview on the HHS blog

  • Introduction: ‘The Total Archive: Data, Subjectivity, Universality’, History of the Human Sciences 31 (2018), pp. 3–22, with Matthew Drage [pdf]

• Special issue of LIMN

• Conference at CRASSH, University of Cambridge