IN THIS ESSAY I EXAMINE select museum responses to new media in order to develop ways of thinking about the changing contours of institutionalized collecting in the digital age. My approach is grounded in a conception of the museum as a discrete medial form whose operations have been and will remain crucial in shaping important aspects of collecting as a social practice and form of cultural memory. As I think of them, museums operate by means of key processes, practices, and competencies involved in organizing, classifying, assigning meaning, and remembering objects, both materially in space and in interaction with medial forms prevailing at particular historical moments. Conceived this way, museum processes and competencies are not the sole purview of museums as we have come to know them, nor have they been in the past. As an analysis of select historical junctures of medial rupture and institutional change shows, these processes and competencies have at times been shared with, or shaped by, other discrete media, institutions, and actors beyond current configurations of museums as they are known today. In addition to illuminating why museums are unlikely the victim of media substitution outright, an analysis of such a juncture raises the expectation that museums can and will experience reconfigurations relative to other entities with which they share their key processes.

I will present my argument in three parts. First, I will briefly delineate my conception of the museum as medium, with an eye toward linking museal processes with long-standing functions museums have had in arbitrating the world and organizing knowledge about it. As the analysis in part 2 will make clear, these functions remain connected with collecting through several historical junctures, in ways related to memory and knowledge production that can be expected to persist into the digital age in significant ways. To demonstrate this, the analysis will mark shifts in what Paula Findlen has described in terms of a dispositif manifested by various forms of media of memory and learning from the Renaissance to the present. Here I will focus on two points: first the intertwined and privileged roles collecting and earlier conceptions of the “museum” have had in generating the value and meaning of objects. And second, how collections-based practices helped develop cognitive capacities to cope with the increasing amount of knowledge created by forms of new media that today is called “information overload.”

This chapter explores what computer-based techniques of distant reading and information visualization can reveal about the publishing programs of nineteenth-century mainstream weekly and monthly periodicals such as Die Gartenlaube (The Garden Bower), Westermann's Illustrirte Monatshefte (Westermann's Illustrated Monthly), Daheim (At Home), and Deutsche Rundschau (German Review), and their place in German life and letters. As scholars have stressed for some time, these periodicals represented some of post-1848 Germany's most widely read print material. Though publishing in general experienced major expansions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, mainstream periodicals rose even faster than books in terms of their circulation. Their relatively inexpensive prices and inclusion of a diverse range of topics meant that individual copies likely reached far more readers by a multiple of five or even more—a factor that has long since driven scholars to regard the periodical press as a key shaper of postrevolutionary German thought and culture. Yet as anyone who has faced the mass of articles that appeared in these periodicals during their runs can attest, illuminating that contribution by means of studying each and every text remains a daunting challenge. Already in 1907, the critic Ernst von Wolzogen observed that such an endeavor represented a “Höllenstrafe”—a punishment of eternal damnation—for which he hoped a sinner of such magnitude would never be found. Strategies of distant reading, so it seems, might present a less damning way into this material and prompt new questions with respect to how publishers changed or maintained their offerings, particularly over long time spans.

Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.