Remembering and storing
Explore how information escaped the limits of living memory and moved into durable materials, recorded media, digital storage and remote infrastructure. This pathway follows the main changes in chronological order and shows which older practices continued beside them.
How did information learn to survive its original moment?
Five turning points
Neural and cognitive memory
Neural and cognitive memory is the first topic that turns information transmission into inheritance across time. Speech can encode a complex message.
Open topic →Clay tablets
Clay was widely available in southern Mesopotamia and could be prepared without rare materials. Moist clay accepts rapid impressions and correction.
Open topic →Scroll
The reader encounters a controlled window rather than the whole text, making physical sequence central to navigation. Joined sheets permit extensive texts without requiring many separate tablets or leaves.
Open topic →Recorded sound and the phonograph
Voices, performances and acoustic environments can outlive the moment and, sometimes, the people that produced them. Accent, timing, timbre, phrasing, dynamics, room acoustics and performance variation can survive.
Open topic →Cloud computing and cloud storage
Compute, storage and networks can be requested through software interfaces rather than manual procurement alone. Resources can expand and contract with workload, reducing the need to purchase for a guessed peak.
Open topic →Follow the history from beginning to present
Neural and cognitive memory
Biological memory is the first storage system in ITEM.
Tokens and accounting objects
Tokens and accounting objects examines the use of small, portable objects to represent quantities, categories, obligations and transactions before and alongside written accounting.
Khipu and other knot-record systems
Khipu are information structures made from cords whose material properties, attachments, colours, knot types and knot positions can encode administrative and possibly other categories of information.
Clay tablets
Clay tablets are moulded documentary surfaces on which information is impressed, incised or drawn while the material is moist, then preserved through drying or firing.
Stone inscriptions and monuments
Stone inscriptions place language, names, laws, dedications, victories, boundaries and memories into durable architectural or landscape settings.
Papyrus and parchment
Papyrus and parchment made writing lighter, longer and more portable than monumental stone or accumulated clay tablets.
Paper
Paper is a thin sheet formed from dispersed fibres suspended in water, deposited on a screen, pressed and dried.
Scroll
A scroll organises flexible writing material into a continuous roll that is progressively exposed and concealed during reading.
Codex
A codex is a document formed from leaves gathered and bound along one edge, creating pages that can be opened, compared, numbered, marked and revisited without traversing the whole work.
Archives
An archive is not simply a room full of old documents.
Photography
Photography created a new class of information object: a durable image produced through the controlled action of light on a sensitive surface.
Recorded sound and the phonograph
Before sound recording, a voice or performance survived through memory, notation, imitation or repeated live performance.
Motion-picture film and cinema
Motion-picture film extended photography from a persistent spatial trace into an ordered sequence of traces.
Magnetic digital storage
Magnetic digital storage represents machine-readable information through controlled magnetic states.
Cloud computing and cloud storage
Cloud computing makes configurable processing, storage, networking and software available as remotely operated services that can be provisioned and released on demand.