Too many topics, too little time

This is fundamentally a paper about the movement of techno-socialobjects which we call digital archives.  It is about the effects of those movements considered transversally.    The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture hosts several archives that are changing, becoming, and revising the relations between themselves, their users, and other communities. The archives that we host are to some people  unknown, but to others world reknowned. They include the Feminist  Theory Online archive http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/, the Situationists International Online Archive http://www.cddc.vt.edu/SIOnline/ , the April16archive http://april16archive.org/, a mirror of The  Marxist Archive http://www.marxists.org/, and a mirror of the the  Bureau of Public Secrets. Those are just the more major archives   These archives are in part alive and in part dead, some are constantly updated and upgraded by their communities, others have not been  updated for ages. However the knowledge and meanings of these  archives construct relations to moving beings and their artifacts. This paper attempts to tell some of the stories of time, place, and movement of these archives within and through the beings and artifacts  in which they become embedded.  In doing that, the paper describes the  everyday life of the archives themselves as they are ambulant in  everyday life.

Using short narratives, this paper center several events and relationships that changed the archives and mobilized them in some relation to everyday life. The stories used will deal with the ambulations of the Marxists archive in 2007 when it was attacked by computers in China, the movements of Feminist theory websites as it becomes embedded in and migrates through textbooks and academic papers  becoming something new, while remaining unchanged, the Tragedy of  April16archive and its relationship to the Northern Illinois  University shooting, and possibly the trials and tribulations of  Situationists International and the Bureau of Public Secrets in  relation to their original print existences.

Through telling the stories of these techno-social ambulants as archives in everyday life, I hope to show their movements and embeddedness in everyday life; their capacity for change and becoming  in relation to all varieties of institutions and communities, from  local users to nation states and to show how their existence allows  for a transversal analysis of cultural relations in relation to the  archives as they migrate through and among those institutions and  communities.