in Performing Digital: Multiple Perspectives on a Living Archive, ed. David Carlin and Laurene Vaughan (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015)
Digitisation takes in cultural collections - objects, documents, catalogs, indices - and extrudes data: records, files, and database entries. All the familiar representations of collections—museum web sites or collection search interfaces—are selective and contingent representations of complex digital wholes. They can always be otherwise. This chapter considers current conventions and emerging practices in the representation of digital cultural collections, and locates them within a simple analytic framework. In presenting this analytic framework, and considering some questions and challenges that arise, I argue for the potential of new forms of representation, and hope to provide tools for reading these forms critically.