Media archaeology of Institutional archives?

Abstract

In his book entitled What is media archaeology Jussi Parikka suggests that it is possible to outline and develop a ‘hardcore’ media archaeology not only of the hard drive and software but their official use as a database, as information management systems as well. But is it possible at all to give a media archaeological account of the formal-institutional digital media practices, to provide a deep and material media archaeology of, say, a scholarly text archive as TextGrid or Deutsches Textarchiv? In my paper I try to check the ability of Parikka’s argument to answer these questions.