Databases Before Digital

Among the many cultural heritage materials that are now in digital form are things that were organized as “data” in some sense even before they were digital: reference works, indexes, directories, concordances, censuses, inventories, card catalogues, etc. I’ve worked on several projects that make some use of such materials, and they present interesting challenges, practical and conceptual. If we make a database now from resources created by a historical bureaucracy, how much of that bureaucracy do we still have to negotiate? If others are interested, I would enjoy a conversation that could range from questions of what we can learn from how and why people organized “data” before digital methods, to what we can learn from media studies, and not least to what kinds of practical projects we might imagine. It would be especially interesting to try to bridge archival, library, scholarly, and technological perspectives. Whenever I browse the Internet Archive, for example, I’m struck by how much past effort of predigital “data modeling” (we might call it) is both available and hidden in ways that full-text search and text mining tools don’t begin to do justice to. What else?