On Disclosure: Technology, Openness, and the Shape of Knowledge

[This is a paper I presented at a workshop in CSDS in 2022.]

Digital archives are often described as collections. Places where data is stored, preserved, made accessible. But that description is too passive. Archives are not only about holding. They are about disclosing. They bring objects and data from private domains into public space. They redraw the boundary between what is kept and what is shared. In doing so, they shift the conditions under which knowledge can be formed.

I have spent much of my work thinking about digital repositories — their structures, their assumptions, their histories. I have worked on projects that digitised manuscripts, built collation tools, preserved letters, modelled battlefields, and recovered fragile memory cultures. Always, the act of collection was also an act of disclosure. Always, the question lingered: what does it mean to take something once private, once partial, and place it into a domain that claims to be public?

The French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant offers a useful frame. In his reading of the Greek polis, he describes openness not as a vague moral good, but as a structural change: the movement from secret procedures to public ones, from knowledge hoarded by cults to knowledge shared among citizens. Democracy, in this account, is not just a system of governance. It is a condition of shared visibility. What was hidden becomes legible. What was guarded becomes common property.

In the digital archive, this openness is both expanded and complicated. Different projects demonstrate different dimensions of disclosure. WikiLeaks, for instance, made government documents — meant to remain confidential — accessible to the public. Transcribe Bentham took manuscripts housed in a particular physical location and opened them for distributed engagement. Photogrammar took a historical photographic corpus and transformed its possibilities through new modes of access and visualization. In each case, the archive is not just a container. It is an intervention.

This openness, though, is not automatic. It is not the consequence of technology itself. Technology is not neutral. It carries assumptions about what should be seen, what should be shared, what should be preserved. As Martin Heidegger reminds us, the essence of technology is not found in devices or systems. It is found in the way we orient ourselves to the world. In the choices we make about what matters and how it is revealed.

To think about digital archives in this way is to think about them as expressions of relation, not just storage. A repository is a wager on connection. A structure of offering. A decision to make certain forms of knowledge possible, and to accept that others will be left behind.

This is why I believe the conversation about digital repositories is, at heart, a conversation about democracy. Not in the narrow political sense. But in the sense that Vernant suggests — the slow extension of visibility, the careful crafting of spaces where knowledge becomes common property. And not just the knowledge itself, but the means of forming knowledge: the data, the tools, the structures of access.

Much of the technical infrastructure that underpins this openness was built with a spirit of generosity. The world wide web, as it was originally conceived, was not a market. It was a commons. An ecosystem of modular, open systems that allowed for independent creation, publication, collaboration. In the digital age, we have not only rediscovered the need for archives. We have rediscovered the idea that knowledge, at its best, is a shared labour.

But this spirit is fragile. It will always be in tension with the demands of capital, with the pull of enclosure and extraction. Technology requires investment. Infrastructure is never free. The openness we celebrate is, in many ways, an anomaly — a rare convergence of generosity, foresight, and opportunity. It cannot be taken for granted.

To create digital repositories today is to participate in this tension. To defend, in whatever small way, the possibility of open investigation. It is to imagine new modes of scholarly work, where transparency is not an afterthought but a principle. Where disclosure is not a risk but a responsibility. Where the archive does not simply preserve the past, but structures the conditions of thought for those who come after.

We will not save everything. We will not prevent the pressures of the present from reshaping the archives we build. But in the act of disclosure, in the quiet work of making knowledge possible, we make a wager on a different future. One where knowledge is not owned. One where the means of making knowledge are open to all.