Introduction

摘要

The articles in this collection were presented at the third conference in a series of conferences under the broad rubric "knowledge/value." This conference, held at the University of Chicago's Beijing Center, was on the topic "Information, Databases, and Archives."1 The articles collected here, all reporting on research in Asia, focus on the forms through which collective and public knowledge is rendered as information of a systematic, comparable, and collectively useful kind. Information models and metaphors that have become hegemonic in molecular biology are accompanied in the contemporary era by the botanical and zoological databases of the environmental sciences, by digital humanities analyses of writing, and by artificial intelligence systems that help users manage an excess of knowledge and put.it to partial use. By virtue of new information-management technologies, multiple archives accumulated in diverse histories are ever more accessible to some users, while at the same time the very structure of our retrieval tools buries some elements of these archives ever more deeply in obscurity. The ways in which tools such as databases generate new knowledge within the constraints of market and government agendas is an important aspect of a global "informationalization" process that is far advanced, perhaps especially in India and China. The articles in this issue explore some of the new terrains of knowledge revealed in these processes.