ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From “the Genealogical Sublime” to “Dead and Deleted”: Digitization and DNA Databanks

• In Event: Genealogy & Inheritance between Passion, Law, and Science, II

English Abstract

In my 2020 book the Genealogical Sublime, I explored “that unsettling feeling of locating ourselves in ever-growing databases of ancestors, databases that thrive on the technological and mythical fantasy of completeness in the world.” Since then, I have been working on a documentary called “Dead But Not Deleted” —or perhaps—“Dead and Deleted,” about what happens to our data after we die. The topic extends my interest in the databases of the dead and the kinds of inheritance and continuation we find in data. How do we interact with the dead when some aspect of them still seems animated? And, how might we deal with the idea of complete deletion, which has been, historically, the fate of most people who have ever lived? Genealogical records have always been uneven, and thus too genealogical imagination. Modern genealogy, and particularly the digitization of records and DNA databanks, led to a democratization of inheritance, but also an expansion of the genealogical imagination to the point of absurdity. But digital remains are unstable, and the gatekeepers are now corporate rather than administrative or religious. How might I modify my previous understanding of the genealogical sublime in light of the shifting dynamics of ownership, corporate retention, re-vivification, and possible deletion?

Author

• Julia Creet, York University