Scholarly digital editions have become an important resource in literary studies. They make openly available and contextualise a broad range of document types, including literary manuscripts, correspondence, or photographs, which shed new light on authors’ lives and works, their composition practices as well as their social and professional networks. They thus allow scholars to explore aesthetic, philological, and material aspects, as well as historical and biographical information within their social, cultural, and political contexts.

The specific affordances of the digital medium and its capacities to highlight (transnational) movements, connections, and relationships merit some reflections on digital editions as life-writing projects that seem to take up new trends in auto/biographical scholarship and practice. Capturing the dynamism, non-linearity, fragmentariness, and relationality of human lives through, for instance, network graphs, interactive maps, and non-hierarchical entry points, digital editions tie in with the objectives of relational biography or metabiography. Digital editions of pre-existing collections of ego-documents do not offer a coherent cradle-to-grave narrative but a glimpse into a fragmented life and decentred subject, with previously hidden lives coming into view. Moreover, they highlight the centrality of ‘persona’ as a concept in life-writing scholarship that does justice to the ways in which different versions of selfhood are strategically produced, staged, and disseminated through life narratives in a wide range of media and genres. Taking the scholarly digital editions Auden Musulin Papers (https://amp.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/) and Auden in Austria Digital (work in progress), two projects based at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (Austrian Academy of Sciences), as a starting point, I will explore the fruitful intersections of life narrative research and digital platforms, tools, and methodologies.

To understand the notions of classification, identification, domiciliation, and consignation in terms of private law and state law with reference to the upsurge in Open AI, Chat GPT, Block-Chain, Gen AI market to temper with the copyright norms, Intellectual Property Rights of the restored, revived and resurged archived manuscripts, records and literature for the conservation of cultural memory and history. Jacques Derrida writes in his book "The Archive Fever - A Freudian Impression" about the same in these words - “the exergue has at once an institutive and a conservative function: the violence of a power (Gewalt) which at once posits and conserves the law, as the Benjamin of Zur Kritik der Gewalt would say. What is at issue here, starting with the exergue, is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence.” (Derrida, 1996)

But the contemporary digitization of the archival repository has navigated unlimited, fastest possibilities for marketing expectations. Content Creation by way of computing automation neural network through Artificial Intelligence has changed the course of discourse of pragmatics concerning the continuation and perpetuation of ideas, concepts and concerns regarding the understanding, circulation and continuity of art and literature down the generations. Investment by stakeholders regarding this emerging entrepreneurship is now very much liable to understand the employees' AI empowered utility to leverage the archival heritage and culture through apt usage of AI productive tools to market as well as to conserve the ethnic interest of the respective memory variables of indigeneity.

The wandering aborigines’ pseudo-historical images, lifestyle, and reflections once used to be a matter of dreamtime indigenous oral traditions and the same for the globalized world seem to be incredibly unbelievable or awesome. But since the computer-based knowhow has been a medium to be a source of repository of archives, the knowledge about the traditional societies, their ethnographic art, folk culture have been measured as parameters in computational virtual vision context, while the progressive generative images technology has opened an avenue for patrons and researchers to explore indigeneity and traditions not only as the metaphors of ethnic identity and ethical mode of going back to sustainable eco-system, but more it has emphatically relived the indigenous intangible indicators as neural perceptions to load in the memory of neural networks datasets that not only help to translate, but also enables to encode and decode relationship in cross-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic contexts, henceforth contribute significantly in building multi-dimensional learning models from the perspectives of neurological analyses (acoustic features, visual images, myths, motifs, signs, symbols as signifiers of their existential features and sustenance in their respective climatic time-zones), besides exploring time-binding factors concerning their ecological, biological context and environmental existence.

After studying some samples as case studies of natural language processing and neural network programming especially of the ethnography of folk culture from Australia and India, it appeared that virtual orientation is in fact and in principle a purpose of building pedagogues of virtual orientalism, besides being the resourceful neurons to calculate perceptron (a mathematical model of a biological neuron used in AI NNs or a simple algorithm to classify data) for multi-layer neural computational automated vision. Indeed, the wandering aborigines’ culture is now a wondering computational pool to build national interest for traditions and indigeneity, and to prevent their extinction, besides mitigating binaries of nature and culture.

The paper aims to present an overview of the involved Repository learning models’ performance initiated to preserve and restore the process of loss, the function, and the training. Secondly the paper will also attempt to present the pro-active steps taken by the governing agencies in cross-cultural context to conserve intangible assets for generating text and content for the further academic proposed scholarships.

Within the ideological context of transhumanism, speculative fiction deals with ‘What if?’ by pushing current global trends and developments into realms defying empirical materialism. Ai Jiang’s transhuman postapocalyptic novelette I am AI explores the consequences of technological human augmentation through the protagonist ghostwriter Ai who, for the sake of increased productivity, slowly replaces her body parts, including her heart, with artificial technology. She falls into a philosophical conundrum in which she questions her identity and personhood as Ai or as A.I. Focussing on an analogue perspective, the Queer steampunk horror A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock looks at eco-transhumanism within a mycological cultural turn, as seen in popular cultural production. Medlock’s novel is about taxidermist Simon and botanist Gregor who live together in solitude on the edge of Victorian London society. They possess a strange fungus showing signs of intellect, and Gregor works to create true intelligent life from plant matter out of which the result is a half fungal-human female called Chloe.

These literary texts offer a type of protagonist echoing Harraway’s Chthulucene that heralds human and nonhuman as being linked in tentacular practices. A comparative analysis of I am AI and A Botanical Daughter show their exploration of the entanglement of “myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-ashumus” (Haraway, 101). These literary texts challenge auto-poiesis or the self-human-making machine of history (Haraway, 118) by instead proposing sym-poiesis, namely the making-with or “becoming-with” Haraway, 119). Stories of making-with or becoming-with are exemplified through the marginalised protagonists in I am AI and A Botanical Daughter. These texts first explore how human existence is measured regarding exclusivity or inclusivity which is reminiscent of Agemben’s discussion of the homo sacre as either sacred or accursed. However, being on the edge of existence forces invention and creation in which new forms of knowledge and social relations are envisioned. As briefly summarised so far, these literary texts offer controversial perspectives to current ecological, political, and ethnic standards in our contemporary times to ensure that we do not end up living the forms of apocalypse projected in speculative fiction.

Works Cited.

Agemben, Giogio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Haraway, Donna, J. Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press, 2016.

Jiang, Ai. I am Ai. Shortwave Publishing, 2023.

Medlock, Noah. A Botanical Daughter. Titan Books, 2024.