An audio interview [iTunes] with Sherry Turkle, who directs the Initiative on Technology and the Self at MIT about her book Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.

The book, a collection of essays edited by Turkle, includes an essay by Susan Yee about her visit to the Le Corbusier archive in Paris on the day the master architect’s materials were being digitized. Here’s how Turkle describes Yee’s visit in an essay called “Inner Objects” [PDF]:

Yee began her relationship to Le Corbusier through the physicality of his drawings. The master’s original blueprints, sketches, and plans were brought to her in long metal boxes. Le Corbusier’s handwritten notes in the margins of his sketches, the traces of his fingerprints, the smudges, the dirt—Yee was thrilled by all of these. One morning, Yee has all of this in her hands, but by the afternoon, she has only digital materials to work with. Yee experiences a loss of connection to Le Corbusier: “It made the drawings feel anonymous,” she says. More important, Yee says that the digitized archives made her feel anonymous. When working in the physical archive, Yee was on a kind of pilgrimage. She did not pause in her work, so completely was she immersed in the touch and feel of Le Corbusier’s artifacts. But once the material was on the screen, there was a disconnect. Yee found herself switching screens, moving from the Le Corbusier materials to check her email back at MIT. More than a resource, the digitized archive becomes a state of mind.