Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 624.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
[1] From: Elisabeth Burr <Elisabeth.Burr@uni-duisburg.de> (19)
Subject: Re: 16.622 preservation and absence
[2] From: John Lavagnino <John.Lavagnino@kcl.ac.uk> (59)
Subject: Re: 16.622 preservation and absence
[3] From: Patrick Durusau <pdurusau@emory.edu> (72)
Subject: Re: 16.622 preservation and absence
[4] From: Patricia Galloway <galloway@ischool.utexas.edu> (15)
Subject: Re: 16.622 preservation and absence
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Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 06:57:26 +0100
From: Elisabeth Burr <Elisabeth.Burr@uni-duisburg.de>
Subject: Re: 16.622 preservation and absence
Just a very short remark,
when printing with movable letters was invented the tone was at least
as triumphalistic (see Luther and many others).
There are ways of keeping track. A good example seems to me the French
Government site
http://www.archives.premier-ministre.gouv.fr/home_ie.htm
or the Digital Variants project:
http://www.digitalvariants.org/
I don't think, we are the preservers of knowledge per se. We preserve in
any case only what we think interesting and valuable. Just think of what
happened to women's contribution to culture, knowledge, science.
Elisabeth
HD Dr. Elisabeth Burr
Fakultt 2 / Romanistik
Universitt Duisburg-Essen
Standort Duisburg
Geibelstr. 41
D-47058 Duisburg
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/Fak2/Romanistik/Personal/Burr/
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Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 06:58:42 +0100
From: John Lavagnino <John.Lavagnino@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 16.622 preservation and absence
Willard writes---
> Less
> immediately the problem with digitization is not merely that
> such artifactual knowledge can be but roughly preserved in
> digital form. More seriously for some areas of work, this form,
> in which so many recent artifacts have been created, is from
> the get-go demonstrably poor as a means of articulating certain
> kinds of knowledge, which as a result may be entirely lost. The
> case is made forcefully by Jed Z. Buchwald for the history of
> science in his forthcoming piece, "The scholar's seeing eye",
> in "Reworking the bench - research notebooks in the history of
> science", eds. F. L. Holmes, J. Renn, H-J Rheinberger,
> ARCHIMEDES, vol. 7, pgs. 311-25. He argues that,
>> When historians in the future look back to the analog world --
>> to the world of paper -- it may be difficult for them to find
>> the residue of human thought and action, because they will be
>> used to seeing only the perfected digital record, which will
>> rarely leave informative traces of the road not taken. Paper
>> retains its human stain; the digital record is
>> spotless. Digital images can be made of paper objects, thereby
>> making the human stain virtually available, as it were. Nearly
>> perfect facsimiles of books and notebooks can be and have been
>> made -- the purpose of course being to give the buyer a sense
>> of direct contact with the object's original producers. But
>> records originally digital had no marks to copy, and their
>> authors cannot be made present in this way.
> Using Heinrich Hertz as example, Buchwald examines "three
> instances in which scraps of paper provide historical evidence
> that in the one case would not exist at all, and in the other
> would probably have been eliminated, had electronic methods
> been available at the time".
> This is a serious, well-considered argument from one of the
> leading historians of science.
Having read the article in question I'd say it's interesting and
well-considered in what it says about Hertz, but lame, unscholarly,
and wrong on this point about digital records. It's the sort of piece
that assumes we know the current situation so well that no evidence of
any sort is needed other than hand-waving reference to what we
supposedly all know; behind such discussions there's usually nothing
more substantial than the bitter memory of a floppy disk that stopped
working or a word processor that scrambled one's file.
The digital era continues a historical trend you can notice in what
survives of intellectual work over the past few centuries: on the
whole there's more and more preservation of more and more information.
Hertz is actually a bad example to use in kvetching about digital
stuff because the record is spotty: Buchwald has to admit that most of
Hertz's lab records are gone, for example. But Shakespeare scholars
would be thrilled to have records for their man as substantial as what
remains of Hertz's letters and manuscripts. Myself, if I look back at
the last paper I wrote, I've got 70 separate versions preserved
covering the entire process of composition, plus a dozen or so
subsequent documents showing exactly what the editors of the volume I
was contributing to suggested and what I chose to do in response.
None of that is on paper; I wouldn't keep most of it if it was because
of the expense. Buchwald should write about me!--- there's a lot more
information, though admittedly Hertz's achievements are slightly ahead
of mine.
John Lavagnino
King's College London
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Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 06:59:09 +0100
From: Patrick Durusau <pdurusau@emory.edu>
Subject: Re: 16.622 preservation and absence
Willard,
Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty ) wrote:
>
>This is in tangential response to Patrick Durusau's thoughtful remarks on
>preservation, which were provoked by the immediate circumstance of looting
>in the Iraqi National Museum. One might say that apart from everything else
>the tragedy of loss has intimately to do with how much and what kinds of
>knowledge were articulated in the lost and damaged artifacts. I take
>Patrick's point that digitization offers a degree of preservation for
>artifacts at risk. But there are problems, of course. Less immediately the
>problem with digitization is not merely that such artifactual knowledge can
>be but roughly preserved in digital form.
I don't recall advocating that digitization would result in preservation of
artifacts without loss of information. One cannot perform C-14 tests on the
image of a manuscript any more than the composition of an artifact be
determined from a 3-D scan at the limits of today's technology. There are
no doubt other losses as well but if the choice is between poor
preservation and none at all, I have no difficulty in choosing the former.
That loss of information is going to occur by digitization is well known
and is a worthy topic of discussion. However, I would discuss it as we are
performing digitization of artifacts so that at least we have poor
preservation rather than large blank spaces in the artifactual record. The
risk to the artifactual record is real, the indifference of national
governments is real and so the question is whether the humanities computing
community is going to push for less than perfect preservation in order to
safeguard as much of the artifactual record as possible.
>More seriously for some areas of
>work, this form, in which so many recent artifacts have been created, is
>from the get-go demonstrably poor as a means of articulating certain kinds
>of knowledge, which as a result may be entirely lost. The case is made
>forcefully by Jed Z. Buchwald for the history of science in his forthcoming
>piece, "The scholar's seeing eye", in "Reworking the bench - research
>notebooks in the history of science", eds. F. L. Holmes, J. Renn,
>H-J Rheinberger, ARCHIMEDES, vol. 7, pgs. 311-25. He argues that,
>
> >When historians in the future look back to the analog world -- to the
> >world of paper -- it may be difficult for them to find the residue of
> >human thought and action, because they will be used to seeing only the
> >perfected digital record, which will rarely leave informative traces of
> >the road not taken. Paper retains its human stain; the digital record is
> >spotless. Digital images can be made of paper objects, thereby making the
> >human stain virtually available, as it were. Nearly perfect facsimiles of
> >books and notebooks can be and have been made -- the purpose of course
> >being to give the buyer a sense of direct contact with the object's
> >original producers. But records originally digital had no marks to copy,
> >and their authors cannot be made present in this way.
I have no doubt that there are many "originally digital" records today that
lack any "marks" from their authors. That is not, however, an inherent
condition of being "originally digital" but is an artifact of the
technology used to produce those records.
Consider the Inote program from IATH (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/inote/).
John Unsworth and company have done an excellent job of developing a tool
that allows annotation of digital images.
Or, consider the Annotea Project from the W3C
(http://www.w3c.org/2001/Annotea/). It allows annotation of documents.
I don't think these technologies are signs of a "triumphalist attitude" and
serious researchers in the field would admit that there is much to be done
in terms of using XLink/XPointer specifications to bring "marks" to digital
records. I am sure other Humanist subscribers could mention other
developing technologies that address one or more aspects of "originally
digital" records. All of these annotation strategies raise their own sets
of preservation issues.
The point being that to have "an unblinkingly critical attitude" should
lead to recognition of when a problem being described is an artifact of a
particular technology (or application) and not inherent in being "digital."
Patrick
-- Patrick Durusau Director of Research and Development Society of Biblical Literature pdurusau@emory.edu Co-Editor, ISO Reference Model for Topic Maps--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 06:59:39 +0100 From: Patricia Galloway <galloway@ischool.utexas.edu> Subject: Re: 16.622 preservation and absence
One tiny comment on Willard's observation: every word processing file has some of its latest revisions hanging onto it; but more to the point, born-digital objects of course don't capture every revision--but many authors burn their drafts, and very few objects can bring with them the experience of seeing and using them that their creators and their contemporaries had. I think also that cultural achievement or evidence that braves time tends to be that which transcends the medium. Nobody pretends that microfilm is as good as paper in preserving the sensuous experience of examining a century-old deed to a piece of land; but if the authenticity of the microfilm (or image) of the deed can be guaranteed, then the claimant can still claim the land. And we will still read and appreciate Beowulf after the manuscript finally disintegrates. The question is preservation for what and how much do we value it. Pat Galloway University of Texas-Austin
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