Materiality and the digital archiveAnthony Mandal, UK medical heritage library event

27/10/2016

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MATERIALITY AND THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE

Anthony Mandal, Cardiff University(@CardiffBookHist)

“Any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and also the starting point for another. In the first place, a large number of people, machines, and materials must converge and act together for it to come into existence at all. How exactly they do so will inevitably affect its finished character in a number of ways. In that sense a book is the material embodiment of, if not a consensus, then at least a collective consent. Its identity can be understood accordingly, in terms of these intricate processes. But the story of a book evidently does not end with its creation. How it is then put to use, by whom, in what circumstances, and to what effect are all equally complex issues. Each is worthy of attention in its own right. So a printed book can be seen as a nexus conjoining a wide range of worlds of work. Look closely and you are likely to find simplicity and inevitability in neither the manufacture of an object like this nor its subsequent control.

Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledgein the Making (1998)

DIGITALITY AND MATERIALITY

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David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (2003)

During the last two decades or so, we have become accustomed to speaking or writing of “printers” not as people, but as machines made of plastic, metal and other substances that sit on our desks: machines driven at least one remove from ourselves via the computer, keyboard and screen that now form parts of our daily lives. In similar linguistic fashion, in the eighteenth century the Royal Observatory at Greenwich employed people who were referred to as computers. At the end of the nineteenth century, the people we now know as typists were referred to as typewriters. Such changes of usage come about almost by accident, but they have their roots in a mechanical assumption: that the printer or typewriter, human or otherwise, is an agent of reproduction, of reproducing our thoughts, words and images — usually but not always on paper.

“Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters (2011)

The facsimile is designed to imitate, to emulate, to reproduce; it encourages readers to overlook the ontological rift between the facsimile and the object that is being imitated and nowhere more acutely than in the digital environment.

“Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (2013)

It is not the digitality of the so-called digital archive that is new but the fact that what is involved is binary code, the smallest information unit of which is the bit, through whose duality words, images, sounds, and times are archivally encodable.

“Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘The Enduring Ephemeral or the Future is a Memory’ (2011)

Also key to the newness of the digital is a conflation of memory and storage that both underlies and undermines digital media’s archival promise. Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicate this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines.

“Doron Swade, ‘Preserving Software in an Object-Centred Culture’ (1998)

The intractable fact of the matter is that in terms of archaeological time scales the operational continuity of contemporary hardware cannot be assured even when suitable specimens are available to begin with. What meaning, then, does an archive of bit-perfect program software have if he material cannot be run?

MEDIA ARCHAELOGY

MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY

Jussi Parikka identifies 4 key themes:1. Modernity2. Cinema3. Histories of the

present4. Alternate histories

THE ARCHIVE

“Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (2012)

increasingly being rearticulated less as a place of history, memory and power, and more as a dynamic temporal network, a software environment, and a social platform for memory – but also remixing. […] Unlike earlier formations of the archive which can be said to focus on freezing time – to store and preserve – these new forms of archives in technical media culture can be described as archives in motion.

“Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Underway to the Dual System: Classical Archives and/or Digital Memory’ (2009)

Every computer is already a digital archive. The archiving occurs in the RAM of the familiar computer, not in the emphatic sense, but rather as the precondition for any calculating process taking place at all.

“Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008)

[A]ll of the other ambient data on the original media is retained as part of the forensic object, including even (if the process is done right) data on ‘bad’ or corrupted sectors no longer accessible.

ARCHIVE AND POST-ARCHIVE

FROM ARCHIVE TO DATABASE

“Tara McPherson, ‘Post-Archive: The Humanities, the Archive, and the Database’ (2015)

We must not assume that digitization will adequately capture the richness and diversity of the cultural record or that digital surrogates can simply replace the physical archive. […] Historically the archive was officially meant to collect, preserve and protect. Selection of, access to, and the use of archival materials were rigorously regulated. The archive cultivate an ethos of the rare and the original. Careful order was imposed. The digitization of archives upset this careful hierarchy.

CONCLUSION

DIGITAL HUMANITIES 3.0

“David Berry, Understanding Digital Humanities (2012)

Computational techniques could give us greater powers of thinking, larger reach for our imagination and, possibly, allow us to reconnect to political notions of equality and redistribution.

“Robert Darnton, ‘The Information Landscape’ (2008)

Information has never been stable. […] I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts.