Stop Discovering Philology (already)

What follows may have only tandential relevance to "future of the book" type stuff, but I thought I should say it somewhere in case the editors of the PMLA decide not to print it.

8 May 2010

Dear Editors and Readers,

I’ve thought to myself on several occasions that it really is a shame most academic journals do not have  space set aside for readers’ letters.  Perhaps no one thinks to write a letter.  The average “reader” of an academic journal—I prefer to think of myself as a scavenger—is herself an academic, so the appropriate response to an article of concern would be to compose one of one’s own and therein demonstrate through detailed analysis where the article under consideration is deficient and supplement it with a “superior” reading.  When said article is published a year or two later, perhaps people will even remember what the original article was about.  This should serve as a sufficient parody of how scholarly discourse functions.

I write this letter to the PMLA, because it is everything an article ought not to be: hasty, immediate, a gut response, ill-conceived, angry, rash, and perhaps poorly argued.  I finished reading the three articles and introduction in the “Philology Matters” cluster of the March 2010 issue and was left irritated and bewildered.  I was irritated with how often philology has been rediscovered of late, even though philological methods (word study, historical linguistics, and textual criticism, to name a few) have been going strong and progressing with the work of numerous critics, who, perhaps, would never self-identify as philologists, though perhaps some would.  Jerome McGann, Susan Stewart, Anne Carson, Virginia Jackson, and Katherine Hayles spring immediately to mind.  McGann in particular has been at the forefront of theorizing new ways to relate textual criticism/editorial theory to literary interpretation (see especially The Textual Condition and Radiant Textuality) and at the forefront of pulling his hair over why this relationship has yet to catch on more broadly (The Scholar’s Art and The Point is to Change It).

I’m bewildered as to why these “rediscoveries” of philology are so dead set on looking backwards.  What I mean is the critics I mention above represent, to my mind, the foresight of philology and philological methods (e.g. their relevance to the so-called new media or using the materiality of texts to reconsider conceptions of genre), whereas the Romance philologists Warren trots out, Auerbach and Curtius (though, curiously, not Spitzer), represent philological hindsight.  Even the more recent critics Warren invokes, Said and Glissant, understand philology retrospectively, not as a means toward novel modes of investigation and interpretation but to bolster what they (and by a certain logic “we”) are already doing.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the thematic link Warren provides for the articles in the “Philology Matters” cluster, “the ways they excavate and activate silence.”  I had the privilege of sitting in on the dissertation defense of a friend and colleague of mine, Michael Kicey, who expressed the problem with these excavations of silence far more eloquently than I ever could.  If I understood him correctly—and, as you can imagine from the scatter-brained prose contained herein, that I may not have—the “gotcha” tendency in treating discursive silences, be they proper to a text or to criticism, is fundamentally wrong-headed.  “To reconstruct what has been lost,” as Warren says, is indeed prime philological territory, but the additional tendency to supplement those silences with what often (though not always) amounts to rank conjecture simply reproduces the critical blindness for which old school philology so often comes under fire.  Additionally, to merely point to a silence with a cheap “aha!” is not productive.  These silences are almost never (as far as I am aware) grappled with as silences, as irrevocably lost, as lacunae (figurative or literal) never intended to be filled or explained.  To treat silence as silence is ridiculously hard, because it would attempt to understand how meaning is made (and unmade) in a space of absolute indeterminacy, where the only appropriate response is restraint: not to say or only to ever say provisionally.  Carson’s translation of Sappho (If not, winter) is a decent but somewhat flawed example of how to go about doing this.

If what I have said here should strike you, O Benevolent Readers and Editors of our fair PMLA, as absurd, unfair, or irresponsible; remember that I am a nobody, no longer possessed of real academic privileges, unemployed, no one significant in any academic field or critical discourse, whose future career is entirely up in the air.  You may very well never hear from me again (or at all).

Your Scavenger,
Nicholas A. Theisen

Cannot be Digitized #5 and #6: Large and Small

Finishing my second of three years in a dual degree program, I got a little bit overwhelmed at the end of the semester and I apologize for my long absence.

Continuing the practical side of "cannot be digitized" I wanted to submit two examples of things that cannot currently be digitized, or are not currently being digitized, things that are too large and things that are too small.

We'll start with the large.  Birds of America by John James Audubon was the first book to be purchased by the University of Michigan in 1838.  It is the most valuable printed book in the Special Collections library, and one of the largest.  The double-elephant folio (hopefully "elephant" gives a sense of its size) takes two people to carry it, and two people to turn its pages.  Certainly it exists all over the world in copies large and small, but it is the age, giant size, and aura that sends people to the Special Collections library to view it, so many in fact that they recently built an "Audubon Room" in order to display it.  (On the ground floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library). With a few hours notice (though a full day is better), anyone can request to see it, and people are always shocked, awed, and pleased that they have the right to do so.  They feel inspired in its presence, gather around, point, whisper, stand with gaping mouths, and arrange groups to come in just to stand in its presence.  Smaller copies have been digitized, and you can google any print and come up with a digital copy right now.  However, the aura that it has in such a massive size, even if a scanner that large is created, cannot be captured.

Conversely, Google is also not digitizing small items.  Though I was unable to confirm the exact number of centimeters,  small by Google standards includes a large number of books.  Anything about the height of my hand, a fairly common size, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is too small, and is currently skipped.  The example I'd like to discuss also has other unique characteristics that cannot be rendered on a screen.  Pat the Bunny the 1968 book by Dorothy Kunhardt is a book that was specifically created with textures such as a soft bunny and scratchy whiskers.  The tactile experience of interacting with this book has is what makes in an iconic book that stands out in the memories of adults 40 years later, and continues to make it a favorite among children today.  However, if you try to digitize it, currently it would be rejected from the library digitization project for its small size, but also it ends up looking like this:

The only way to tell that this is fuzzy at all is the slight indication near the bunny's tail that some of the 3D fuzz is overhanging the black line.  This particular book has no reason to exist on a screen.

Cannot Be Digitized #4: The Problem with Papyrus

This week's blog entry is dedicated to the late Traianos Gagos, world-renowned papyrologist, who passed away sometime on Monday.  I didn't know the man personally all that well, but his passing has left a gaping hole in the academic community at the University of Michigan.  He will be missed.

Papyrus is an interesting material.  It was one of the scant few plant-based paper products in the ancient world, and, when it wasn't being used to compose such lofty things as epic poems and bills of sale on particularly cranky mules, it served a wide variety of non-literary purposes.  Papyrus was (and still is) used in numerous genres: corpse preservation, haberdashery, roofing, netting, baskets, rope, and mats, just to name a few.  It's an incredibly versatile plant, but when historians attempt to explain the shift away from papyrus scrolls to codices made with parchment (a paper product made predominantly from goat and sheep skins), they tend to emphasize how brittle it is, how susceptible to moisture and aridity, how rough its surface is, and how generally unwieldly the long strips used to make scrolls were.

Most of the papyrus in the ancient world came from Egypt, so it's not exactly a shocker to discover that one of the biggest finds in the history of papyrology took place in Oxyrhynchus, a town in southern Egypt named after the species of fish said to have eaten Osiris's wiener.  Along with Herculaneum in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius, it is the source of the vast preponderance of papyrus fragments that exist and likewise of most discoveries of "new" classical texts, which may seem like an oxymoron (har har).  What I mean is texts we knew probably existed at some point but for which there were no surviving copies, like Sophocles' Ichneutae, which has the dubious distinction of being one of the most peculiar satyr plays in existence.  It is neither particularly bawdy nor particularly funny.  Sophocles always was a bit of a downer.  Surely, several individuals at our fine university could talk your ear off about all this (they're on the second floor of Angell Hall--no, not the philosophers...), but I wish to address something a little more pertinent to this blog, their digital afterlives.

While I have in the past taken issue with the "sky is falling" rhetoric of the digitizers (I mean no disrespect; some of my best friends are digitizers, which I realize reads just like "some of my best friends are black"), in the case of ancient papyrus it truly is apt.  William Biers, a professor of Colleen's from the University of Missouri (our mutual alma mater), often tells the story of a dig some graduate student participated in where he was carrying an amphora full of papyrus scrolls.  He, the graduate student, dropped the amphora, and when it hit the ground, the texts shattered soundlessly into a pile of dust.  Whoops, sorry history; our bad.  So when optical scanning came on the scene as a genuine means of digitally preserving documents, papyrus was one of the first things subjected to it.  Alas, we may lose the papyrus, but we'll always have Paris... err, the image!

WRONG!  The problem with papyrus is not only do you have to know dialects of ancient languages most people have never even heard of, the script on a significant number of scraps is barely legible to the naked eye, and magnification was often hardly of any assistance.  One of the feats digitization did permit, however, was the ability to run the images of the fragments through various after effects processes, like photoshop filters, to up the contrast and to improve legibility in ways not possible with just the document itself.  But it was with the development of high intensity x-ray scanning that legibility of ancient documents improved immensely, not just in terms of reading the "visible" text but also palimpsest, text scraped away so the paper could be re-used.

In terms of relative purchasing power, books have never been cheaper, so it is perhaps hard for us to imagine that you'd want to reuse a book; we just recycle or throw them away.  But re-using a physical document is not merely limited to wiping away what it was and making something new of it.  Sometimes, texts are already inscribed with more than we can see, and it is incumbent on us not to be so arrogant to think we know all that it is and can be.  As the more recent x-ray scanning demonstrates, it is important to keep those ancient things with us, so that we might return to them, so that we might see them again with what we have learned.  Traianos was fond of opening public lectures with the claim that most papyrus fragments are boring, are receipts, are tallies, are well-deserving of returning to the rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus where they were found.  In a way he was right, but in a way he was also very wrong.

Cannot Be Digitized #3: G for Graffiti

In one of the more compelling scenes of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, Evey Hammond has been captured by security forces (who turn out to be V himself) and is tortured all in the name of her confessing her "coercion" at the hands of, as they say, the terrorist "Codename V."  Of course, V is the one responsible for her torture, and he does so in an attempt to "set her free" from what he sees as the prison of her daily life.  In her cell, Evey discovers the brief account of a woman named Valerie scrawled in pencil on a piece of rolled up toilet paper.  Valerie's story is just like so many other stories of victims in the comic: she is arbitrarily incarcerated for being homosexual and is executed because she refuses to admit that there is anything wrong with her psychologically.  The authenticity of the text is dubious; the only other text to play a prominent role in the narrative, the diary of Delia Surridge in which V's "history" is recounted, is called out by Detective Finch as a possible forgery on the part of V to disguise his true motives.  Of course, its authenticity does not matter.  What does matter is where Evey finds it and how: in her cell as she undergoes the very same torture and deprivation Valerie did.

Many years ago, when I was but a fresh, [not-so-]young graduate student, I tried to make the argument that there is something fundamentally unique about bathroom graffiti as a text in process, in constant process of production as well as erasure.  Suffice it to say, my argument, whatever its relative faults or merits may have been, did not impress a certain professor of media studies at our fine university, for which I received a rather disappointing B+ (which is Graduate-School-Grade for "what is this charlatan even doing here?").  She and I did not see eye to eye.

In that paper, I was trying to make a point about context, both about the context of the recent Supreme Court decision that had invalidated the university's admittance procedures and about the physical context of the bathroom stall in which the "texts" under analysis were found.  At the time I set up a (in hindsight) rather problematic dichotomy between public and private texts, the irony being that private texts were the print (and not quite print) materials you carry about and consume largely on your own and that public texts were something read while, ahem, in the privy.  I had wanted to argue that public texts transgress accepted norms of textuality by both inviting participation in the creation of said text--bathroom graffiti shows clear signs of having been written by numerous, distinct hands--and by locating this text in a peculiar space that is at once public (i.e. ideally accessible to all) and private (it segregates men from women, the defecating from the not, etc.).  But there was something missing in this argument that I would take myself to task for now and perhaps should have been by the aforementioned professor of media studies but was not.

I focused too much on that specific place, the ground floor men's bathroom in Mason Hall at the University of Michigan, and not enough on the larger problem of the unportability of a text.  What does it mean to "have to have been there" when it comes to reading?  Two years ago, I found the following quatrain written in a single long line along the far wall of the third stall on the left of the very same men's bathroom.

Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,
Et mon sein, où chacun s'est meurtri tour à tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour
Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière.

I am fair, O mortals! like a dream carved in stone,
And my breast where each one in turn has bruised himself
Is made to inspire in the poet a love
As eternal and silent as matter.

[Charles Baudelaire, "La Beauté," Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. William Aggeler]

I made a futile attempt to digitize this text for myself with the small digital camera I had with me in my bag when I was doing my, ahem, business.  I say futile, because given how the quatrain was written in a single line spanning the breadth of the wall, it was impossible to get far enough back within the stall to allow for sufficient focal distance as to capture the text in toto in one go.  In the end, I broke the text up into several images, which, ironically, do not survive outside my memory of them.  You could go there now, but some other text has taken its place, because the powers that be attempt regularly to cleanse bathrooms of any undesirable notions.  What I realize now is that there is a flip side to the rhetoric of digitization as preservation.  The extreme portability of digital documents (and likewise of their physical precursors) is precisely what makes them less subject to the caprices of environment.  This is likely obvious (and suspect) to anyone with half a brain.  However, what is less obvious is how this reflects on texts tied inextricably to a single place: while they may be subject to the whims of administrators and custodial staff who regularly efface them, even the most rehashed story, like "Valerie's" above, or poem can acquire what is meaningful about a particular place simply by being attached to it.  Then, even if it is erased (and it will be), our memories do something for it, to preserve it, just like Evey's above and mine below.

Apples and Orangutans

There's an interesting opinion piece in today's NY Times about the relative environmental impact of a "book" and an "e-reader."  It brings to bear something I think is crucial in the ongoing debate about the future of books, particularly when the issue is taken up in the popular press: we're still asking the wrong questions.  In "How Green Is My iPad," Goleman and Norris replicate one of the fundamental analogic problems that plague discussions of digital texts, namely the assumption that there is sufficient similarity between "analog" and "digital" documents to perform a one to one comparison.

In order to make the (relatively useless) comparison, digital documents are generally concretized in some fashion.  In the case of the above op-ed piece, digital texts are represented by their access technology with particular emphasis on Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad.  My first objection to the inclusion of the iPad is wisely accounted for by the authors; they only focus on those aspects of the technology related to digital text and largely ignore its other, broader functions.  The article then goes through and details the environmental impact of of a generic "book" and a generic "e-reader" in five key categories (materials, manufacture, transportation, reading, and disposal) two of which (transportation and reading) are so widely variable as to render the analysis all but moot.  It also fails to acknowledge the nature of the impact costs of the two objects.  With a "book," whatever that may be, the costs are largely determined and sunk by the time the object reaches your possession.  Its only ongoing costs are storage and, perhaps, patience.  But the costs of maintaining and using an "e-reader," whatever that may be, are theoretically infinite and persist long after the device in question finds its way to your hands.  I'm also somewhat baffled by the assertion that "[i]f you like to read a book in bed at night for an hour or two, the light bulb will use more energy than it takes to charge an e-reader, which has a highly energy-efficient screen."  E-ink displays are not backlit.  In fact, they're designed not to be backlit so as to reduce eyestrain.  In other words, the "light on before bed" applies even to the high-efficiency display.

Which brings me to what I think is the fundamental myopia of this type of analog-digital comparison: we're not talking about commensurable things.  I've said this in so many different ways before, but let me be clear.  A digital text is of a different kind.  Digital objects (files, web environments, self-perpetuating algorithms, etc.) are a different kind of thing, one which challenges what it is we mean by a thing when we use that word.  My suspicion is that in popular discourse, things remain woefully concrete, much to the detriment of those of us (i.e. nearly everyone) who must negotiate the veil between our analog and digital pasts and our analog and digital futures.  What this means for the present discussion is the false (and all too common) assumption of the null impact of the digital text itself, the so-called e-book, when, in fact, an elaborate, expensive, and fragile technological infrastructure is required merely to make digital objects persist in a way the "book" takes for granted simply by virtue of being a physical object.  That environmental impact goes largely ignored, and it is the ignorant valorization of the "digital future" by the political and economic powers that be that blinds popular discourses to the very real problems that plague digital information itself (portability, backwards compatibility, access, etc.).

It is the very same ignorance that leads Goleman and Norris to conclude, "[a]ll in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library."  I wonder if they are even aware of what is happening to the coffee sho--I mean public libraries (both collegiate and municipal) whose stacks are being gutted in favor of a more services-oriented system where libraries function less as book warehouses and more as study spaces, access points, reference assistance, and so forth.  The "virtuous reader" may very well be surprised by what she finds in a public library even five years from now.  I wonder if she will be surpised to find that our libraries are in fact the vanguard of those who perpetuate the ignorance enumerated above and not bulwarks guarding the lingering presence of the past against the imagined dictates of the future.

[now that I've made my over-the-top, sweeping generalization]

It amazes me how often people are removed from these discussions: the people who staff libraries, the people who maintain servers (and server farms), the people who design access software and devices with the noblest of intentions, the people who write, and the people who read.  We've become so obsessed with objects that perhaps for awhile we should set objects aside and think about the impact on ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually, and so forth.  After all, what are we doing this for if not for ourselves?

Things That Can't Be Digitized #2

In putting together this blog, we here at Libral Thinking (Colleen and yours truly) did what we always do when weighing the pros and cons of a particular endeavor: we sat in a coffee shop and drew up a list.  Traditionally, this activity takes place in donut shops, and the list is drawn up on the back of a placemat.  These fate changing documents rarely survive time and (our) indifference, though perhaps somewhere in the depths of my own shamefully unannotated files I still retain that fat-stained leaf that chose Michigan over Notre Dame and the University of Chicago for grad school.  In Ann Arbor, with its nauseating dearth of donut shops (though, thankfully, not of donuts; I wouldn't have survived the Fall semester of '09 if it weren't for the joys of the Washtenaw Dairy), we had to settle for one of the several thousand coffee shops and a single sheet of narrow ruled paper torn from a spiral notebook.

The master list, as we call it, contains a few outlines and notes as to layout but is mostly a list of things that in one way or another cannot be digitized.  The master list is not one of them; it would be a simple matter to set it down on a flatbed, scan both sides, maybe run an OCR process, and be done with it.  The crumpled page would retain little more than mere sentimental value (and perhaps, under certain conditions, ease of access).

Of course, there is something to be said for sentimental value, and that is most distinctly something that cannot be digitized.  It is an open question, though, whether that matters.  After all, the rhetoric of digitization is merely to provide access to a text from any place in the world.  I'm not sure a scholar studying children's literature in Milan gives a damn that a digital copy of The Velveteen Rabbit is from your copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, the one you were given to fill and explain away (ineffectively) the spiritual abyss you felt when one of your totems of childhood was finally wrested from your hands and made into yesterday's trash.  Of course, that may matter to our imaginary Milanese critic, but such a thing can only be digitized (given current metadata frameworks set up by Google and Hathi) in so far as it is inscribed in the text itself.  It is entirely possible that in the future users may be able to tag networked digital documents and provide for them something like the (fictional [?]) sentimental history above.

Things That Can't Be Digitized #2: History

Now, when I say "History," I mean the continuing history of a document.  One of the pitfalls we run into whenever we treat documents as discrete and finite things is the problem of their continued history.  A digital scan of a document only represents that text at a very specific point in time.  For the vast majority of archived materials, this is not much of a problem at all, as they change very little (if at all) beyond the natural degradation of all matter.  These documents undergo few historical processes beyond the ones that produced and preserve them.  However, if you take our master list as another kind of document, one that is always incomplete in that we add and take from it as we progress in this very project, you can see that the very scan I propose above represents it very poorly.  Any digital simulacra (like, say, transcription into a Google doc) would be equally dissatisfying, because it is a fundamental token of exchange and negotiation between myself, Colleen, and this blog.  We would mourn its absence not only for the loss of the record of our thoughts but also for the space it provides to continue rethinking what it can be as document and how it fits into our lives.

Things That Can't Be Digitized #1

Last fall I hosted a Symposium on the Future of the Book here on campus called "Digital Book Debates."  One of the trends I noticed in planning for that event, was the same trend I notice in the news about the iPad, Google, or anything else relating to the future of books or libraries.  There are two camps in the rhetoric.  Either you are for the complete digitization of the world, as Google's claimed goal at the beginning of their project was "Digitize every book ever printed," or you are pro-print and the books will have to be "pried away from your cold dead hands."

Craig Mod, a computer programmer, in a recent blog post makes a distinction between Formless and Definite content.  Some content is very aware of its container and its boundaries, in this case, it's page, and some is less dependent on the space or object containing it.   Certainly the Kindle demonstrates that blog content, newspaper content, and perhaps even novel content are types that stretch beyond the page so that the delivery platform seems to interfere less with the reading experience.

However, the question that continued to arise as the yays argued with the nays was "prove to me that there is something that cannot be digitized."  When placed on the spot of defending the form + content unity, it is often difficult to grasp for examples, so this series of posts intends to do exactly that.  Present some examples, or thought exercises if you will, about items where the form cannot (at least currently) be divorced from its physical content, rendering Google's goal of "digitizing all books" impossible unless they more clearly define their terms.

Item #1:  The Wonders of the Stereoscope, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976.

This boxed set contains one more traditional "book" and another book that opens as a shell and contains about 40 sterographic images and a viewer.  the combination of text, images, book as container box, and accompanying image objects is particularly difficult for digitization. Viewing the 3D effect of sterographs on a screen is incredibly difficult since the viewer and the screen interfere with one another.  In addition, part of the thrill of looking at sterographs is the manipulation of them.  You hold them, choose them, load them in the viewer, and see the 3D effect appear.  That physicality cannot be digitized.  Finally, there is the problem of focal length.  In order to view them correctly and acheive the effect, each person has to manipulate the viewer, pull it slightly closer or farther away to make it work for your eyes.  That cannot currently be acheived if the image in on a screen.

The Myth of Digital Permanence pt. 1

After last week's relative downer, I thought I'd begin this week on a lighter note:



I don't think anyone who works in digital preservation would actually argue that digital documents or their respective media have any more or less permanence than, say, a book or even a glossy magazine, and, as it turns out, the true genius of digital documents (and their greatest enemy) is their portability.  A digital file is not dependent upon its medium in the way a paper document is.  The slow (sometimes not-so-slow) steady degradation of the material of a given text need not necessarily worry you, as ease of copying and transferring a digital document means it will persist, so long as people pay careful attention to the maintenance of the documents themselves and don't assume that once they've been digitized that they are now "safe" from the caprice of a given material medium.

As Digi-man would remind us, it is important, o Brave Reader, to remain ever vigilant in the struggle against Team Chaos, those champions of entropy who would threaten the total degradation of all our precious information!  His first and third suggestions seem pretty obvious: 1) backup your data somewhere safe and 2) be sure to transfer your data consistently from one place to another in order to avoid catastrophic deterioration.  Number 2 is a lot trickier, though, than Digi-man makes it seem.  For those of you not familiar with what metadata are, they are basically standardized codes about information (yes, o Brave Archivists and Librarians, I know you're already aware of this--but bear with me).  So, for example, if a "book" is the piece of information in question, a catalogue entry in a library database concerning that book would comprise metadata.  It is important that metadata be composed of standardized codes, because the whole point is for said data to describe what your information is and how it is to be used.

That's all well and good, except digital files aren't exactly the same as physical documents, despite the fact we use the language of print and physical texts to describe them.  Digital documents are fundamentally bifurcated in a way physical texts by their nature are not.  What do I mean by that?  With a book (or any physical, print document) the "text" (I refrain from saying "information," because I'd rather not reinforce the neo-Platonic notion of a text as something beyond its material manifestation) is coeval with that which presents it graphically.  In other words, they are the same thing.  With a digital document, the file and the software that "reads" it have no necessary relationship and, as such, exist independently of each other.  That means should either half of the bifurcated text be lost, the other half would be insufficient to reproduce the document.  Only recently have information theorists started paying closer attention to the loss of digital documents that occurs not as a result of the loss of the file but of the software, the interpretive codes, that are necessary to represent the file in a form that is meaningful to us as human users.  Only last year did the European consortium KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) form to tackle just this issue of obsolete formats.

The point that I'd like to come to with all of this is how thoroughly wrought all these problems in informatics are with questions of interpretation.  Archivists, Librarians, Information Theorists of the world, I say this from a place of love, but you deal very facilely with the theoretical concerns that surround interpretation.  Might I suggest you take your local homegrown humanist out for a cup of coffee or something stronger and pick her brain a bit.  After all, these problems are not, in fact new: it was a classicist and a cryptologist who made Linear B (the script of the Mycenean language) readable again, and it was a British scientist and a French philologist who, with a little help from a trilingual rock, brought hieroglyphs back into our collective ken.  Some of us really would like to help, because it concerns us too.

As always, should you, o dear reader, have any suggestions for topics or particular objects to examine, feel free to email us at libralthinking@gmail.com.

You may be a Mac, but...

In Kathleen Fitzpatrick's talk at the UM library on Thursday the 18th, she laid out what amounts to an introduction to the more extensive work done in her most recent project, Planned Obsolescence, a project that both tries to explain what changes are taking place and some that should take place in the world of scholarly publishing. The online version of Planned Obsolescence is an admirable document both in the issues it takes on (though I should admit now that I have significant concerns over what she says) and how it engages with them. I'll have more to say about the document itself at a later date, but I want to get into a concern Fitzpatrick raises over the obsolescence of readers and formats that produced some of the earliest hypertext novels like Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden.



Fitzpatrick mentioned the fact that current versions of the Mac OS (Snow Leopard - rawr!) no longer offer support for the "classic" Mac OS (i.e. from the pre-UNIX days) applications, meaning that hypertext documents written using Storyscape, Eastgate's "hypertext writing environment," can no longer be viewed by Mac users running OS 10.4 or later, even though they possess a license for said document.  Of course, if you use a PC, none of this silliness really affects you.

In my previous post, I quoted Jerome McGann's statement from The Scholar's Art about the invisibility of material media, but I did not quite go into the ramifications of what it might mean to read the materiality of a text or the anxiety that might result from constantly keeping materialist concerns in mind when, really, all you want to do is read a damn book (or newspaper or pamphlet or whatever).  Rather then delve into esoterica, as is my wont, the anxiety of the materiality of texts can best be explained by Apple's recent PC vs. Mac commercials.  Their brilliance lies in the way they tap into people's anxiety (even so-called power users') about personal computers and the degree of acumen they, at least in the early days, seemed to demand in order to simply function properly.  I say this, after just having spent the better part of a Wednesday booting my laptop in Safe Mode and individually deleting registry keys left over from a particularly annoying (but altogether somewhat benign) piece of malware I'd gotten from, well, who knows where.  This commercial in particular emphasizes everything people hate about buying a new PC and how the kind people at Mac have graciously taken the time to instill their machines with an ease of immediate use that is unprecedented in personal computing technology.

The problem with treating anxiety is how you have to go about it: by largely taking control away from the person who suffers by inhibiting their conscious mind and its underlying neurochemistry.  Note: my knowledge of psychopharmacology is about a decade old now, but the most common class of anxiolytics (anti-anxiety medications), Benzodiazepines (like Xanax and Valium), are sedatives and at extremely high dosages can become psychotropic.  I don't want to press this point too far but in treating anxiety, be it with drugs or mass media (of course, some would argue "same thing"), you ever so subtly alter your consciousness.  All of the problems of viruses, backwards compatibility, usability, and portability remain--you now simply filter them out or, rather, they are filtered out for you.

So, you may be a Mac, and I hasten to mention your computer preferences ultimately reflect very little, but your documents aren't.  And PC users don't get to act smug here, because what I'm trying to say is that digital documents aren't anything: aren't PC, aren't Mac, aren't Linux, aren't Commodore, etc.  They are markup, and whatever operating system you choose to use has to decode and "read" them.  In the earlier days (though not the earliest) of PC use (back when that acronym meant "personal computer" and not "machine that runs Windows"), back when to even run Windows you had to enter a command into an MS-DOS prompt, a certain amount of knowledge (or at least awareness) of how one interfaces--how one moves from machine language to some "end result"--was part and parcel of using a computer in the first place.  This is, strangely, analogous to the shift in textual consciousness (as I'm calling it now; hopefully I can think of something better) that took place with "printed" texts.

Ancient authors show a marked awareness of how books were produced, as "reading" handwritten documents largely requires an understanding of how they were written.  In the Roman world lectores ("readers") were either slaves or freedman professionals whose job it was to read texts aloud to their wealthy masters.  What the standardization of print did was to ease the burden of reading text, to remove the anxiety of the technologies of textual production in one of the boldest egalitarian gestures of the modern world.  But in order to relieve that anxiety, it had to render them invisible to the public eye by sequestering them.  This might be acceptable to one such as myself, if the problems of formatting and conversion did not persist in the precisely the same way the problems of variance of print also persisted and continue to.

So, now that I've laid a bit of foundation, next time I will deal more extensively with the bifurcation of digital documents and with the great possibilities such a bifurcation presents in terms of portability but also the problems of backwards compatibility and "obsolescence."

As always, should you, o dear reader, have any suggestions for topics or particular objects to examine, feel free to email us at libralthinking@gmail.com.

Whose Text is it Anyway?

Welcome!  There are two of us creating Libral Thinking and so with a second voice, the second post commences. I, Colleen, am currently a graduate student in the School of Information, and I am working "in the field" as it were, both sitting at a reference desk, and answering patrons' questions through a chat program on the internet.  I hope to be able to add some insights into the practical and professional side of the messy nature of working in collections at this uneasy "transition" time.  (Is it a transition?  Will we keep the books?  --questions for another time.)  For today I take up the topic of the uneasy relationship for the text and the institution created in the space between the physical book on the shelf in a collection and a digitized version (copy?) on the web with access provided through Google Books.

To use Google Books, a person must type "Google" into a browser of some sort.  Each page of the book scanned by Google bears their mark, seen to the left.  It is fairly clear that it is a document scanned and provided by Google, presented by Google through their interface (and their copyright settlement).

Yet, there is a tricky problem:  The same text is marked very clearly with the institution where a physical copy (at one point?) was housed.  In the case of Essays of an Ex-Librarian by Richard Garnett, 1901, it bears a large bookplate identifying the University of Michigan. 

As a "remote reference librarian" I sit in my living room answering questions that pop-up through chat programs from patrons typing on the library website. I have already fielded multiple questions from patrons around the world asking questions resembling the following:

Patron:  Page 193 is blurry, can you scan it for me and e-mail it?
Me:  There is a button in Google's interface to report the page unreadable.
Patron: Come on...It's just a page. Can't you go get it?  At least read it to me?
Me:   No.
Patron:  Pretty please?
Me:  No, but you can request the book through Inter-Library Loan.
Patron:  But, it's just a page, and I'm in Poland.  That would take a month and I'd have to pay.
Me:  No.

Okay, okay, some of that is a lie already.  In fact, I have, on my own time, requested books to be brought over from the Buhr storage library on my own account, and I have photographed the requested page with my own digital camera and e-mailed the photo to the patron.  There is no policy for handling such requests since they are not frequent enough as of yet to be a problem.  In general, our affiliated patrons come first, but with any time left I can choose to help.

What should the response be to these types of questions?  Whose text is it when the digital scan belongs to a company providing access, but yet it never loses its association with its referent, physically housed in another place, but containing the same content?  The combination creates a lot of assumptions.  The person typing usually assumes that I am in the library, that the book still exists in the library, that it is a few feet away from me, and that it will "just take a minute."  They also assume that it is our (my) responsibility to help them, and not Google.  Maybe that is a good thing?  The library is seen as more available, and helpful than Google. The physical item in this case is more accessible since a bad scan cannot be re-scanned.

But, what do I do though when there are three other chat windows open simultaneously and it's the second Google verification request of my shift?  As the face of a "public" research university, who is my patron?  Should I have levels?  Shouldn't the students come first?  How does a local or state institution fund reference services for a public that through those bookplates and our availability on the web becomes a global audience?    Does the whole library become a reference for the digital in that we should make plans duplication charges like for a closed-stack special library?  Are physical books now a "Special Collection" in relation to the digital?

These questions cannot just remain fuzzy since the digitized texts constitute the memory of our culture.  In some sense we all own them since the memories in the texts lie in the spaces between people, sustained by references to the texts each time we read one, think about it, and add it to our store of knowledge that we share with others as we live and chat over coffee.  For now (most of) the physical books that Google references remain in the libraries, but many people unable to see the blurry details behind "the cloud" call for the practical destruction or selling-off of the books and their pricy buildings and air-conditioning as a practical necessity, not seeing the physical servers, fiber optic cable, and software with quick obsolescence upon which a digitized collection such as Google Books collection relies.  We must define our relationship, and take ownership and responsibility for it, or just like the stack of corroded 51/4 inch floppy disks that hold the games my father programmed for me that sit next to a failed Commodore PET disk drive in my closet, the entirety of our cultural memory could become inaccessible while we pay attention to shinier things.

"I went looking for a book"

 

Yesterday, I went looking for a copy of Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson.  It was cold out, as all Michigan dead-of-winters happen to be, and, after finding the catalog entry I was looking for (or rather a close enough approximation thereof), I was loath to brave the wind and the salt-encrusted pavement just to check a reference in a book I would likely not end up using anyway.  But what luck!  The ongoing efforts of the Hathi Trust and Google Books (in alliance with various university libraries, namely yours truly, the University of Michigan) foresaw my laziness and the intellectual inertia it would inspire, so they went ahead and digitized the 1901 edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson (second series) so that I could satisfy my momentary whim from the relative discomfort of my home desktop.  I thus confirmed my suspicion about the marked absence of a particular hyphen (haha!) and, now with plenty of free time on my hands, began wandering through the digital document that had saved me from the compulsions of my own sloth.  This is when I noticed something peculiar.

If you, dear reader, would like to follow along with story time, the link immediately above will bring you to where we will begin.

According to the Hathi Trust's FAQ, a "missing page" designation can mean any of three things.  1) "Pages were missing from the library's print copy of the book;" this is doubtful given the "page" in question is the cover.  2) "One or more pages were not scanned;" well, duh, but that doesn't give any indication as to why.  3) "In some cases, Google will misidentify a page, leading them to believe that a page is missing when it is not;" again, this is highly unlikely here given the "misidentified page" would be the cover.  I make no claims about the intellectual acumen of the fine employees at Google, but I'd like to believe they wouldn't misidentify the cover.  Of the three options, I obviously favor "was not scanned," but this statement amounts to a completely unexplanatory *shrug*.  Irritated with a wholly unnecessary stimulation of my pendantic curiosities, I got up from my desk, took a shower, got dressed, and left to trample the mile or so of salt-rimed pavement between my apartment and the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library where the "library's print copy" (why not just say "original" - another curiosity...) is housed.

You won't find 828 D553 Ser. 2 1901 on the shelves of the third floor of the south stacks, and not because it went mysteriously missing.  Leveraging one of the few privileges I still retain as adjunct faculty of our fine university, I took 828 D553 Ser. 2 1901 down to the circulation desk and checked it out.  It's a peculiar object, 828 D553 Ser. 2 1901--you may wonder why I don't simply refer to our poor little book as the 1901 edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson, as I do above.  The simplest and most honest answer is that it is not 1901 edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson but a facsimile produced the book preservation and conservation unit of the university library.  How do I know this?  I should begin by pointing out that to hold the book and see it, this fact is obvious.  It is significantly larger than every other edition on the shelves, its cover is much newer, the paper is much newer, and it bears a bibliographic code on page 3 that makes clear this is a facsimile:

grad
31063846

repla
6/17/98
repl

"grad" for graduate library; "31063846" for... honestly, I don't know (perhaps a work order #?); "repla" for replacement; "6/17/98" for June 17, 1998, when, one supposes, the work was completed; and "repl" again for replacement.  One does wonder why this needed to be said twice.  If you've been following along, dear reader, you may have noticed that in the Hathi Trust digital document, this bibliographic code on page three is nearly illegible.  In point of fact, nearly all of the non-"textual" codes that point to the "original" of the digital document being itself a facsimile have been eviscerated.  If it weren't for my own pedantry and for my deep love of old-fashioned print texts, it would have been quite difficult to uncover in the digital document those clues that point to what with the physical book is patently obvious.  You would have to be an inordinately thick moron not to see that the very book I held in my hands (and on that, o dear reader, you will have to take my word!) was not published in 1901 and could not be the historical document all the digital bibliographic codes (including the library's own catalog entry) claim it to be.

Of course, I'm being quite melodramatic; the Google version of the very same digital document (which, oddly, should be the same digital document) retains the bibligraphic code in a completely legible form on its own page 3.  But what this whole experience is meant to unconceal, as Heidegger would say, are all those aspects and conditions of texts we ignore.  As Jerome McGann says in The Scholar's Art (p. 136), "The physical object… is coded and scored with human activity.  An awareness of this is the premise for interpreting material culture, and the awareness is particularly imperative for literary interpretation, where the linguistic 'message' regularly invisibilizes the codependent and equally meaningful 'medium' that codes all messages."

What exactly is a text? What are texts becoming in an age where digital reproduction not only promises to provide access to and new tools for understanding documents from around the world but also threatens to use digital reproductions as an excuse to disregard the materials that heretofore serve as our connection to the textual past? We here at Libral Thinking wish to explore the ramifications of this future in digital media both for the materials to be digitzed and for the digital texts themselves, to emphasize the continuity between physical and digital texts rather than the facile contiguity of the "print is dead" crowd.  Colleen and I (Nicholas) will be bringing you at-least-weekly articles on the future of the book in digital environments with a particularly philosophical and theoretical bent but always with an eye to the practical ramifications of the theoretical. Welcome!

Should you, o dear reader, have any suggestions for topics or particular objects to examine, feel free to email us at libralthinking@gmail.com.