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.