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.