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.