Long Absence

Apologies for the long absence.  New content is on the way, but in the meantime do follow @LibColleen on Twitter for posts from Colleen locating and compiling news on rare books, libraries, archives and museums from around the web.

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.