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.

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.