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?

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.

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.