As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes.
"There's an illusion being created that all the world's knowledge is on the Web, but we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries," said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. "Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users."
The article adds later:
The ultimate fate of information relating to potentially valuable but obscure people, places, events or things like the Silenus highlights one of the paradoxes of the digital era. While the Internet boom has made information more accessible and widespread than ever, that very ubiquity also threatens records and artifacts that do not easily lend themselves to digitization -- because of cost, but also because Web surfers and more devoted data hounds simply find it easier to go online than to travel far and wide to see tangible artifacts.
How do we respond to this situation? Have we been infected with a disease of digital optimism, where we see only the hopes of democratization that digitization advertises, paying no attention to the tyranny behind the curtain? Or does this aspect of digitization simply emphasize again the extent to which a digital archive is, like any other archive, defined as much by its holes as its fabric?
3 comments:
Or is it once again the shift in the dominant media that determines the value of what can (should?) go into an archive? In a world of digital records, paper trails (in the physical) are obselete...but more importantly, those which resist easy digitization, which also means those which resist falling into the improved categorizations and/or improved navigational procedures of the new (digital) archive, are likely to be excluded. Is it a hole if it is chosen to be excluded? Or are holes only defined by what was unintentionally left out?
"Is it a hole if it is chosen to be excluded? Or are holes only defined by what was unintentionally left out?"
Wow--cutting, holes, rent fabric. What would Derrida say?
One difficulty, as Ann Laura Stoler or Thomas Richards might note, is that the issues of intention is hard to pinpoint. Is it a deliberate gap if colonial ideology leads an archivist to believe that a document about, say, colonized women does not merit saving?
Each time my wife and I move into a new place, it seems as if something we used no longer works/fits in the new location. The space, place, design, functionality, and so on seem to determine what we can display, what we can utilize, or even how our lives can be lived. Our most recent move led to the purchase of a new TV and TV stand because the space (and layout) didn't work with our old stuff. The bathroom decor we registered for and recieved for our wedding (almost) four years ago no longer has a place because of the (gaudy) wall paper in our current bathrooms. Additionally, we now have more wall space (and more windows) so we have begun purchasing more things to go on walls (as well as curtains and such). What about all the things we previously owned? We still have some of them, locked away in an attic or storage place for "in case the next place..." but we have also had to discard many things over the past three moves--perfectly good things, some with sentimental value and others with use value, because they didn't work in the new (system?). Some get left behind, some get discarded because of our various ingrained senses of design (things like symmetry and balance...or colonial ideology about women :)...) and others just don't belong in the new. Conciously (aware), unconciously (unaware), or even perhaps inconsciously (neither aware or unaware), some of the things that were once part of our lives do not have immediate presence in our lives and do not make the cut to get into storage (our archive)...some just get cut out of the fabric of our lives.
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