Whatever the type of digitizing, the process depends on a translation of form. This has very interesting social and practical implications beyond the sizable concerns associated with information loss and the uncertainties of digital format longevity. The act of shifting, removing, or abstracting the physical properties of an document distorts meaning. It also enhances meaning. In a way, value is neither destroyed or enhanced, it is just shifted based on cultural practices. It is important to meditate on a few of these points, if only briefly and idly.
If we think of documents as more easily transportable and accessible idea containers, then digitization is merely a method of advancing and augmenting these properties in the digital world. The loss of information and context that results from form distortion, by digitization, results from an imperfect conversion. To me, this is not different from the distortions innate in manifesting pure idea into a socially digestible form via spoken language. It may be arbitrary, but for the case I am making, it is helpful to think of physical forms a containers. Each document is a vessel for ideas, and these ideas can be manifest in a number of ways. But there really is no platonic and perfect from of the idea that exists outside of its physical form. The form adds and diminishes meaning, but, more importantly physical form enables the idea to live in a social environment. The form grants social dimension to the idea.
From a archival perspective, as much as from a IT perspective, the true value of an idea arises from its social and contextual significance. Value accretes as it moves though communities of use and consideration and is linked to other intellectual and physical developments. Context is key. An artifact in a museum setting is decontextualized. This is true whether the curator desires it so or not. Context has to be artificially built around decontextualized documents. This process could reflect an intention to restore context or to construct novel context.
Context emerges through associative information. This information could live in documents and experiences in near physical and intellectual proximity, but not necessarily. It is, however, always outside the and surrounding the document itself. The problems of value and scarcity (both integral to market economies) in the digital world are good examples. Copyright law and ideas of ownership and possession are confounded in the virtual world where nearly anything can exist anywhere at the same time.
Two ways of representing associative information, that come to mind here, are pastiche and palimpsest. Pastiche is a type of idea destruction and recreation. Its often now called remix, or mashup. It provides for the creation of new forms through the appropriation and decontextualizaion of prior forms. Many argue, reasonably, that all human creation is pastiche. In essence, the argument goes, we are all just absorbing ideas that existed before and around us, and through the application of our personality and experiences, combining them under the guise of innovation.
Palimpsest is a type of meaning that accumulates over time. It signifies a cycle of writing, erasing and rewriting. Though, with each new iteration, the old is simultaneously obscured and reincorporated into the new. Think of a once vibrant and vital industrial park that falls on hard times, decays, lies fallow and unused, and then is rehabilitated into trendy shops or lofts. The process tells us more about a city and society that any one instantiation or roll of the physical place and its arrangement.
Metadata is the primary, thought not the only, reflection of the above discussed associative information in digital and digitized documents. It describes a thing so that the thing can be found and used. Sometimes metadata proscribes, other times it prescribes use and meaning. It is always constructed. Thought, often, it is constructed collaboratively, and over time, like the meaning in which the object itself resides.
No comments:
Post a Comment