Archaeology of a digitization

Abstract

This study proposes an archaeology as a means of exploring the practices by which digitally encoded resources are generated, circulated, and received. The discussion grapples with the ambiguous relationship between digitizations and their exemplars in the wellknown database, Early English Books Online (EEBO), and suggests ways in which digitizations might be analyzed as witnesses of current perceptions about the past and used accordingly in scholarly research. The article therefore offers a critical reading of EEBO and its digitizations as part of a broader effort to investigate the role of digitally encoded resources in the transmission of ideas and the production of cultural heritage.The proliferation of digitized materials for both popular and scholarly audiences has stimulated widespread interest in the relationship between these new materials and the documents, books, and artefacts that they represent. Although investigations of digital reproductions have highlighted the notion of remediation, what has not yet been considered in detail is the ontological rift that separates digitizations from their exemplars, the ramifications of such a rift, and how we might embark on productive and critical interpretations of the digitized sources.1 Debates continue to be waged about the appropriate treatment of digital materials in libraries and archives, 2 but we can in the meantime deepen our understanding of these entities by exploring their role in the production of knowledge. To this end, the present study is conceived as an archaeology that excavates for consideration the discursive practices by which digitizations are produced, circulated, and received. This particular conception of archaeology was popularized by Michel Foucault (1972) as a means of critical analysis, and will prove useful in making visible the scope and approach of the examination at hand. L.M.J. Delaissé advocated in 1976 similarly for an archaeology of medieval manuscripts that would be "the first step in any research based on manuscripts." He went on to explain that the method "guarantees that we are in possession of all the material facts revealing the life of these books and vital for understanding their contents" (p. 81). Just as Delaissé hoped that his archaeology would develop into a robust and well-rounded history of the medieval book, so too does the following study propose an archaeology that lays the foundation for a future history of the digitization. The article will therefore perform an excavation of a particular project in digitization, introducing for discussion the constitution of that project, how we might interpret the conditions in which its digitizations circulate, and how we might approach similar initiatives as sites of critical analysis.

"Q i-jtb the Raven": Taking Dirty OCR Seriously

“…43 As a new impression, such an image clearly "operates in reference to, and intermittently transmits something of, the various circumstances associated with the object that is being represented" while simultaneously, through its role as both source text and graphical overlay for the archive's new OCR-derived editions, linking its historical antecedent to its twentieth-and twenty-first-century descendants. 44 Mak describes the layers of a digitization's image, text data, metadata, and interface, "as palimpsests" altering each other, "a particular synthesis of traditional and emergent technologies" that are "challenging to locate for scholarly analysis." 45 These challenges are exemplified (and sometimes exacerbated) by the interfaces of large-scale digital archives, which struggle to reconcile a rhetoric of surrogacy with technical systems that demand mediaspecific representation.…”

“…44 Mak describes the layers of a digitization's image, text data, metadata, and interface, "as palimpsests" altering each other, "a particular synthesis of traditional and emergent technologies" that are "challenging to locate for scholarly analysis." 45 These challenges are exemplified (and sometimes exacerbated) by the interfaces of large-scale digital archives, which struggle to reconcile a rhetoric of surrogacy with technical systems that demand mediaspecific representation.…”

A Fragmentizing Interface to a Large Corpus of Digitized Text: (Post)humanism and Non-consumptive Reading via Features

“…(Brooks 2014) Thus, technological changes (and the discursive practices associated with them) that seem to favour a fragmentation of the reading experience at a sociotechnical level are interpreted as a threat to 'philosophic or literary' inquiry. Scholars in the humanities have also expressed concern with how digital scanning of texts, in general, dissociates the product from the process that underpins it, so that digital versions of texts have a propensity to be disseminated, as Bonnie Mak mentions, with scant regard for their 'history of construction', so that they all too easily end up 'deployed as data in the crafting of other narratives' (Mak 2014). It is to be quite expected, then, that some scholars in the humanities are likely to react with consternation at the idea of non-consumptive 'reading' that we have described, which takes place across an interface that generates bags of words while obliterating all traces of the positional relations between words: 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone', indeed, to borrow from Donne's poem!…”

Teaching with Digital Primary Sources: Literacies, Finding and Evaluating, Citing, Ethics, and Existing Models

“…Her archaeology of Early English Books Online aims to counter this by analyzing and situating digitizations. Lara Putnam broadens Mak's focus to 9 assess transnational history's use of digital primary sources, arguing that digital primary sources and the use of search erases the need for contextual information and learning by supplying too many items to actually work with. Other work similarly seeks to return digital primary sources 10 to their histories and contexts and to consider the political, social, and economic implications of the mass digitization of analog primary sources.…”