The readings this week address digital preservation, digital oncology, and interoperability. Much of the information in these readings was somewhat abstract and technical, but I think I understand what is at stake.

McDonough

This article talks about the unintended consequences of  XML use in the digital library community, mainly why there are failures of interoperability between institutions, developers and other users of XML.  The whole idea of XML was to have flexibility within a generalized, standard mark-up language so that different programs could communicate within it.  What has happened, though, is not quite what the creators of XML envisioned.  McDonough says this is because of culture and social relationships between content creators and software vendors (par. 13), among other things.

His solution is to establish “common principles of structural encoding and standardized stylesheets for translation” (par. 36).  The main problem I see is that a standard, or universal mark-up language is probably impossible.  We don’t have a standard, universal human language, we don’t have a standard, universal culture, and we don’t have standard, universal social relationships.  A consequence of human flexibility makes it hard to generalize the digital.

Kirschenbaum

We are again dealing with archives in this article.  The author tells a great story about preservation and possibility for research within the born-digital archives with his example of MITH.  His hook is the “.txtual condition.” He says the catechism of this condition is “Access is duplication, duplication is preservation, and preservation is creation – and recreation”  (par. 16).  I took this to mean that archiving is all about making things ready for recall.

In the digital aspect, an archivist has to “be able to identify and retrieve all its digital components” -Kenneth Thibodeau (par. 16).  What this means is hardware and software may need to be physically available, or emulated, to access old digital information.  This would be very important to a historian because records are primary sources.  Digital records will need to be accessible if future historians are to study the digital age.

Evens

This is a very abstract article about the abstraction of the digital world.  It is about binary code (0,1) being behind everything digital.  We don’t think about that as we go about our digital lives, but it is real.  Evens says, ” The digital has an ontology, a way of being, and products and processes generated through digital technologies bear traces of this way of being” (par. 9).  Later, Evans says it’s not just about technology, but binary code has abstract, ideal and discrete characteristics that end up being expressed in human relations (par. 15).  I found this article difficult to digest, but do think it would be an interesting area of study for philosophers.