» Rushdie’s digital decay - Long Views: The Long Now Blog

Rushdie’s digital decay

March 17th, 02010 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander

Salman Rushdie at Emory University in Atlanta, which is currently exhibiting his personal archive, including personal papers, and electronically produced drafts of his novels.

Stewart Brand sends in this excellent piece in the The New York Times on what I am sure is to be an oft repeated story. As museums ingest invaluable intellectual material from authors and thinkers that increasingly will have never used paper, they are finding that preserving this data is a many layered problem. Huge Kudos goes out to Emory University for pulling together a full emulated environment of Rushdie’s word processor to recreate the digital “environment” for others to see into his process. I suspect this emulation strategy will be used more and more…

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.

“If you’re interested in primary materials, you’re interested in the context as well as the content, the authentic artifact,” Ms. Farr said. “Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact of word processing affected literary output,” she added, which would require seeing the original computer images.

(…continue reading at NYT)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 02010 at 11:19 am and is filed under Digital Dark Age. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Markus G.

Anything people feel is important enough to preserve will survive in the clouds of computers connected to the internet.

Look at Comodore 64 games and songs. They exist on millions of computers world-wide; there exists a wide variety of emulators to play them and technical documents describing in pornographic detail anything you could possibly want to know about the hardware of the commodore 64.

It exists because people feel it is important; you could not even stamp it out if you decided to enforce copyright laws judiciously for such old works.

Things people don't care about will suffer from bit-rot and eventually go extinct as the last remaining copies become unrecoverable. This is perfectly fine; not everything about anything needs to be stored, just the stuff people care about.
Jenn

Thank you for this post. "Mediated Memories in the Digital Age" by José van Dijck is another fascinating strand of this conversation. Van Dijck explores how old and new media technologies shape acts of memory. The book was first recommended to me by one of my profs at the San Francisco Art Institute - a really interesting read.
Clayton

This is always an interesting problem. Some time ago I working for a weekly news publication. All the past issues were backed up digitally but in an enormous range of formats. There were Syquest drives, JAZ, ZIP, Magneto-Optical, 3.5 inch floppys; it seemed they had an "elephant's graveyard" of obsolete media. There was a room filled with systems that were kept in inventory simply to read old disk formats. It was a miniature version of the Computer History Museum, a dusty timeline of hardware and software development. I became somewhat adept at troubleshooting data transfers from old to new systems. In theory it was hoped that these things would be migrated to newer media, but in reality with deadlines and budget priorities it was never feasible. Ultimately paper won out for archival purposes. When a reporter needed to get an old story they just went down to the basement storage area and dug through the shelves for the few copies we kept of each printed edition.
And there's the time I worked at an ad agency that used a proprietary digital archiving system for all their digital archives. The archive software became obsolete with an OS upgrade and they ended up with 100's of CDs with mysterious numbers on the envelopes. But that's another story...
Matt Warren

Great find. Thanks for sharing this. I'm impressed with the Rushdie Museum's attempt to recreate the working environment of the authors. That's a great way to convey more "period" to their work.