Alan Liu @ UMCP
Alan Liu spoke last Friday in McKeldin about the ELO’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination Initiative (PAD) and the Transliteracies project at the University of California.
The in medias res structure of the discourse about handling electronic work born digitally fascinates me. Liu, like everyone else, has to face diverse audiences from different professions and address detailed/complex issues of theory and practice that go to the heart of the scholarly enterprise.
The novice rhetorican in me was fascinated by his having to face simultaneously the tasks of advocating the position of ELO (an organization of early adopters who want their work preserved) as well as the demand to speak of detailed technical standards of other disciplines (METS, RDF, OWL, and OAIS). Discussion of the preservation of electronic records has a history of over thirty years among a small professional group of archivists, a history of ten to fifteen years from some of ELO’s number, and both groups are working dilligently to lower the boom of intellectucal and physical control over dynamic objects no more stable than ephemera in many circumstances. These dual(+) demands on the rhetor are like the dual demands on receptive media and interpreters’ schemas to allow for two-way communication visually and textually (IF you can separate them). Inscriptions are by definition (deeply?) coded performances producing a schismogenesis: the rhetor must be singly focused in dynamically diverse landscapes.
The rhetorical challenges of digital humanities scholars was certainly not his purpose for speaking. He addressed “smart” and “dumb” constraints of the current matrix of tools to achieve scholarly control of “texts”. One constraint is that the meta data standards above do not adequately describe the behaviors of texts produced in Flash or XHTML, for example.
The focus on description as a path toward control (better control) has me thinking. One must begin somewhere, certainly. In my archives experience, the nexus of arrangement, description, preservation, and access as a simultaneous process applied to relatively more stable objects has limited application here. The different parts of each of those areas are in different stages of development. Hopefully, those who can will build test libraries, special collections, and archives (NOT the same thing!) and conduct longitudinal studies that will begin to speak to the scope/scale of future inscriptions.
I guess Transcriptions will have to be another post! [I hope to post on Jospeh Tabbi’s remarks as well, btw.]
April 30th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Excellent post, Kevin. In fact I think I might like to link to it from the main MITH blog, if that’s okay with you–
May 2nd, 2006 at 9:18 pm
[…] Kevin Fries offers these excellent reports on recent talks by Alan Liu and Scott McCloud at MITH. […]
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