Some Darker Sides of Digitization; or, Disappearing Data, Doubtful Descriptions, and Other Deformations of Print

Abstract

In Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and Forms of Print (2009), Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, quoting Anne R. Kenney, write of the 'fast fires' of digital obsolescence (163). It is not only disappearing data that constitute a dark side of digitization, however. Its bleaker aspects are also represented in doubtful descriptions of works by booksellers on electronic catalogues and in deformed--and sometimes stolen--digitized editions of works originally published in printed forms. In this article I shall both explore these darker sides of digitization and suggest ways in which they might be mitigated. My four case studies derive from my experiences with Centre Editing Early Canadian Texts (CEECT), an enterprise that endured almost thirty years at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and with a collection of articles that I am assembling a volume on role played by London publisher named Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, then Richard Bentley, and then Richard Bentley and Son in shaping images of Great Britain's colonies through works that it issued from late 1820s to mid-1890s. CASE STUDY NO. 1: CEECT AND COMPUTERS In April 2013 issue of University Affairs, magazine that is published ten times a year by Association of and Colleges of Canada, and that is advertised on its website as Voice of Canada's Universities (http://www.aucc.ca), there is an article by Suzanne Bowness entitled Parsing Humanities: Everything You Wanted to Know about Digital Humanities. It begins with following reminiscence: If you're old enough to remember a time before Internet, cast your ears back to this sound: ... ding*ding*ding. That's right. That's irritating ... ring of an old-fashioned modem connecting your computer to Internet ... Now, imagine yourself back in era when that sound was a novelty, particularly in quiet halls of an English or history department, where loudest ambient noise up to that point may have been quiet swish of pages turning. Or perhaps a pencil scraping lightly at their margins. If you were that reader, hearing that ding first time, ... You might have heard birth of a new discipline called digital humanities. (Bowness 14) This article, as well as WordStar Was King, a chapter in Dennis Baron's A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and Digital Revolution (2009) that reviews dramatic changes in computer technologies in last half century, reminded me that CEECT too was a pioneer in this field. The reason is that from time steering committee started to meet in fall of 1979, concept of producing our texts by using computers moved quickly from a remote possibility to a definite reality. When we made this decision, however, there was no Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) that provided consistent and apparently universal ways to mark up text. Although we tried, there was no satisfactory way to digitize texts by scanning them into a computer. And notion of electronic editions, which has dominated so much recent literature about scholarly editing, had not been imagined. What we meant by editing by computer in late 1970s and early 1980s, in fact, had itself largely to be invented. Invent and acquire hardware, languages, and software, therefore, we did. In CEECT: Progress, Procedures, and Problems, example, an article published in Papers of Bibliographical Society of Canada in 1987, I explained that we used computer for thirty-two in course of preparing CEECT editions, and that we had seventy programs that were especially written to run these processes (Edwards 20). Because computer technology developed so quickly, we never did market our programs as office at Carleton concerned with such business matters once suggested. And as years went on, we abandoned our mainframe CP-6 and our WANGs personal computers and laptops, and we moved from backing up and storing data on magnetic tapes and various sizes of discs to transferring our files to USBs and to sending them over Internet to e-mail accounts and to various clouds in cyberspace. …