RE: [-empyre-] authenticity

Dear Luciana

Thank you for such a passionate response. I'm delighted that you too emphasise the importance of values. I'll keep reminding the list about this as we go forward because competing values can compromise long-term access.

Nevertheless, I don't think we are diverging in our approach. I think we might be talking about the same thing. Yes, the object was originally a book but what I was pointing you to (in the link) was the fact that as a digital object on-line, it had become encrusted with comment, indeed, shaped by format containers now imposed by cultural values. Acknowledging, recording and capturing these encrustations, is precisely what the Flight of Ducks sets out to do.

In case you didn?t follow the link, you would have found a captured email message

http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1033.html#Hersey#1

that offered the PDF format as an appropriate response to Aboriginal sensitivity:

??That is, unlike the paper novel, the hypertext version (published in html-based chapters) had been completely spidered and catalogued for search engines. The result was that when certain keywords were entered, the information about the sacred areas was immediately listed onscreen??

I find this quite extraordinary. I had never considered that particular digital formats could have different cultural values. Is this authentic? How would anyone know that the email is not a work of fiction. Like the InterPARES correspondence that you mention, every conversation that the Flight of Ducks has engendered over the last 10 years is included in the site. In fact it is embedded in conversation. And like InterPARES, the aggregated site is regularly captured by PANDORA. As you say, ?the natural, interrelated, impartial, authentic, unique residue of it as it has accumulated over time?.

I guess I?m about as close to this residue as you can get, yet I have no viable mechanism for indicating that the email is genuine, authentic or true, other than the context in which it is gathered and made accessible to all.

To honour this context I have contaminated the message with markup and (like this discussion) with hyperlinks to the thread. Is this form of contamination a bad thing. Ted Nelson would argue that it is harmful. Perhaps the act of archiving or gathering is a form of contamination?

Have I misunderstood the point you were making?

Best wishes

Simon




From: Luciana Duranti <luciana@interchange.ubc.ca>
Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] authenticity
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 14:14:32 -0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: from gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au ([149.171.20.30]) by mc5-f32.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.211); Wed, 9 Feb 2005 14:16:57 -0800
Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1])by gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au (Postfix) with ESMTPid 0131C139711B; Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:16:51 +1100 (EST)
Received: from gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 26990-01; Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:16:49 +1100 (EST)
Received: from gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au (gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [149.171.20.30])by gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au (Postfix) with ESMTPid F175013970E6; Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:16:42 +1100 (EST)
Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1])by gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au (Postfix) with ESMTP id C926513970D6for <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>;Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:16:40 +1100 (EST)
Received: from gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au ([127.0.0.1])by localhost (gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new,port 10024)with ESMTP id 26698-16 for <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>;Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:16:39 +1100 (EST)
Received: from smtp.interchange.ubc.ca (mta2.interchange.ubc.ca[142.103.145.70])by gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au (Postfix) with ESMTP id EABAA13970D2for <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>;Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:16:38 +1100 (EST)
Received: from SLAIS.interchange.ubc.ca (texada.slais.ubc.ca [137.82.170.155])by smtp.interchange.ubc.ca(iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 HotFix 1.21 (built Sep 8 2003))with ESMTPS id <0IBO005G60JLKE@smtp.interchange.ubc.ca> forempyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au; Wed, 09 Feb 2005 14:16:34 -0800 (PST)
X-Message-Info: GQXpnklFM/eJUpGQZYbtwPr0Q+m5g3RsE9xcC4ZFBQk=
X-Original-To: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Delivered-To: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 6.2.0.14
References: <5.2.0.9.0.20050208150329.02caf878@pop.interchange.ubc.ca><BAY10-F379B33AE18CC7DCEF9A361DE750@phx.gbl>
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at cofa.unsw.edu.au
X-BeenThere: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5
Precedence: list
List-Id: soft_skinned_space <empyre.lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
List-Unsubscribe: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre>,<mailto:empyre-request@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au?subject=unsubscribe>
List-Archive: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre>
List-Post: <mailto:empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
List-Help: <mailto:empyre-request@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au?subject=help>
List-Subscribe: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre>,<mailto:empyre-request@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au?subject=subscribe>
Errors-To: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at cofa.unsw.edu.au
Return-Path: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 09 Feb 2005 22:16:57.0895 (UTC) FILETIME=[11D62370:01C50EF5]

At 04:43 AM 2/9/2005, you wrote: 
Dear Luciana

to know whether they can trust their sources, and any spectator wants to know whether is looking at the real thing or some forgery, imitation, or surrogate.

By way of an excuse to tell another story, I'm just a little puzzled about the strength of your concern for authenticity of digital forms. Sometimes one of useful qualities of digital material is its ability to be free of its container and change form. In a previous posting I think that I also suggested that a lack of contextual residue might also be a weakness. 

Dear Simon:

I am so concerned because I am an archivist. The primary quality of archival material we swear to protect with our life is authenticity. This is where the weaknesses of interdisciplinary discussions come up. What unites us is digital preservation. What divides us is the nature of the material we are trying to preserve and the set of values that we are imbued with in the course of our professional education. I will use your own example to explain.


At the risk of being scorned, your posting made me recall a message sent to me in on 28th April 2003 12:18 PM from the (then) Research Director of the Strehlow Research Centre in Australia's centre (message contained in link below). The Strehlow Research Centre had published an out of print book on its website that I had (without guilt) immediately appropriated. I had done this not just because I was a hunter-gatherer-collector but because it had been badly marked up and was full of character encoding anomalies. Playing the archival role, I re-marked it up into a pristine version with appropriate metadata and allowed it to join the rest of the Strehlow related material on its journey into the future via The Flight of Ducks.

http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1020.html

Anyone searching for an authentic version of the content of the book would have been better served by my appropriated version than by the official sanctioned version. If you go to this link and press the [removed] link, you will see yet another example of the action of cultural values. My solution was to use comments (see source of FOD1020.html).

As it turned out, this story became far murkier than I had imagined, but this is not the place to go into that. If nothing else, this illustrates how the residue of its stewards can indeed encrust or contaminate digital material depending on how you see it.

This is a wonderful example because it shows the difference between my and your profession. The object of your care is a book, an autonomous item meant for dissemination in multiple copies. A book is not authentic with respect to its creator and even less with respect to its owner. It is authentic with respect to itself and the message it is meant to convey by itself. You did the right thing. You brought it back to what it was meant to be.

Now, let's say that the same book (also in electronic form) was owned by a literary critic, that the critic annotated and interspersed it with his reflections, and then used this annotated version as the basis of his own essays on the book's author, which were published and for which he won the Governor of Canada award. A year later the critic dies and his wife gives his material to the Library and Archives of Canada. The librarian says: I want the book to add to the collection of this author as I am missing this one. The archivist says: forget it. This item was a book when bought by the critic, but it is no longer a book, it is a record (a natural, interrelated, impartial, authentic, unique by-product of the critic's activity), and I have to protect its authenticity with respect to its creator (the creator is the person who makes, receives or accumulates records as means and residue of his activities), the critic. Its papers would not make sense without the book with its annotations. So, if the librarian wants to make the book available as part of the collection, the archivist will create a pdf or TIFF version of it to ensure that none of the annotations will be lost and allow the librarian to establish a link from the collection of the books of the same author to that book in particular.

I do not know whether it is clear what I am getting at. The web is a portal. Anything can be there, publications, artifacts, or records. I only care about web sites when they contain records and, if they do, I must ensure that their authenticity is protected. Take the InterPARES 1 website, which PADI has. It is a publication, it is meant for dissemination. But the restricted area of the web site contains all the correspondence of the InterPARES researchers, the documents generated in the common workspaces in their various versions, the databases in which we analyse metadata sets, terminology, etc., proceedings of meetings, case studies interviews, surveys. These are all records of the InterPARES activity; they are the natural, interrelated, impartial, authentic, unique residue of it as it has accumulated over time. I am not giving it to a library because I want those qualities protected in the way archivists do, exercising archival functions according to archival theory, methods and standards.

So, art. Well, digital art falls in between the cracks, doesn't it? Music...if the work is the performance (carrying its message on its own, autonomous), the score is a set of instructions necessary to do the performance (a record?). And the score of each musician and the conductor are different, and they are annotated by the individuals....This is why InterPARES studies digital art...although it is a product, not a means to a purpose, a by-product; although it is meant for dissemination, it is authentic, it is unique, it is interrelated.... it is to be protected in the form that the author considers the most accurate, cannot be left to the popular vote...

I apologise to everyone for being so long...or just passionate...

Luciana



_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

_________________________________________________________________
Searching for that dream home? Try http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au for all your property needs.


This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.