Begin forwarded message:
>> From: Matthew Kirschenbaum <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: April 11, 2010 10:16:54 AM EDT
>> To: Jon Ippolito <[log in to unmask]>
>> Cc: "Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org" <NEW-MEDIA-
>> [log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Re: Crowdsourcing preservation
>>
>> I sometimes call this the "love will find a way" school of
>> preservation. It doesn't scale very well, but if enough people care
>> enough about a certain thing, the most amazing stuff can happen. The
>> bigger take-away of both the book and the specific case study of
>> Agrippa is that these are almost always finally *social* rather than
>> technological challenges.
>>
>> Feel free to forward this on to the list--I'd also love to see any
>> replies. And thanks for the kind words! Best, Matt
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 8:12 PM, Jon Ippolito
>> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> As Beryl and Sarah have left the door open for a continued
>>> discussion on collecting new media art this week, I thought we
>>> could turn to another angle from the world of electronic literature.
>>>
>>> The perseverance of digital narrative is a central theme of
>>> Matthew Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic
>>> Imagination. This well researched book makes a convincing case
>>> for a perspective that is diametrically opposed to the variable
>>> media paradigm: that bits can hide away in material substrates
>>> much longer than the conventional wisdom would imply.
>>>
>>> Kirschenbaum cites some provocative examples, such as the
>>> forensic recovery of data from hard drives buried under rubble at
>>> the bottom of the World Trade Center after 9/11. Interestingly
>>> for our purposes, one of his chapters offers another answer to
>>> Beryl's request for "good examples of crowdsourced preservation
>>> or documentation." William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh's digital
>>> project Agrippa was supposed to be a lesson in ephemerality, a
>>> poem that erased itself when read. The press release claimed,
>>>
>>> "The Collector/Reader, when encountering this new object, will be
>>> forced to make a radical choice; between 'possessing' the story
>>> and images, by activating the disc and opening the pages of the
>>> book, ending up with only a relic or memory of its content, or
>>> keeping the story and etchings 'intact', but never actually
>>> experiencing what each contains...at least until some super-
>>> bright Hacker cracks the original virus, penetrates the form and
>>> retrieves the text."
>>>
>>> Turns out it took only days for the text to show up in news
>>> groups, and it has been preserved online ever since. You can even
>>> view an emulated run of the poem based on a bit-level copy of an
>>> original diskette made possible by the Maryland Institute for
>>> Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab at
>>> University of Maryland:
>>>
>>> http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/category/the-book-subcategories/
>>> the-poem-running-in-emulation
>>>
>>> Open-source champion Eric Raymond once claimed that "Given enough
>>> eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Perhaps there's an analogous
>>> axiom for preservation?
>>>
>>> jon
>>> ______________________________
>>> Forging the Future:
>>> New tools for variable media preservation
>>> http://forging-the-future.net/
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Matthew Kirschenbaum
>> Associate Professor of English
>> Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the
>> Humanities (MITH)
>> Director, Digital Cultures and Creativity (DCC, a new Living/Learning
>> Program in the Honors College)
>> University of Maryland
>> 301-405-8505 or 301-314-7111 (fax)
>> http://mkirschenbaum.net
>
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