Tuesday, November 10, 2015

WORST INK STILL BETTER THAN THE BEST MEMORY?


When you snap a picture with your cellphone or digital camera, what do you do with it?  Do you still have it “developed”?  When your company asks for a report, do you still print it out or would it exist only in some computer or backed up in Dropbox or some cloud storage?    When you read a book, “do you read it off the screen just like everyone else” or do you still flip through pages like they did in days of old?

Argentine Humanist Alberto Manguel had this to say:

Even the newer electronic technologies cannot approach the experience of handling an original publication. As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader’s hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words. (Columbia University’s librarian Patricia Battin, a fierce advocate for the microfilming of books, disagreed with this notion. “The value,” she wrote, “in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established.” There speaks a dolt, someone utterly insensitive, in intellectual or any other terms, to the experience of reading.)

But above all, the argument that calls for electronic reproduction on account of the endangered life of paper is a false one. Anybody who has used a computer knows how easy it is to lose a text on the screen, to come upon a faulty disk or CD, to have the hard drive crash beyond all appeal. The tools of the electronic media are not immortal. The life of a disk is about seven years; a CD-ROM lasts about ten. In 1986, the BBC spent two and a half million pounds creating a computer-based, multi-media version of the Domesday Book, the eleventh-century census of England compiled by Norman monks.

More ambitious than its predecessor, the electronic Domesday Book contained 250,000 place names, 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3,000 data sets and 60 minutes of moving pictures, plus scores of accounts that recorded “life in Britain” during that year. Over a million people contributed to the project, which was stored on twelve-inch laser disks that could only be deciphered by a special BBC microcomputer. Sixteen years later, in March 2002, an attempt was made to read the information on one of the few such computers still in existence. The attempt failed. Further solutions were sought to retrieve the data, but none was entirely successful. “There is currently no demonstrably viable technical solution to this problem,” said Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation, one of the world experts on data preservation, called in to assist. “Yet, if it is not solved, our increasingly digital heritage is in grave risk of being lost.”  By contrast, the original Domesday Book, almost a thousand years old, written in ink on paper and kept at the Public Record Office in Kew, is in fine condition and still perfectly readable.

The director for the electronic records archive program at the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States confessed in November 2004 that the preservation of electronic material, even for the next decade, let alone for eternity, “is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals.” Since no clear solution is available, electronic experts recommend that users copy their materials onto CDs, but even these are of short duration. The lifespan of data recorded on a CD with a CD burner could be as little as five years. In fact, we don’t know for how long it will be possible to read a text inscribed on a 2004 CD. And while it is true that acidity and brittleness, fire and the legendary bookworms threaten ancient codexes and scrolls, not everything written or printed on parchment or paper is condemned to an early grave. A few years ago, in the Archeological Museum of Naples, I saw, held between two plates of glass, the ashes of a papyrus rescued from the ruins of Pompeii. It was two thousand years old; it had been burnt by the fires of Vesuvius, it had been buried under a flow of lava—and I could still read the letters written on it, with astonishing clarity. (footnotes omitted)
The Beauty of Books 

Manuscripts and typescript drafts can easily be read if they are found.  You will also be able to find a wealth of meaning by examining various versions of the manuscript versus the published version.  But the ephemeral nature of electronic word processing makes it difficult to find the same level of textual analysis from authors.  With the advent of electronic composition and storage of books is the elimination and disappearance of drafts.  In the past, an author would make a series of drafts before coming up with a final manuscript.  Historians, hagiographers, biographers and other academics would find these drafts a very rich source of what the author was trying to write and what he was trying to say.  Remember José Rizal's lost chapter in the Noli Me Tangere, a chapter thatwas later included in some critical editions.  Jefferson's drafts of the declaration of liberty have been examined over and over again by historians and political scientists seeking to “get into Jefferson's brain.”  In this blog, I have an ongoing project to write a study guide of Los Pájaros de Fuego, the “lost novel” of José Balmori, is based on the critical edition of Isaac Donoso which contains glosses of previous drafts of the novel.

There are legal implications as well.  In the Philippine setting, legal instruments are, without exception, paper documents.  For example, there is no such thing as a “video will”.  In other legal traditions, we have the UK Parliament, where a law is only formally passed once it is printed in parchment.  Indeed, the durability of parchment and ink and paper and ink is not something we can easily replicate with the electronic medium.

What is the legal status therefore, of so called “electronic titles”?  Of late, the Land Registation Authority (LRA) has been digitizing the land records of our country.  Basically, all physical titles on file with the LRA are scanned and kept in a server somewhere in Scandinavia.1  A law professor discussed that these electronic titles have no legal status.  The only title to land in the Philippines is the physical certificate of title on file with the LRA, and thus the title can still be physically destroyed and the scanned copy on file somewhere in Norway cannot simply replace the physical title. 

Imagine also if something were to happen to the hard drive in Norway, and everything up in the cloud were to suddenly disappear—all of the precious digital-only land title system would be in complete disarray.  People had a big row if Facebook or Instagram would suddenly go down and all of their precious pictures and memories with it, how much more the indefeasibility of a person’s ownership of a parcel of land?

The Feared Blue Screen of Death

What do you guys think?  Paper or electronic?

Footnotes:

[1] This is just an example, but many servers are located in Scandinavia to take advantage of cold weather to save on airconditioning costs.


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