[Air-L] archiving writers' e-work (fwd)

[jcu]

Hello,

Please forgive my rather large post to this list.
But I wish to share an article in full (see below)
for the sake of placing a question in context. I
hope this is alright to do ...

Has anyone heard of someone bequeathing
their 'cloud' of personal info to a loved one/
family member? In the world of computer forensics,
can a family member legally gain access to/take ownership
of a deceased family members' mobile me accounts
(the contents of it), for example?

Is anyone researching this aspect of e-writing?

thank you for your time,
joan
(canada)


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Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 11:58:07 EDT
Subject: [vel] archiving writers' e-work

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i31/31a00102.htm
  From the issue dated April 10, 2009
<Archiving Writers' Work in the Age of E-Mail

  Digital preservation lets scholars learn more than ever about authors
  By STEVE KOLOWICH

  Leslie Morris is used to handling John Updike's personal effects. For
decades, Mr. Updike had been sending a steady stream of manuscripts and 
papers to
Harvard University's Houghton Library, where Ms. Morris serves as a curator.

  But in late February, several weeks after the iconic writer died, some 
boxes
arrived with unexpected contents: approximately 50 three-and-a-halfand
five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks â?" artifacts from late in the 
author's career
when he, like many of his peers, began using a word processor.
  The floppies have presented a bit of a problem. While relatively modern to
Mr. Updike â?" who rose to prominence back when publishers were still using
Linotype machines â?" the disks are outmoded and damage-prone by today's 
standards.
Ms. Morris, who curates modern books and manuscripts, has carefully stored 
them
alongside his papers in a temperature-controlled room in the library "until
we have a procedure here at Harvard on how to handle these materials."

  Harvard isn't the only university puzzling over new media from old â?" 
and
not-so-old â?" masters. Emory University recently received four laptops, an
external hard drive, and a Palm Treo personal digital assistant from Salman 
Rushdie.
The University of Texas at Austin recently acquired a series of Zip disks 
and
a laptop containing Norman Mailer's files.

  "Once we learned how to preserve paper, we were good," says Naomi L. 
Nelson,
interim director of the manuscript, archives, and rare-book library at Emory
University's Robert W. Woodruff Library. "That really hasn't changed a lot.
With computers it's a whole different ballgame."

  Still, three things are becoming clear. First, these trappings of the
digital age will transform the way libraries preserve and exhibit literary
collections. Second, universities are going to have to spend money on new 
equipment and
training for their archivists. And finally, scholars will be able to learn
more about writers than they ever have before.

  In With the Old

  Personal computers and external storage devices have been around for more
than a quarter-century, but only now, as the famous literary figures of the 
20th
century begin to pass away, are these technologies showing up on archivists'
doorsteps.

  According to Ms. Morris, the Updike papers will be the first in the 
Houghton
catalog to have a "significant magnetic-media component," and she realizes
that old floppy disks are just the tip of the iceberg. The great American
novelists of the digital era â?" the ones who own BlackBerrys, use Gmail, 
Facebook,
and Twitter, and compose only on computer screens â?" will soon begin 
shipping
their hard drives off to university libraries.

  What happens then is something much on the minds of Matthew G. 
Kirschenbaum
(The Chronicle, August 17, 2007) and Douglas L. Reside. Both Mr. 
Kirschenbaum,
associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the 
Humanities
at the University of Maryland, and Mr. Reside, an assistant director at the
institute, possess the collection of skills that may eventually be required 
of
all 21st-century curators. In addition to holding doctorates in English, 
they
are computer experts.

  The institute, located in an austere warren of offices in the basement of
the university's McKeldin Library, houses a mix of sleek new machines and 
clunky
old ones. An easy office-chair roll away from his newest computer sits Mr.
Kirschenbaum's oldest one: a small, gray box known as the Apple II. Mr. 
Reside's
office contains similar artifacts, including a Commodore 64 gaming console.

  Amid the institute's state-of-the-art machines, these ridiculous-looking
antiques are stark reminders of how rapidly computer technology has evolved,
producing one of the major challenges of preservation in the digital age:
compatibility.

  The problem with the dizzying pace of computer evolution is that new
machines are often incapable of learning old tricks â?" even if the tricks 
are not
really that old. For instance, most new computers don't come with 
floppy-disk
drives. And while Harvard will surely procure machines that can safely read 
Mr.
Updike's disk-based papers, what if those papers were trapped inside an even
older storage device â?" say, something resembling a Commodore 64 game 
cartridge?
Future archivists must have the skills to retrieve them.

  Brave New World

  Archivists must also know how to transfer their data to new machines, 
since
old machines can survive for only so long before their circuits give out.

  That, Ms. Nelson says, calls for people with intimate knowledge of how the
new stuff works, plus the resourcefulness to retrofit modernity's round 
holes
to accommodate antiquity's square pegs. "We're still going to need people 
who
are experts in the history of the book, people who study handwriting, 
organize
paper collections, handle obsolete video formats, traditional photography. 
...
We're going to do everything we've been doing, and then we're going to be
doing this."

  Ms. Nelson understands this better than most: While Mr. Updike's floppy
disks at Harvard probably contain simple text documents, the digital devices 
Mr.
Rushdie donated to Emory contain entire ecosystems of data.

  Writers today do a lot more on computers than they used to, and modern
devices hold a lot more information about their users than old ones did. The 
laptop
(and now the mobile device) has become the locus of social life as
correspondence has migrated from letters and phone calls to e-mail and text 
chatting.
Recreational reading and research have also increasingly moved to the Web.

  Since a laptop logs basically everything its user does, preserving these
data environments will allow the scholars of the future unprecedented 
insight
into the minds of literary geniuses. "It's basically like giving someone the 
keys
to your house," says Mr. Kirschenbaum.

  The influence of authors' environments on their writing has always
interested scholars. Marcel Proust, for example, is known to have been 
heavily
influenced by the paintings he surrounded himself with when he penned the 
novel
Remembrance of Things Past, between 1909 and 1922. Imagine if Proust had 
been
writing 100 years later, on a laptop: What else we might be able to learn 
about his
creative process.

  The implications for scholarship are tremendous, Mr. Kirschenbaum says. 
Take
a great digital-era author: "You could potentially look at a browser 
history,
see that he visited a particular Web site on a particular day and time," he
says. "And then if you were to go into the draft of one of his manuscripts, 
you
could see that draft was edited at a particular day and hour, and you could
establish a connection between something he was looking at on the Web with
something that he then wrote."
  In some cases, computer forensics can even hint at an author's influences
beyond the screen. Mr. Reside recently mined data from old equipment 
belonging
to Jonathan Larson, the late composer and playwright who earned a Pulitzer
Prize posthumously for the musical Rent. In an early draft, Larson had a 
character
suggest that the moonlight coming through the window is really "fluorescent
light from the Gap." In the final draft, the lyric was "Spike Lee shooting 
down
the street."

  "From the time stamp on the digital files," Mr. Reside says, "I learned 
that
the lyric was changed in the spring of 1992 ... when, I believe, Spike Lee
was shooting Malcolm X in New York City."

  A Deluge of Data

  That is really just scratching the surface. Imagine how mapping the 
content
of an author's Facebook profile, MySpace page, Flickr account, or Twitter 
feed
might help scholars dissect that author's life and letters. The social-media
generation has developed a habit of casually volunteering biographical
information. When the great authors of that generation emerge, scholars may 
be
pleased to find plenty of fodder for study already on the public record.

  But that is where things get tricky. Information that lives inside a
writer's personal hardware â?" like the data on Mr. Updike's floppy disks 
or Mr. Rush
die's hard drives â?" may not have physical dimensions, but it is at least
attached to a single device that is owned by somebody. "It's physically 
here," says
Mr. Kirschenbaum, gesturing toward a shelf of Apple Classic computers, 
donated
to the Maryland institute by the poet Deena Larsen. "I can wrap my arms 
around
it."

  Not so with e-mail and social-media content. These are not programs run on
individual computers; they are Web-based services, hosted remotely by 
companies
like Facebook and Google. The content exists in an ethereal mass of data
known in information-technology circles as "the cloud." There, Mr. 
Kirschenbaum
says, "you get into this wilderness of competing terms of service."

  With more and more information being stored on the Web, it is no longer
clear who owns what.
  For example, in February, Facebook rewrote its terms of service to stake a
claim on all content that users put on their profiles. After a backlash, the
company hastily backed off and reiterated that users own their own profile
content. But the case is a reminder of the fluidity and ambiguity of 
ownership laws
in the dawning era of shared media.

  "Consumers don't really know their rights here, and many are so wowed with
the convenience that they aren't asking themselves the tough questions yet,"
says Susan E. Thomas, digital archivist at the University of Oxford's 
Bodleian
Library. "Right now we can collect boxes from the attic, but if the family
request a cloud service to transfer the archive of their loved one to the 
Bodleian
Library, will that happen? We haven't tried it yet, so I can't tell you."

  "That's sort of the brick wall that every archivist knows they're hurtling
toward at 100 miles per hour," says Mr. Kirschenbaum.

  No Manual

  Many other questions also remain unanswered. For example, how much
information is too much? A 20th-century author's personal papers might be of 
manageable
quantity â?" say, what she was able to store in her attic. Digital storage, 
on
the other hand, is cheap, easy, and virtually unlimited. Mining, sorting, 
and
archiving every bit of data stored an author's computers could become a 
chore
of paralyzing tedium and diminishing value.

  At present, researchers are wary of discarding anything. "The work of an
author over their entire lifetime is such a fraction of the space you have 
on a
server hard disk, so there's no reason to throw any of that away," says Mr.
Kirschenbaum. However, he added, unless scholars are able to find what they 
want
in that sea of data, it is not worth archiving in the first place.

  The good news is that as computers are logging more data, reference
technology is growing more sophisticated. And Ms. Nelson suggests that the 
new tools
for interacting with born-digital artifacts â?" including a wiki 
functionality
that could allow researchers to annotate materials and share their insights 
with
others â?" may not be too far away.

  New tools and new training, however, mean new money. Richard Ovenden,
associate director of Oxford's Bodleian Library, says the speed at which
universities adopt digital curation may depend on their willingness to 
divert funds from
more traditional areas. And that could be at a slower pace than the speed of
technological invention itself.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Volume 55, Issue 31, Page A1

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