Contexts
When Martha Nell Smith founded the Dickinson Electronic Archives (DEA), a critical website dedicated to the scholarship of Emily Dickinson and her primary correspondents, she and her team were infatuated with the overwhelming and seductive possibilities of digital technologies and their ability to expand the power of archives. She describes this initial infatuation in the introduction to Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Inquiry, explaining that:
The Dickinson Electronic Archives team first imagined a digital scholarly edition that would be “comprehensive.” The plan was to edit every known writing of Emily Dickinson for digital distribution and, for our organizational strategy, to follow her method of coterie publication – in which she distributed poems in letters to at least a hundred correspondents and bound them into manuscript books found after her death, presumably for “Posterity.”
For Smith and her team, the appeal of digital archives was completeness. The freedom of storage afforded by digital archives offered an opportunity to bring together the physically separated pieces of archival Dickinson objects in order to create a “complete” Dickinson archives. Later in her introduction, Smith describes this intention as the “romance of comprehensivity,” and she suggests that a comprehensive archive is both impossible and unhelpful. “That mind-blowing capacity for gathering together that which had been scattered,” she continues to explain, “can distract one from posing questions about the archival logics of the physical and virtual archives and about the archival practices both informed by and informing those logics.”
This romance of comprehensivity, initially imbued by digital technologies into the founders of the DEA, is a facet of a greater issue. This issue permeates the ranks of those people most interested in digital archives and is again best described by Smith in the introduction to Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences, where she explains it as “the seductive power of scope.” In many of the articles toting the “power” of digital technologies in archival recreation, this seductive power of scope – the possibility of creating comprehensive digital archives – is prevalent in the form of praising either one or both of the two “benefits” of digital technology: storage and access. While Smith, in her construction of the Dickinson Electronic Archives, realized and compensated for her preoccupation with the romance of comprehensivity achieved through storage and access, other digital archive editors have not.
One example of scholars praising the “storage” of digital technologies appears in an article authored by Joseph Viscomi, an editor of the William Blake Archives, in which he praises the potential of mass-inclusion of documents afforded by digital archives, writing:
In 1993 the editors of the Blake Archive began to conceive of reproducing Blake digitally. [We] had just finished editing nine illuminated works for the Blake Trust and, while pleased with the scholarly apparatus we developed, we were frustrated by the relatively small number of reproductions allowed. With the economic constraints of the codex form fresh in mind, we visited the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, where we began to envision a critical hypertext of approximately 3000 images, 2/3rds drawn from the illuminated works and the remainder from Blake’s paintings, drawings, prints, and manuscripts, with all texts and images deeply encoded in SGML. We would represent the illuminated canon by exemplary copies from each printing of each illuminated book, as well as copies from the same printing session with important variants in coloring, motifs, arrangements, etc., along with related material, such as drawings, proofs, and sketches, so that the production history of each book would be recorded. About half of the books selected for inclusion had never been reproduced before – including six of our eight copies of Songs… Unlike printed editions of Blake, which, as noted, have typically chosen among the textual features of various copies to produce a single printed text, the texts in the Archive are specific to individual plates; each transcription is of a particular plate in a particular copy and no other.
(31)
From this description, as early as their first encounter with digital archivization technologies, the editors of the Blake Archive sought to pack into it as much information as possible. The focus of these archivists was not how useful including every possible reproduction of Blake’s printing decisions was for the archive visitor; their primary focus was on how digital technologies offered unmatched storage and reproduction potential.
From storage, Viscomi moves, as expected, to the correlation between digital technologies and expanding access. By the end of the same article in which he praises the mass amounts of storage digital archive affords, Viscomi excitedly proclaims, “users of the Archive can attain a new degree of access to these works” (47). For Viscomi, the benefit of digital technologies is seen through the lens of the “seductive power of scope.”
Viscomi is not alone. In a 2007 PMLA article, one of the editors of the Walt Whitman Archive, Ed Folsom, makes similar claims. With regards to storage and the “romance of comprehensivity,” Folsom explains that:
Our goal when we began [the Walt Whitman Archive] in 1996 was to make all of Whitman’s work freely available online: poems, essays, letters, journals, jottings, and images, along with biographies, interviews, reviews, and criticism of Whitman. We plan to keep growing and altering the site as new materials are discovered and as we find the time and energy to follow other root systems into the unknown.
(1573)
After outlining the goal of a comprehensive Whitman Archive, Folsom ends his article discussing a variety of statistics that express how the Whitman Archive has opened access. Folsom writes:
One of the most surprising realizations I’ve had while working on The Walt Whitman Archive is that, as it gets used, not only does our database of Whitman materials grow exponentially, so does a less visible database, the database of users. And those users cannot be corralled into a narrative either. We began predictably enough and were gratified to hit a couple of thousand users, almost all in the United States, almost all, presumably, scholars and students. But now we average around 15,000 hits a day, often spiking to well over 20,000, and our users have become increasingly international, with, over the past two months, 17,000 hits in South America, 21,000 in Asia, nearly 60,000 in Europe, and nearly 1,000 in Africa.
(1577)
These user statistics, though appearing as a description of fact, mirror Viscomi’s praise of digital technologies as a tool that opens access. Folsom was initially “gratified” with his “couple of thousand users,” but now he boasts of his 15,000+ daily hits from users around the world. Perhaps the words that might be put into the mouth of Folsom are this: “What kind of physical archive could possibly achieve such a level of daily open access?”
Viscomi and Folsom and any other scholar lauding the storage and access potential of digital technologies are, to be fair, quite correct. No physical archive can match the potential of digital archives for mass user-ship, and, as a result, digital archive editors have a legitimate reason to be excited. However, while praising the obvious benefits of digital technologies, these early adopters have overlook one far more subtle result, but a result with a much larger impact. New technologies allow for the production and archivization of before-un-archived content. While these scholars have been busy archiving the already-archived, creating digital archives for topics such as Whitman, Dickinson, and Blake, the same technologies have been fostering entirely new archives about topics that address subjects and issues well outside those normally studied and preserved. The same tools – HTML, XML, computers, the Internet, etc. – used to digitally preserve many of the world’s greatest intellectual and cultural figures are also creating entire digital repositories devoted to pop-cultural phenomena, independent and sub-culture ephemera, minority history preservation, and much, much, more.
The primary goal of Digital Textuality is to explore these other technology-spawned archives. These unique archives are recording a tangible and traceable legacy of human interactions and events – a legacy that, until now, would likely have had little or no lasting recordation. This newly recorded legacy introduces a relabeling of the potential of digital technologies. Yes, expanded storage is a powerful tool. And yes, opening access to content will radically change the ways in which archives are utilized. But the most substantial change offered by digital technologies, and perhaps the most important promise, will not be their ability to reorganize the information already available. Instead, digital technologies will have their most profound influence by recording cultural objects that would, in a world without these technologies, never have existed, and, as such, never have been preserved.
To understand the significance of this new idea of creation and preservation, Smith’s concept of archive is most helpful. Smith, when describing the Dickinson Electronic Archives in her introduction to Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences, explains that, “[The Archives] are epistemic arrangements that do not house what was – in this case writings by Emily Dickinson – but rather some of what remains of her writings.” This same concept can be applied to all archives. Archives, objects that, by their nature, can never be comprehensive or complete, are, as a result, always representative of “what remains.” However, in a context of digital creation and digital preservation, the “what remains” component of culture is fast becoming a much larger object than it has previously been at any time in human history. This immenseness of archivable materials forces the new archives of human culture to be archives capable of organizing and maintaining substantially more content. The design of an archive able to most effectively manage such an immense increase in cultural production might render the vessel, at first, unrecognizable as an archive. However, that archive of human culture is the very object creating the influx of archivable content: the Internet. The Internet, as an archive of human culture, is opening access to production and distribution, meaning the archive itself is producing its own archivable content.
