Methodologies

In a 1998 article written by Steve Tomasula called “Bytes and Zeitgeists: Digitizing the Cultural Landscape,” the author looks at the early-Internet world and asks what kind of form artistic representation in the digital age will take.  His solution is both simple and complex, answering that artistic representation “is always a palindrome that can be read from art to artist and back” (338).  In 1998, the digital age was beginning to open theorists like Tomasula to a new world of representation for “a culture that is increasingly interactive, encyclopedic, linked and therefore open-ended and open to reorganization by its users” (338).  That was 1998.  That was an era when “linked” meant emails that took mere minutes to deliver, and “instant communication” still took an Internet-wired computer enjoying the first quivers of DSL-type speeds.

Twelve years later, an email not instantly received is considered slow, and an instant message might not be instant enough if it can’t reach its recipient via the phone in his pocket.  To complicate the complexity of understanding digital forms of representation, these technological advances are surely not the culmination of digital evolution.  Email will one day (sooner than we like to think) be archaic (and archival [link]), and a communication not guaranteed to reach its recipient instantly anywhere in the world will be unacceptably inefficient.  And even those seemingly perfect standards will be obsolete within thirty years.  Probably less.

The goal of Digital Textuality is not to laud the current state of technological advance, particularly since, within ten years (or perhaps ten days) those same technologies it would hope to praise would be outdated.  Instead, Digital Textuality was designed to address how representation is evolving in an increasingly linked and increasingly instantaneous world.

One of the ways in which Digital Textuality approaches the discussion of a fast-evolving style of representation is to address this technological evolution within its own terms.  Prodding digital production in a non-digital medium such as physical publication is, at best, inefficient, and, at worst, foolish.  When a topic evolving as fast as digital technologies is being discussed, why not rely on those same digital tools?

The result is this digital project.  Digital Textuality is not a static, printed page.  Nor is it even a static website.  Digital Textuality is designed to be a regularly-evolving online exploration of the cultural shifts caused by the advance of digital production, digital representation, and digital retention.  As a result of this non-traditional implementation of academic argumentation, the methodologies with which this article was built require a more detailed explanation.

Method 1: Random Browsablity

The traditional article takes its informational transmission processes from the form of the book.  As a result of this mimicry, an article (in English) is generally expected to be read from top to bottom, left to right, from paragraph one sequentially through to the final paragraph.

Digital Textuality does not need to be read this way.  Instead, Digital Textuality has adopted a publication model that encourages random browsing of its pieces.  Its sections are written to exist individually, at least so far as they do not need to be read in one particular order in order for a reader to be able to elicit meaning.  Even these “methodologies” might be read first, last, or somewhere in the middle.  Perhaps even never.

Does an unordered “digital” version of an article have an advantage over its physical counterparts?  For the purposes of this project, it seems to.  The archive being studied – the Internet – is not ordered (in the sense of how a book is “ordered”).  Browsers of the Internet Archive select their own order of interaction with that archive, and those same browsers may select their own order of interaction here.  However, I must acknowledge that printed articles and books do not, by their design, require sequential reading.  A user might browse a book in the same manner she browses the Internet.  Though the history of the printed page dictates a sequential reading, the choice belongs, ultimately, to the reader.  The reason for producing Digital Textuality as an unordered argument is not entirely because it studies an unordered (sequentially) object, but because it exists within an argument that defies bookish conventions of order.

Method 2: Searchability and the User’s Agenda

While a book and an archive might both be “browseable,” neither a book nor a physical archive are easily searchable.  Authors and archivists have tried to mitigate this lack of searchability with tools such as indexes and codices.  But the problem with such author or archivist-created tools is that they insist on prioritizing the agendas of the creators instead of the users.

Once a knowledge object is publicly released, the intellectual possession of that object no longer belongs to its creator(s).  But a search tool such as an index relies on what the creator of the object believes is most important.  What if the needs of the user are not the same as the intentions of the creator?

A digital article allows the user to prioritize her agenda and interests.  While some authors might not happily relinquish their own agendas in favor of those belonging to the user, an object’s greatest potential often exists in uses beyond its original designs.  As such, Digital Textuality is a user-searchable object.  Its information is intended to be used not as the author desires it, but as the reader requires it.

Method 3: Updateability

Perhaps print publication’s biggest weakness, when compared to its digital counterpart, is lack of editability.  When a print object is released, that object is “final.”  The argument cannot be adjusted, the content cannot be rearranged, and errors cannot be easily corrected.  The objects are static, and, as a result, their arguments are static and their information is static.

Digital Textuality is not a static object.  It is currently being and will continue to be updated both as new ideas define themselves and as old ideas refine themselves.

Method 4: Authority

While publication’s biggest weakness is lack of editablity, that weakness produces its signature attribute: authority.  Published textual objects, as a result of their lacking editability, are subjected to a rigorous vetting and editing process that, in theory, “finalizes” them, making them suitable for public consumption as well-researched, credible “thought.”

A digitally published text might be equally well researched and credible, but, because of the democratic nature of production allowed by the Internet, it might also be published with verifiably errant or misleading information.  The vetting process for digital publication is a responsibility of the publishing site itself; however, in contrast to print publication which requires the costly resources of a printer and distribution channels, digital publication has minimal entry boundaries.  To digitally publish, one only needs access to an Internet-capable computer.

Digital Textuality is knowingly published as a product of the Internet’s democratic nature of publication.  Its content could have been created in a more traditional, text-based style of argument, but doing so would circumvent the phenomenon in which the project is most keenly interested: cultural archivization.

By eliminating (or, at the least, minimizing) the boundaries to content production and distribution, the digital age is forcing a new kind of cultural production model.  No longer are publicly distributed textual objects vetted by commercial and/or accepted authoritative interests.  Instead, public textual objects in a digital medium are being culturally curated.  Their societal worth is being determined not by an intermediary body, but instead by the final users to which these cultural objects belong.  The result produces objects that might lack critical authority, but they have organically obtained cultural authority.  While cultural authority might not be as “correct” as critical authority, it reveals more about the society in which that authority was obtained.  Instead of textual objects being selected by those people and groups who believe they know what is best for their audiences, the audiences themselves are prioritizing the objects they find most useful.  Whether those objects with critical authority are better or worse than those objects with cultural authority is irrelevant.  Objects with critical authority will continue to exist regardless of the democratization of production, and value judgments as to better/worse, correct/incorrect, etc. are not objectively measurable.  However, objects with cultural authority are, as archival objects, fundamentally different in terms of the cultural information they represent.  Whereas critically vetted, published textual objects are generally first limited in their existence by authorities and then culturally valued or devalued, digitally produced objects often have no authoritative filter.  As a result, those objects that are valued and devalued are objects of unfiltered (or rather, less filtered) societal selection, making the archival product – that information that is retained and, in some form, catalogued – more, to use a digitally appropriated term, organic.

Digital Textuality is an organically filtered object.  While its existence in the cultural archive is established by its publication, the information it provides about the “archive of human culture” is variable.  This object’s relevance, its usefulness, and its social (and academic) worth will be determined by those users of the archive in which it exists.