Abstracting Digital Documents to Think about Cultural Preservation

The textual scholar and literary critic Jerome McGann begins his most recent book with the following: “Here is surely a truth now universally acknowledged: that the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures.”[1] McGann emphasizes the enormous consequences of this acknowledged truth. The whole of our cultural inheritance is being produced again as simulacra meant to stand for the people, objects, and ideas we care enough about to make available again. The perils and opportunities presented by digital reproductions are suggested by the word reproduction—productions that are produced again. That we can repeat the cultural productions we have received in places and times both distant and near suggests the opportunities promised by our new technologies. The process and procedures of reproduction also manifest the dangers that can be associated with attempting to reproduce what has been received. We learn through childhood games such as “telephone,” where the aim is to have short, whispered phrase repeated exactly from person to person gathered in a room, that repetition is paradoxically generative, creative. We learn this lessen again later as bibliographers and computer scientists. The phrase uttered by the first player is never the same as what is uttered to the last. The facsimile, no matter how meticulously made, is not the original. The message at the information source is not the same as the message received at its destination, even in Claude Shannon’s famous mathematical theory of communication. But we gain much through our reproductive efforts—more efficient communication, a useful substitute for the rare book that must remain locked away for its own safety, and the joy of whispering into each other’s ears. -article excerpt