April 22, 2001 - New York Times
Digitized History
One of the great themes
in this digital age is the dream of
perfect reproducibility, the ability to create generation
after generation of digital copies with no loss of information.
Binary code has also become the Esperanto of equivalence,
translating music, words and images into a common, readily
manipulated language. It has dissolved the fundamental
differences between text and illustration. The time when
photographs by Jacob Riis, the journalist and social reformer,
had to be turned into wood engravings in order to be printed in
The New York Tribune seems almost as distant as the time,
only a few years ago, when copiers and printers were entirely
different machines, when combining text and illustration meant
an exacting outing with scissors and paste and a bottle of
Wite-Out.
But digital technology can perfectly replicate only what is
already digital. At home, you can now turn out exact copies of
existing CD recordings. But even in the best digital recordings
of live performance there is a loss of grain, of substance. You
can scan a photograph or the pages of a book, but the original
remains tangibly different, if only because it was printed on
different stock with inks of different composition. There may be
only the ghost of a difference between the original and the copy,
but these are the ghosts that matter. In the texture of old paper or
the warmth of old ink, there lurks something irreproducibly rich,
a kind of information that cannot be detached from the stuff
itself.
Meanwhile, stuff itself is in serious trouble. Consider the fate of
the Bettmann archive, which began as a collection of images
recorded on film smuggled out of Nazi Germany by Otto
Bettmann and grew into a collection of 17 million historic
photographs, now in the possession of Bill Gates. When Mr.
Gates bought the archive, the plan was to digitize all its images.
But the time it will take to digitize those pictures has proved to
be longer than many of the pictures themselves will last, unless
they are properly stored. As a result, the archive is destined for
archival refrigeration 220 feet below ground in a limestone
mine not far from Pittsburgh.
From a curatorial standpoint, the decision to place 17 million
photographs into protracted cryogenic hibernation is exactly the
right one. It is also a sensible hedge against the shifting
technology of digitization. But it has the unwelcome
disadvantage of hiding away from us a more nuanced vision of
history, a vision that is more expansive, more ambiguous than
the endless replication of the quarter-million Bettmann images
that were digitized before this decision was made.
At least those originals will be preserved. According to
Nicholson Baker, old newspapers have not been so lucky. In his
chilling new book, "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on
Paper," Mr. Baker chronicles the dire effects of the ideology of
replication. With an ill-founded distrust of aging paper,
librarians in the past half-century have microfilmed most of the
old newspapers in their collections and then discarded the
originals, as if there were no difference between a coil of
microfilm, itself vulnerable to deterioration, and a properly
bound volume of, say, The New York Tribune in the days when
Riis was its police reporter.
It is easy enough to point to the inadequacies of microfilm and
to argue that new digital technologies will produce copies of
higher quality. But, as Mr. Baker argues, when all the
newspaper originals have been destroyed, the only recourse is
to make a digital copy of a microfilm. The growing urge to
digitize and then discard the books in libraries is also based on
the ideology of replication. There is nothing wrong with
digitizing books and newspapers as long as it never becomes a
pretext to destroy the originals. They are the real matter of
which real history is made.