Digital Kulcha: selective memory?
April 4, 2011 Leave a comment
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Information is that part of an individual’s knowledge which s/he choses to share with certain other persons at certain times for certain reasons. Information must be represented in language of some kind – and by ‘language’, I mean any form of symbol or code or gesture that enjoys a culturally derived meaning: there does not appear to be universally understood meaning that can be attached to any sound, gesture, image, colour or shape, as far as I am aware. Information is best considered as a rather loose form of the concept of ‘ideas’. A document, it has already been noted, can be considered as a container of information: that is, when information is recorded in order to overcome spatio-temporal constraints, it is recorded in a document. The document, as a physicality, has its own particular characteristics.
‘Ideas’ are also perhaps culturally derived, or have cultural origins. While, as individuals, we certainly enjoy individual personalities, capabilities and competencies, we also, fairly early on, start forming a knowledge framework, or scaffolding, onto which we can position other thoughts and ideas and insights and experiences, as they are encountered. But while our individualism makes us selective, our individualism is, in turn, shaped by our context – our cultural context, specifically. As Winston Churchill is believed to have said, ‘First we shape our tools (or houses) and then they shape us’ – we have a similar structurated relationship with knowledge, culture and ideas. Eventually, what we know – our knowledge – is a product of our being and of our experiences – physical and cultural – of the world.
What is ‘culture’? I will not attempt any definition of that word here, except perhaps to say that it does not necessarily mean the grand artefacts of high culture, nor the most popular of contemporary creative expression. As T.S Eliot said, ‘Culture is the smell of cabbage soup’; slight sensations (like the smell of a madeleine dipped in tea) can give rise to great visions and deep understandings.
What does this have to do with digital libraries, archives and museums? We do know that these are highly specialised and expensive projects. We also know that the technology is still at a primitive stage, comparatively speaking, compared to where it might go: digital preservation is an area that, in particular, needs some significant development. Because of these reasons, at least, digitisation efforts have, for the most part, been focused on digitisation of documents (used here to include any information-containing artefact) that are perceived to have some cultural value. In other words, these documents are considered to contain information which is considered to be important to transmit, to preserve, to communicate.
In making such decisions, however, are we not making choices which may change or even skew the understanding that future generations may have of the very ‘culture’ we are attempting to preserve and make available? Do we run the risk of relaying or supporting only one particular view of what is important (however broadly that may be conceived)? Archives tend to deal with those documents which provide evidence of business transactions – and which are considered worthy of conservation and preservation for possible later use (whatever that might be). Museums will collect objects, sometimes defined by subject area (‘art’, ‘natural history’) determined to a certain extent by what is discovered or found, as well as what is unusual or scarce. Libraries are known to be particularly selective in the documents that they collect and manage, depending on subject area and user community profile.
But what about all the other textures and flavours of everyday life? What should we be doing about social media? Should we continue to rely on Google to locate all the born-digital documents that are available less formally than those that are formally published and distributed? Should we, could we, ignore more transient or ephemeral documents? Where does ‘quality control’ begin and end? Who will the digital ‘user’ be in years and generations to come? Will focusing only on the past or present in a selective way make sense in the future? How should we as information professionals be associated with open access materials?
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