Or: Why do we archive in the first instance?

It’s about removing the ability to forget – reframing the argument (much of the discussion online following the announcement of the British Library’s archive has been about the specifics of the archive, not what it is for. Omitting the ask the question at the heart of the curatorial process) and addressing the purpose of archiving.

I’m reading Derrida, can you tell?

It’s encouraging to see the surge in interest in digital books, ebooks and even the inevitable cooing over the iPad, but what’s less convincing is the snake oil salesmen hawking their XML conversion wares as the answer to everyone’s problems. For many, many publishers, a grasp of XML conversion is integral to success in a electronic marketplace, but it’s not the whole answer, and judging by the fudged response I got when asking about complex typography and full page images, it’s going to ask innovation to find somewhere else to go when the revolution comes.

A book like Steven Hall’s Raw Shark Texts asks difficult questions of not only its reader, but also its typesetter and publisher. EBook files can’t, it appears, handle something like Hall’s Ludovician Shark image (below), and that’s going to leave a significantly interesting section of the market unsupported. Or looking for an App developer.

Incidentally – salespeople from BCL NuMedia, if you really think that all Enhanced Editions do is slap some author interviews onto an XML ebook and push it out as an app, then you’re welcome to your 360 degree ‘solution’ to digital publishing. See you next year when you’ll still be selling orphaned e-works as if they were new…

Ether books, on the other hand – you have something special and you should be wished every success. Especially if you get into the Academic market.

More soon…

Don’t tell MrsT, for goodness’ sake, but this simply isn’t cutting it – unless it’s that it’s too cluttered, and what I need to do is to decamp somewhere like the Pervasive Media Studio for a day or so a week. Regardless, it’s like writing at the edge of a table.

There’s a kitchen table through there that’s going begging though. Although the wireless signal in there is awful.

Right – first few days worth of reading and assembling of the start of an argument. Or a discussion at the very least.

Journalist-Curators. Much like BoingBoing (this is the model the web seems largely comfortable with at present, although I don’t think it’s the whole answer, by any means), and a host of other sites – I’m more familiar with referring to them as ‘aggregators’, and while it’s interesting to see someone else remark on BoingBoing’s role as a centre for editing, it doesn’t get me very far.

Although (the word although is going to be the most used on this thing), I do think that there’s something interesting in the ‘linking is curating’ (on a very small scale, mind) argument.

From some sources:

“One thing that I think is really important to the curatorial model is that there’s an obligation – as far as it’s possible – to provide access to the curated item *right there* in the page – embedded or ‘inline’ as we used to say in the old days. This won’t always be possible (if you’re curating something physical or something protected by DRM) but should be compulsory if you’re curating video or music, for instance. Referencing or linking to a TV show just isn’t enough. You have to wrap your commentary around the item itself…” (Steve Bowbrick)

“I’ve spent a good deal of time searching for a word other than “Curation” in part because of the connection to museums (which I feared sounded elitist and historic). But the fact is that it is the right word, with the right results.

The biggest shift from mainstream media publishing to curation is that the expert curator has no obligation to rely on ‘expert’ or ‘professional’ sources. In fact, very much the opposite. Because speed and authenticity are increasingly essential – a good curator can publish, and then edit and update as the conversation or the story requires. What is missing – but arriving -are curation tools… that give publishers the ability to find, and sort, and publish.

But there are good pieces of this already in place.. and more on the way.” (Steve Rosenbaum)

I don’t buy the linking is curating as an absolute), or frankly, and ‘end of the argument’ statement, but there is something there – without a doubt, when I link to something, I’m calling attention to it – and in a google-sense of attention being linked to, how @aleksk put it – interestingness (for want of a better term that denotes value to a reader) that’s relevant. It’s an issue of scale though, surely? A link from one site (blog) to another (whatever it might be) does not make for a curatorial act, unless – and here’s the rub – someone actually sees it.

It’s back to Marx and interactive objects. They have to have a noticeable and measurable affect in the world before they can be classified as being curatorial in anything more than intention.

They have to comprise something.

Curation is to care. It’s also to organise, and to exhibit, usually to some degree of scale and audience. There’s expertise involved, and it accepts the existence of an implicit context (unfortunately, I can’t get away from the single curatorial act possessing all of those qualities, except for scale).

Need some reading – something on the role of the museum in the digital age. Also – have a search for the mission statement (if one exists) for the Agrippa site.

And Derrida. Have avoided Derrida for at least a week and a half. No longer..

• Digital storytelling,
• Archival strategies and realities (especially the realities, which are going to end up taking more of my time than anything else on this run, I suspect),
• The nature of story in the digital age (and, while we’re here and in parentheses, the responsibilities of story in the digital age) and what that means for writers and readers,
• Exploring the inter-relationships  between Higher Education Institutions and other parts of the public sector in the UK and Europe,
• Distribution, platforms and media specific story construction,
• Networks, future bids and european funding,
• Curation and who gets to decide that something is worth curating in the first place, and
• Cryptoforensic analysis.

(ok – I threw that one in for the sake of it. But it’s not ‘completely’ untrue)

This might see me return to semi-regular blogging here (it’s the plan, but lets never say for sure until I find myself writing). The project is three days of my time a week, so there’s plenty of time to think and act on it. And I get to talk to writers and explore some futures for storytelling, which is by far one of the most interesting aspects of the whole shebang.

Right – this is being written in Journler, so it’s getting copied, pasted, and thrown online. And I’m going to get back to having far too much fun.

Robin Whitehead, who was found dead in a Doherty-infested flat in Hackney, might on the one hand be the latest victim of the creeping menace that is the man who is so-not-Jagger, but in a way this she is also a player in a Sinclair piece writ large. As has been lightly reported in the press (with an expected dose of ‘liberal lifestyle’ damnation), Whitehead was the daughter of Peter Whitehead, the filmmaker and flagrant self-mytholgiser profiled in Sinclair and Chris Petit’s ‘The Falconer‘. The same Peter Whitehead whose reception of the completed film veered from ‘masterpiece‘  to ‘deliberately calculated betrayal‘, and now whose daughter (and without him and his career, is it fair to ask whether she would have found her way there?) has walked permanently offstage from the ongoing farce that is Peter Doherty’s life.

In Hackney.

The space Sinclair provides an apposite monument to in his last book. Pluralist, provocative, polyglot and now another footnote in the narrative of place.

Or amongst the collective hypocrisy, confusion and general conflating of forty or fifty years of first, second and third wave feminism that followed the unveiling of Dr. Brooke Magnanti’s other life as Belle De Jour, nobody has dwelt on what this scenario says about our cultural commitment to education, properly funded education, in the 21st Century. We wring our hands at the idea that we’re letting a generation down who are then turning into hood-wearing lurkers on street corners, that we need to sustain education beyond 16, to 18 and into University and further to excel as a nation, that to stand on the world stage we need more graduates, more postgraduates – a knowledge economy. Despite the financial cost (at a time when we can apparently afford to sustain two foreign wars, a nuclear programme that’s beyond a joke, and a bailout of the banking sector that exposed capitalism as a colossal gag at our expense), more and more parents are committing to the idea of higher education. Graduates are returning years later, self-funding their way through a postgraduate programme that promises a higher qualification and a wider perspective.

But if you want to pursue that further, if you want a doctorate, even in the sciences (where a model of funded research is far more established than in the arts), then maybe the question we should be asking is not whether what Dr. Magnanti did was morally right, but why she had to do it at all.

Elsewhere – Dr. Dan Pinchbeck (funded by the AHRC)’s Half-Life 2 mod ‘Dear Esther’, part of thechineseroom wins prizes, and plays with the space between computer games and story. Edge article, AHRC release.

To clarify and narrow down, though – I’m not terribly interested in the retention of newspaper content published online – it’s interesting and certainly shed light on events of the day, but it’s not of paramount concern to my research, and I think newspaper sites do that job rather well themselves. What is useful is the ability to retain digital story projects – the building blocks toward the creation of a narrative grammar for a new platform. Or platforms. We do have some of these stored – the site hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara English Dept, archiving William Gibson and Denis Ashbaugh’s Agrippa (below) is a stunning example of how to generously and gracefully document a project. Partly this is due to Gibson’s profile amongst new media enthusiasts and scholars, partly, I suspect down to the novelty of the text itself.

Where, though, is an archive and critical context for, for example, Geoff Ryman’s 253? If the fees for the web hosting happen to be missed one month, do we lose the whole project? Forever?

The British Library project to archive digital texts is, as far, as I can see bound up in red tape, legalese and permissions. The BBC have just appointed Bill Thompson to the position of Head of Partnership Development for the BBC Archive Project, putting someone ably equipped to deal with the complexities and demands of that role in precisely the right place at the right time.

But that still leaves 253, and the dozens and dozens of digital texts like it, that have been critiqued and addressed by academics and critics alike, without a home.

An aside – while the lovely MrsT and I were honeymooning in Montreal, a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Arts (under some duress for one of us, I confess) offered up from their bookstore an essay lurking in a copy of  ‘Close Reading New Media’ on 253.

I didn’t know it existed (I suspect, nor did Geoff), and there’s my point.

I think the answer may lurk in the observation that if you want a job doing well, then you have to do it yourself…

(And don’t get me started on House of Leaves. More texts, more critique, more observation and interrogation hosted randomly and unarchived than almost any other work I can think of.)

Phil Spence is a little more downbeat than I’d suggest is the case:

“We’re failing to create intellectual capital and the knowledge economy because of this digital black hole,”

Well, possibly. I think that the lack of an archive is a symptom of the intellectual vacuum at the heart of Government thinking about digital technologies, rather than the sole cause, but nevertheless.

Martyn Wade, though, head librarian at the National Library of Scotland, hits the nail on the head:

“We’re missing the birth of a new way of publishing”

That’s about the shape of it. A new way of publishing that we (and especially our archival bodies) have a duty to preserve and study in order to see what happened, examine how it happened, and provide the means to propose what that might mean for the future.

Still, there’s always the Wayback Machine. Although it won’t cache flash files, and provides no context.

Case in point: Henry Jenkins’ rebuttal/debate with David Bordwell (an aside – Jenkins was born in June 1958, which makes him 11 years (almost exactly) older than I am. Which also means he was writing about Twin Peaks in 1995, when he was 37 (in “Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?” – link here). which makes me feel better about not having written a book yet, so thanks Henry).

Jenkins isn’t as acerbic towards Bordwell as I might have been – there’s a legacy of the student/tutor relationship there I suspect, and he’s unwilling to point out some of Bordwell’s omissions with regard to argument and grounding – but it’s a cogent and timely reply to a critique of transmedia story.

His final point is one I’d like to examine though;

More often, transmedia is about back story which shifts our identifications and investments in characters and thus helps us to rewatch the scenes again with different emotional resonance. More often, it is about picking up on a detail seeded in the original film and using it as a point of entry into a different story or a portal into exploring another aspect of the world.And yes, to do this well is creativity of an extraordinarily high order, which is why most transmedia extensions disappoint; they fail to achieve their full potential. Transmedia is appealing to artists of a certain ambition who nevertheless want to work on popular genre entertainment rather than developing avant garde movies or art films. It appeals to intellectually engaged viewers who are more at home with popular culture than with gallery installations.

Because I’m not completely convinced by that being the only reasons to make transmedia work. On the one had, it is a useful shorthand to describe what goes on within a transmedia environment – we’re taking aspects of an original (or hypo) text and exploring them in more detail – adding things that weren’t there before, and taking you in a new direction.

That’s fine. In fact, it’s more than fine – it’s great. But it’s surely only half of the story, and that’s hinted at by Jenkin’s use of a term in his summing up: Avant Garde – the advance guard – is a movement that creates new work – pushes boundaries and opens up possible futures – and that isn’t served by just expanding on existing licences (and see previous post for my issues with film being the superior reading) and being satisfied with achieving that. Avant Garde ought to be an opportunity for transmedia developers, or else the whole platform (or multitude of platforms) simply becomes, as this post might, parasitic on the existence of a higher authority. It ought to be about exploiting what happens when convergent media mature, and trying to develop the rules and conventions for making new work in a new framework. I think Jenkins is right. He’s absolutely grounded in his response, but he’s also, at least in terms of these replies to Bordwell, guilty of holding back the potential of what it is he’s championing.

Still, if the statue’s wrong, never mind who it’s of ‘eh?

And it’s not wrong, exactly, just really missing the point. Or, more properly, A point, as this is my take, and not any absolutist position.

Henry Jenkins was taught by Bordwell while at Grad School, or so his tweet suggested, and that snippet makes sense, as the two approach new media objects from a similar perspective – namely that film has an natural primacy in any transmedia story form (a Genettian ‘hypotext‘). This is expanded in Bordwell’s recent post on transmedia story structure (here) – I have a few comments:

Bordwell is very, very good (as I’d expect) when the task is a summary of the ‘rules’ of transmedia story. He captures the nature of the beast very well, and highlights the ‘added value’ element offered by transmedia story – that embracing a larger experience of story (and it has (problematically) to be the whole experience) affords a more complex experience of story than that offered by one narrative platform alone.

Okay, that’s fine.

But, skipping over the ‘whole experience’ problem (if I don’t watch all of the Matrix transmedia texts, then I’m supposedly missing some aspect of the whole. I can choose not to engage though?), Bordwell (I can’t bring myself to call him David, just seems too familiar) doesn’t take an extra leap, and consider the new textual object (the sum of all of those pesky transmedia elements) as a new thing. The Matrix and Star Wars are all very well, and illustrate safe ground in which to operate and critique, but what wold happen if something was designed without the ‘franchise’ structure that affords a primacy to film? The example of Lance Weiler is interesting, but it’s still rooted in a televisional/filmic bias.

I don’t want (to address Bordwell head on) to receive tweets from Juno, or know about Daredevil’s down time, because those narratives weren’t designed to appropriate those elements of storytelling. But form can be utilised to ground a narrative object in a transmedia state. The hypotext can be the text itself – and that hypotext is utterly about control, and yes – artistic tyranny. It’s construction does though, require a toolbox not constrained by film, or the page, or the microphone, or camera, or even the audience.

Interesting summary though. Especially considering the author’s place in the canon.

Oh, and Rob. Hi.