How Do We Archive Visuals? Preservation of Visuals in the Digital Realm
In this past month I've been immersing myself into a whole new realm of the unknown: digital preservation and curation in the context of art; specifically ephemeras in case of my research project. In the last tutorial, Diana once again pushed me to go back into the question by asking myself: Why?
In my current question, I mentioned archival space as a tool to help the desired audiences to learn about contextual dimensions of visuals. Why archival space, not any other form of tools?
To answer this question, I read through a paper written by Tim Au Yeung, Sheelagh Carpendale, and Saul Greenberg published by University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada titled Preservation of Art in the Digital Realm that introduced me with the concept of digital art preservation, proces, and the challenges of preserving arts in the digital context.
Why digital preservation and curation?
"The preservation of information is the cornerstone of human progress– by passing knowledge from one generation to the next using a multitude of symbols, devices, tools and approaches, civilisations has been able advance." [1]
To gather insights on how digital preservation and curation have its benefits in the context of Jakarta, Indonesia, I got in touch with PDS HB Jassin, an existing physical archive on Indonesian literature located in the cultural hub of Taman Ismail Marzuki, Jakarta. The archive consists of around 200,000 documents including 21,300 fictions, 17,700 non-fictions, 475 references, 875 drama scripts, 870 biographies, 130,534 clips, 690 original photographs, 742 audio records, 789 thesis and 25 video clips.
When it comes to physical preservation, the biggest challenge that PDS HB Jassin currently facing are, firstly, the space limitation to contain all of their archive. Most of the archives are stacked unevenly and some of them are contained inside boxes. The poor archive organisation will lead to difficulties to find and sort the sources. Secondly, the sustainablity of the archives. PDS HB Jassin is currently facing the challenge of paper ageing due to the high humidity of the country and inadequate facilities to sustain it such as air conditioning and frequent inspections. Others include the presence of animals like ants, termites and rats [2].
Based on these facts, it gave me clarifications and also urge that digital preservation and curation in the context of Indonesia is not only considered beneficial, but also necessary in the era of digital realm and platforms.
Why digital preservation and curation in the context of arts?
Throughout history, art has played an important role in this transmission with artistic depictions being more than representations of the world but reinterpretations for the sake of communicating what is deemed important. It is critical to note that these reinterpretations reflect not just the material culture but how society understood its place in the universe. Their understanding of the world comes to us largely from surviving artifacts including many art objects." [3]
Currently, there is no archival space dedicated for arts and design in Indonesia. If there's any of them (let's take DGI Archive as an example), it only lasting for a short period of time without anymore updates or for temporary purpose such as exhibitions or events.
Some notable examples of existing attempt of digital art preservation and curation exists in several websites. For instance, Gurafiku, a blog dedicated to document the history of Japanese graphic design created in 2009 by graphic designer Ryan Hagerman. It is stated in the blog that the goal is not only for research, promotion and preservation of Japanese graphic design, it also breaks the language barrier and to presents Japanese graphic design into the international audiences. Another example of existing digital archival space is The Ephemera society, an institutional council regarded as the authority in the field of ephemera in the UK.
The Process of Digital Preservation and Curation
Appraisal: Appraisal involves the process of developing criteria and selecting resources that may become part of subse- quent curation processes; these resources are drawn from a source domain, where they appear in digital or physical form, and their identification and selection is based on information (data and text) mining operations, and on pre-existing wide- range resource discovery resources.
Ingesting: Ingesting digital resources may involve digital recording of image, sound, text and data; digitizing of analog recordings on various physical carriers; and importing digital resources from other sources, including repositories. From the point of view of the entity collecting and managing the digital resources, the ingesting process yields primary material.
Classification, indexing and cataloguing: This process not only produces the logical indexes required for information management purposes, but, most importantly, subject indexes and indexes related to the intended or possible uses of the digi- tal resources. This semantic indexing is context -dependent and the outcome of domain-specific scientific interpretation. Thus it carries an inevitable epistemic bias which raises an issue with regard to the re-use of the resources in different contexts. The indexes themselves can be considered as secon- dary, autonomous digital resources, though related to the pri- mary material. They can be produced during the indexing process, or they can be imported resources.
Knowledge enhancement: Scientific research and profes- sional practice incrementally generate further knowledge about the real-world entities, situations and events represented by digital resources, about their wider context and domain, oreven about digital resources themselves. Knowledge enhance- ment is the process of adding knowledge on top of an existing repository of digital resources and its related knowledge base. Each knowledge addition is related to a different view, angle of interpretation, or application, thus representing a new way of looking at or combining the primary resources and prior knowledge, and can itself evolve. Like indexing, knowledge enhancement is context-dependent and produces secondary, autonomous digital resources.
Presentation, publication and dissemination: This is the process of generating new artefacts (scientific, scholarly, artis- tic, etc.) from existing primary or secondary digital resources. Presentation introduces the notion of genre, and also that of pragmatic context (environment, session, etc.). On the other hand, it can be thought of as producing tertiary, autonomous digital resources related to primary and secondary ones.
User experience: This is the process related to resource use, interaction between users and resources in a functional context (i.e., a session) mediated by a specific presentation or publication artefact, and the effects of this interaction on both resources and users. User experience is visible in session logs, observational data, and in traces produced by interaction with resources, e.g., social tags, annotations, and similar Web 2.0 artefacts; also, in social interaction mediated by resources, as, for example, in the creation of virtual communities and social networks.
Repository management: All digital resources are stored, organized and managed in a repository. This may be actual (centralized or distributed) or virtual. The latter is the case of Web-based, peer-to-peer and grid systems aimed at imple- menting community- or practice-specific systems. Repository management includes access mechanisms.
Preservation: Digital resources face a range of perils related either to physical causes or to technological evolution. Physical perils include various damages of storage media and catastrophic environmental incidents, e.g. fire, flooding, earth- quake, etc. Preservation policies to safeguard against such perils include copying and distributing copies in different loca- tions. Technical perils include the various kinds of difficulty or inability to access and use data due to the technical evolution of hardware and software. Preservation policies against techni- cal perils employ techniques that fall in nine main classes: mi- gration of digital content, technology emulation, technology preservation, dedication to standards, backward compatibility, encapsulation, permanent identifiers, transformation to non- digital form and digital archaeology. Recommended preserva- tion policies have been developed by various national and in- ternational bodies and their implementation invariably relies on the use of appropriate metadata.
The above “action line” processes of digital resources life- cycle management rely on three supporting processes, namely, goal and usage modelling, domain modelling and authority management. These processes effectively capture the context of digital curation and produce valuable resources which can themselves be seen as curated digital assets. The utility of the outcome of these processes spans different instances of digital resource lifecycle management, and is necessary to ensure epistemic adequacy for future “fitness for purpose”. In fact, goal and usage models, domain models and authorities provide the conceptual “glue” between different curated resources.
Goal and usage modelling: Goal modelling tries to capture the intentions of the creators and the users of a given class of digital resources, while usage modelling tries to capture the patterns of use of the resources. Such models provide repre- sentations of human agency within which the basic goals of digital curation must be attained.
Domain modelling: This process produces or refines repre- sentations of expert knowledge about a domain of interest, in the form of ontologies and conceptual models. Several scien- tific and professional communities have developed or are de- veloping ontologies thus promoting information sharing and actionability, initially through human-understandable, and re- cently through machine-understandable, semantics. Ontologies have even become the object of standardization, a develop- ment that marks the economic evolution and globalization of the respective domains, qualified by the penetration of infor- mation technology. Digital curation is conjoint with the emer- gence of such conditions, therefore relies heavily on the exis- tence and maintenance of domain models.
Authority management: While domain models deal with the definitions of concepts, properties, relations and rules in a domain, a good part of the expert knowledge about the domain is captured in the controlled vocabularies (e.g. geographic names, historical periods, chemical molecules, biological spe- cies, etc.) used by convention to denote those concepts, prop- erties and relations, or their instances, known as authorities. Authorities, and even domain models, are bound to evolve as significant changes to the body of domain knowledge occur. Their maintenance must be undertaken according to specific procedures, so as to safeguard qualities such as coverage, specificity, coherence, consistency and parsimony.
Challenges
The Digital Preservation Coalition note a number of factors for why digital preservation is harder. Machine dependency, speed of change, fragility of media, ease of making changes and the need to make changes, the need for active preservation and the nature of technology all play into making digital preservation harder than traditional preservation.[]
“[d]ecision makers do not have the resources to preserve everything. Therefore, decisions have to be made about what is significant, and, consequently, whose interests are to be acknowledged, what documented history is to be privileged, and whose history is to be marginalized or silenced.”[]
Footnotes
Jones, Maggie and Neil Beagrie. (2002). Preservation Management of Digital Materials: A Handbook. Online: Digital Preservation Coalition. Retrieved March 22, 2008 from http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/handbook/.
Lloyd, Annemaree. (2007). Guarding Against Collective Amnesia? Making Significance Problematic: An Exploration of Issues. Library Trends 56.1, pp. 53-65.