The question of what is “lost” or “gained” in the age of digital archives is a multifaceted one. At first glance, the most intuitive item “gained” from placing collections online is that knowledge of whatever placed online can now be accessed, shared, and analyzed by more people and faster than ever before. However, it’s difficult to say that new knowledge is gained here so easily – the information itself is old, but placed in a new format.
However, placing information that was once tactile and ostensibly in the hands of only a few scholars in a (presumably) new digital home places it a new context, allowing new things to be said about it. Indeed, as Cohen points out, the ability to place it online in the first place takes a new language (his example is XML (p. 228). Thus, the knowledge of new, constructed languages is gained in the act of transferring information into a digital format. However, the transfer itself sacrifices tactility and “materiality” that changes the “interface” of textual information (ibid p. 229 – 30). A letter or a diary entry is now scanned and placed online rather than felt and held in an archive or study.
However, this isn’t a wholly new phenomenon. Transcribing journal entries or certain personal writings into books has been a common practice throughout academia. Some authors, such as Antonio Gramsci’s major works are, in fact, transcriptions of notebooks. In an unintuitive way, digital archives possess the potential to allow non-academians and non-established academians access to the actual texts themselves in an archival setting, rather than an accepted or prepared version of textual information.
This leads to the consciousness of something lost: notions of “editions” and “definitive presentations” have fallen to the wayside. Price (2009) and McGann point out that idea that a “definitive edition” of a text is a much harder sell in the post-digital age. New information is discovered constantly and the easy of updating information in a digital context makes curating digital archives far easier. Thus, the work of a scholar is never “over.” Updates to scholarly work can be made at a very rapid pace and in a very collaborative way, making the idea of individual personages in scholarly work ephemeral as well.
Such a restless conception of scholarly work is indeed, a double-edged sword. On one hand, the accessibility is a great boon to the amount, and hopefully, the quality of scholarly material in the post-digital world. However, the drive to know, curate, and interpret gives way to a great anxiety in the minds of scholars. Can individuated academic authorship survive; is there any clear way to contribute to the pool of knowledge that is seemingly ever expanding and changing; what new programing language do I need to know now; in five years? These are all pertinent questions brought forth by the rise of digital archives.
The conventional political answer to these tensions would be to tell technological information to “slow down.” However, this doesn’t likely seem to be an answer. The proper solution could consist in a critical reappraisal of criticism, literary or otherwise, in such a new and difficult age. This reappraisal should be conducted within the minds of scholars and as a scholarly community, incorporating many different voices in the conversation regarding the use of knowledge in an increasingly digitized world.
