Digital Bibliography

When I first started trying to produce digital texts, I didn’t really have scholarship in mind. I produced mostly digital stories and websites. I considered them ephemeral, and I just assumed that I would to keep updating them as technologies emerged. I also assumed that at some point, they’d fade away into irrelevance. I was fine with that. For two reasons.

First, for at least the last several years, I’ve tried to focus primarily on “being” right now. Of course, that means something a bit different to everyone, but for me it meant that I needed to let go of some things from the past, and I needed to move some of my future-focus to the present. That’s done me a lot of good. But this isn’t a navel-gazing, personal reflection blog (maybe), so I’ll get to the point.

The second reason I didn’t really reflect on the inevitable obsolescence of my texts is that I really like redesign work. That’s one of the reasons I like blog design so much, and why this one tends to change so often.

But digital scholarship doesn’t really lend itself to this sort of attitude. And that worries the heck out of me. Anxious, anxious. In general, I don’t think it’s a secret to anyone that the technologies we use to access today’s texts will look a lot different in 10 years. And the access technologies we employ ten years from now likely don’t exist yet. (…) Read the rest of this entry »