Digital Bibliography

In case you missed my last post, here’s the late paragraph from it that I’m extending here in this entry:

“And then, there’s a flip-side. How much help is too much? What’s the role of the editor as collaborator? As trainer? As code fixer? These are questions that I’ll return to soon. But I’m going to try to address them all through the lens of one, simple aphorism: We’re not in the middle of a digital revolution. Not because it’s not over; not because it hasn’t started, either. If you can accept that, these questions start to look a little different.”

There are times when I feel like we’re in the middle of a digital revolution. Like the Web has changed everything. Internet speeds. Wireless access. Mobile phone technologies. Storage volumes. Access to enormous databases. Collaboration tools. Ten years ago, most of this stuff would have looked unrealistically powerful. And twenty years ago? The unfathomability factor goes pretty sky high. So, yeah, on the one hand, it seems like we’re somewhere in the middle of a revolution. But are we at the beginning? The end? The middle? Of course it’s hard to say. But what is it hard to say? Because we need to have a sense for when this revolution will END. Here’s the thing… I don’t think it will. I think the rate of technological development will continue to increase. Innovation will continue to increase. More tools. Better storage. Faster speeds. Cheaper, better-built hardware. Yeah, the world’s economy, at times seems to be lilting and staggering. And our own national debt gets heavier on our backs all the time. But there’s no reason to think that these sorts of factors will slow down innovation. The places it happens might shift (i.e. to technologies of farming, weather manipulation, disaster relief, security, affordable medicine, etc.), but it’s still going to happen.

Yep. That’s a lot of generalizations. None of which are surprising or insightful. They’re merely the premise on which I want to talk about a certain orientation toward technology: the wait-and-see. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »