[My interest in this session is that archiving the data surrounding a book may be a service a publisher can offer. If everything is digital the publisher has the authority to say, this was the original version, this is the first edit, this is an actual correspondence with an editor, etc.]
Today nearly all literature is born-digital in the sense that it is composed on a word processor and saved on a hard drive.
What we have from Shakespeare today are most likely memorial productions put together afterwords. It is what we have to study since we have no authoritative text, so experts use the sources available and learn what they can from them. T.S. Elliot's first version of "The Waste Land" is different from the first published edition and we can use both to understand the text.
When we saw "the complete works of X" are we speaking of the published work, the unpublished, the laundry bills with a signature? We have a fairly good grasp of this challenging question, but for contemporary authors it is a bigger question. What are the bounds of the writings of a contemporary author? Do we consider their Twitter postings when we speak of their complete works?
No matter how we answer that question, we also have a question of what gets archived. Norman Mailer's old laptop for instance is on display in Texas (Ransom center) as an artifact.
Hybrid documents. We may have a hand written version, the typed version, the MS word version, the Story Space (hypertext) version, an HTML version, and an eBook. The same text migrates across the spectrum and typically gets edited at each step. We have a philosophical question here about whether the text is all of these things or one thing that goes through them.
What do we do with an old email that says "if you want to make public all or part of this, fine". Is that part of the author's corpus then.
Fronds = stuff that belonged to the author that became part of an archival collection.
Challenges: hardware failure, data format obsolesce, physical format and device obsolescence, volume of data, cataloging (finding aids), metadata, versions & duplicates (great for comparative literature, but could mean thousands of versions of the text if you use time machine), confidentiality (other data on the drive), authenticity, security, copyright & intellectual property (what do you do if the author donates a computer with pirated data on it?) Some archivists are setting up terminals with old computers so they can access old data.
In the past archival material survived in attics or basements, but that's highly unlikely with digital data. So what does this mean? Should the archivist approach the author early on and preserve the data. What is Stephen King's inbox worth? Should it be archived? Authors could become savvy to the monetization of their born digital documents and complicate this.
For every challenge there is an opportunity. - Wikipedia and track changes in MS Word allow you to see document history. Wouldn't it be a useful tool for textual analysis to look at this history to see what attracted the attention of editors. We can even use this for determining authenticity.
The challenges (and opportunities) are at least as much social as technological. The New Yorker's fiction editor said she sometimes prints interesting email from authors, but otherwise the server is automatically erased. This is a social issue, not a technical one really.
An authors computer is not just a device, but an environment. Just say there was a BDSM photo on Norman Mailer's desktop from the previously mentioned laptop (there's not), wouldn't that inform us about the author? We're interested in pictures hanging in the room when a piece was composed, so we should also be interested in how the author customized the computer. it's part of their workspace.
Libraries have policies for discarding dust jackets and actually many text have no surviving dust jacket. So what will be the similar thing for this time? Are we interested in file structure and organization, bookmarks, cookies, etc?
Part of the digital workflow should be attention to preserving the digital life of the book. People do care about drafts and correspondence between authors and editors.
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