arnoud glaudemans, rienk jonker and frans smit documents, archives and hyperhistorical
societies: an interview with luciano floridi
decades, we found ourselves living in a world that is completely mixed, with
analogue and digital features intertwined. And within this mix, the digital is leading.
It takes 'two to tango', but the leading dancer is the digital, at least most of the time.
In that sense, the topic of your book and our discussion now, the area of archival
studies, is part of 'the big book of revolution'. It is part of the huge transformation
we are undergoing.
Recently, in a different context, I was discussing similar issues within the banking
system. It might seem a bit far-fetched to compare archives to banks. But when I got
your message, it did ring a huge bell. I thought, just imagine how many branches of
any bank are closing down for digital reasons. Who needs to go to the bank to do
business? Most of the time we are doing everything online. If you need cash, you get
it from an ATM. If you need to transfer money or receive a payment, you can do
everything online. You do not need to go to a bank anymore. The bank was a place
where your location physically, and your presence interactively, were the same thing.
This whole is now split. My interactive presence is now online. My physical,
geographical location is no longer necessary. This split has caused the closing down
of more than a thousand branches of different banks in this country (the United
Kingdom) over the past five years. As to our public libraries, we have the same
problem. Location and presence are now split. The public libraries are becoming
useless if they are only warehouses where to store and get analogue documents.
What if I get the documents digitally online, what if I buy the book on Amazon for a
fraction of the price that it would cost me to go to the library? To me it seems that
the archives are also part of this huge challenge that you, as editors, denote as
'liquid'.
I would like to answer some of your questions concerning the state of affairs.
EDITORS: The first question concerns the nature of records. There are quite some
essays in this book which use the word 'materiality' of records. Of course, as old
fashioned, but not very traditional people, we know how the record is really the
object in the paper world. What we think that is happening, is that - fortunately -
many scholars in archival science are drifting away from the idea of materiality, and
into the digital world - which is a good thing. The nature of records tends to be
defined much more in terms of functionality of information. When we take the
definition of records from Geoffrey Yeo as persistent representations (Yeo, 2008,
p. 136), we could analyse and understand them in a functional way. This would
imply that, in a digital world, a record should not be understood as an object
anymore but as functionality through algorithmic processing. Maybe you have some
thoughts about this way of thinking?
FLORIDI: Out of your five questions, I found this the most difficult one to answer.
So, let me start with a couple of clarifications.
The first is, that there is a misconception about the non-materiality of the digital.
It is a dangerous misconception that we are still endorsing these days. It is dangerous
because we are relying so much, and increasingly so, on the digital to record our
present and future. It is crucial not to forget that the digital resides somewhere. It is
usable according to a particular technology and subject to an enormous amount of
risks, like a virus or a wrong click of the mouse. The materiality of digital
information is not immediately clear and obvious, as is the case with printed
information. The materiality of the digital is more remote and hence less visible. So
it is not immediately clear how to take care of the materiality, the physicality of the
digital. Any big company that moves to the digital knows exactly the problems that
arise here. At the Bodleian Library we had this case of someone famous donating his
entire collection to the library - including all the floppies. To read them you need to
buy some old piece of hardware. There is nothing to put the floppies in anymore and
the software is not available. I know that I am telling you things that you know by
heart. But I think what is happening in our culture - generally speaking - is the
following. On the one hand, there is the obvious physicality, the materiality, of a
piece of paper. We know how to take care of it. The material nature of the digital, on
the other hand, is more remote, and therefore we feel less involved. It is also more
difficult to explain that we need to invest resources (financial but also intellectual
and human) to take care of the materiality of the digital. We have to be very careful
about the distinction of digital 'nonmaterial' and analogue 'material'. It is not
adequate, because the analogue and the digital do overlap in many ways.
Let's move to the second clarification, which concerns the distinction between
functional use versus material identity. When I first read your question, I thought:
the archive is one of the places of memory, like the museum, the library, or the
gallery. These are places where we accumulate and curate memory. The question is:
what for? Is it just to enable different forms of functionality, like going to an art
gallery to enjoy it, or consulting some documents for a research? Or is it also because
we think memory must be collected in order to protect, preserve and foster our
identities and give sense to our lives; otherwise we would not be who we are and
could not interpret our existence constructively? Continuity is what counts here,
because it makes construction of our identity possible. The digital tends to stress
functionality and hence usability more than identity construction and hence the
continuity and meaningfulness of the narratives. Memory is the basis of identity.
The digital is much more about functionality, purpose, usefulness, accessibility,
availability, and so on. The digital again pushes us in that direction, making us forget
that artefacts are the historical memories of who we are and can be. Archives are full
of beautiful things that are not just usable but also fruitful, insofar as they can make
us grow in our self- and mutual understanding.
Given the previous two distinctions, I am not impressed by the definition of 'record'
that you give, as 'persistent representation'. It is not that I disagree, or think it is a
bad definition. I just think it is restrictive, in terms of what archival items are in
their varieties. People who have been to an archive or work with old documents will
know that, for instance, a page was read many times, because the corner of the page
is totally black. The materiality of the thing is consumed by people as well. The
digital does not get licked. It does not fade. If you look at some manuscripts - years
ago I did quite a lot of research on medieval and renaissance manuscripts4 - there is
a lot of information in the specific materiality that can easily get lost by digitising
everything. When a document is digitised we of course have the picture, the high
resolution of the reproduction. But the digital version comes short in not providing
this kind of materiality. When defining records as a persistent representation in a
archives in liquid times
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4 See Floridi, L. (2002).
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