Digital versus Physical….Where stories go to die?

When everyone rolls into class today, you are going to see that MITH transformed in the short seven days since you were here last. After much wrangling and pain with construction folk, the MITH display spline (courtesy Matt Kirschenbaum’s photo) has been installed. The spline was conceptualized as a way for MITH to provide physical space to display research artifacts we use for e-literature, gaming, and born-digital research. We have one of the foremost collections of this stuff in the US and having it all stacked away in closets is a bit like hiding diamonds in a bag of rock salt—you know it is there but trying to find it is a pain in the rear. Our spline is stocked with items from the Deena Larsen and Bill Bly Collections as well as MITH’s antique/vintage computing collection.Last night, we had an open house and without a doubt, the spline (and Testudo) were the hit of the evening. Everyone seemed to use the display as an opportunity to reminisce about their own experiences with the various computing systems on display. Stories abounded of people’s first encounter with Nintendo, Apple II’s, wordprocessors, etc.

Last night, as I was trying to wind down from the event and simultaneously shoving copious amounts of pizza down my gullet (how come I never get around to eating at these types of things?), I kept thinking of how different the event would have been had the physical objects not been part of the space. What if instead of the Apple II physical computer you had an Apple II emulator? Would people still have begun telling stories or would their recollections have been tempered by the fact that they weren’t able to physically experience the computers? In some ways, we tested this premise at last year’s Maryland Day….we loaded up a couple of computers with emulators (because having historical artifacts sitting outside in the rain on the quad isn’t good archival practice) and made them available for people to play. Without the recognizable Apple II computer, fewer people stopped than we anticipated and while those who stopped did navigate the emulator, only a couple stayed more than a few minutes to play or chat. Almost no one stopped and also used the time to reminisce about their own use of the technology.

I was reading Kelsey’s post and she was talking about how she’d never move to an e-reader. That has been a hot topic of discussion among writers and publishers…whether the experience of reading a book has been destroyed by kindle/e-readers. I made the switch to an e-reader (a Kindle first and now kindle app for iPad) almost three years ago. I’m a huge reader…usually around a 1000 to 1500 pages a week of pleasure reading (fiction, mystery, romance, sci-fi—anything but biographies really) and another 200 or so for academic reading. It’s what I do on the bus, between appointments, nights/weekends. I used to buy on order of 15-20 physical books a month…now I’m buying/renting 3-5 physical books and another 10-15 e-books. What’s been interesting about all of this (and what relates to the spline) is that I used to share books way more frequently than I do now that I’ve moved to e-books. I used to loan out books to friends and family, academic books to students and colleagues, and now that happens much more rarely. I continue to invest in physical books for my scholarly reading but when it comes to fun reading, it’s all about the e-book. I can get them on the day they are released, from any wi-fi network. I even downloaded a new book on an international flight this summer while winging my way to germany. But I can’t loan them out the way I do with physical books…and there is no used e-book market the way there is for physical books. I’m paying full price on a book even if it is 5 or 6 years old….and that’s a problem.

So, we are talking about storytelling and digital spaces and I’m wondering what happens to stories when they die….where do stories go? is there a story heaven somewhere for those stories people no longer read? and if stories only exist in one medium (physical or digital but not both) how do understand the limits of their survival? What’s the lifecycle of a digital story?

 

 

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About Jen Guiliano

Jennifer Guiliano received a Bachelors of Arts in English and History from Miami University (2000), a Masters of Arts in History from Miami University (2002), and a Masters of Arts (2004) in American History from the University of Illinois before completing her Ph.D. in History at the University of Illinois (2010). She has served as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant and Program Manager at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (2008-2010) and as Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities (2010-2011) and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina. An award-winning teacher and scholar, Dr. Guiliano is currently revising her dissertation, “An American Spectacle: College Mascots and the Performance of Tradition,” which traces the appropriation, production, dissemination, and legalization of Native American images as sports mascots in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

3 thoughts on “Digital versus Physical….Where stories go to die?

  1. To Jen’s excellent questions, I’d add one more: “What happens to stories when they change media form?” (The Book-Was-Better-Than-The-Movie Dilemma.) A lot of the stories we’re encountering in this course will be “born-digital”–that is, created as a digital object–but there’s a host of other stories that start out as print novels and short stories, then are re-imagined (“remediated”) in a new media form (it even happens with board games–does anyone remember the film Jumanji?). Next week, we’ll start exploring the limits of different media forms–what does hypertext allow that you can’t do in print, what does writing with pen and ink call forth that typing does not. How does the media format for your writing limit and empower different stories?

  2. I’ve noticed a lot of people have a similar problem with the e-reader – it’s incredibly hard to share books on it. This has a lot to do with copyright law and whatnot, and I think that we’re definitely headed in a direction where sharing books on the Kindle is much easier, as easy as sharing music. That’s one main reason I like physical books – you can tell a lot about a book by how well loved it is. I borrow books from my boyfriend a lot and my favorite part is seeing lines he underlined as important, or comments he jotted in the margins. This is probably possible, or even easier, in e-readers, but… it just doesn’t have the same feel to me.

    As far as your questions, it’s definitely harder for a digital story to “die.” It’s not like a huge catastrophe could just wipe out our electronic database and “kill” a story the same way stories were lost in ancient civilizations and cultures. I think a digital story online does not necessarily die. It can be lost on the interwebz, it can be hidden, but I think someone, somewhere, will always eventually find it and draw meaning from it. I am thinking of, in particular, the various YouTube videos that have become popularized over the years. More often than not, they are several years old and have very few hits before they become a trend. This is an extreme example, of course, but it illustrates the idea of the story being “reborn.”

  3. Hi Kelsey-
    You’d be surprised at how fragile digital material really is and how quickly it disappears….here’s a good article from Popular Mechanics on how technical evolution makes the loss of digital materials more rapid (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/4201645)

    When we look at the internet, the assumption that something just “exists” on the web is problematic. Take YouTube…it was originally founded in 2005 by three former paypal employees. They sold YouTube in 2006 to Google, changing all the rules about who ran what and with what legal rights….now imagine that google implodes tommorrow and goes bankrupt. Every google server farm in the world turns off…including the one hosting millions of youtube videos. not a problem if you as the person who contributed your video have it somewhere else but perhaps you’ve had hundreds or even thousands of comments on your video. When google dies, it takes the live video and the commentary record with it. If you are like most people, you trust that the cloud has your back and you haven’t backed up your video anywhere….now what happens?

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