Digital Archives Show Their Hand
Labor and activation in the archive’s digital life
Each interaction with an archive inaugurates a new life for it. Whether it’s something visible like writing in the margins, or something invisible like evolving interpretation, both physical and digital archives mature as our societal texture changes. An archive today is read differently than it was a year ago, two years ago, twenty years ago.
When graphic designer Benjamin Shaykin stumbles upon a scanned hand in Google Books, something changes for him. He is surprised and creeped out by a hand that is obviously on the job, a rubber thimble on the forefinger holding pages open as a book scanner takes photos of each page. Others document similar encounters. Some users who have come across these errors by chance intentionally search the Google Books index for human error, scouting out labor that was always there but only now happens to show itself. These disembodied hands force readers to confront hyper-visible labor in a society that desperately wants to ignore race and class, especially when it’s entangled in labor that facilitates convenience.
Each interaction with an archive inaugurates a new life for it.
Digitization cements labor in time and initiates a new chapter in an archive’s lifecycle. Dr. Jennifer Douglas focuses on five specific instances that alter and modify an archive significantly: contributions from the communities where these archives may live, compilation by an outside archivist, or maintenance from archival custodians, to name a few. She describes each instance of activation as a type of “creation.” Dr. Eric Keetelar also speaks extensively on archival activation and the “invisible” instantiations that characteristically shape archives through use: “[e]ach activation leaves fingerprints which are attributes to the archive’s infinite meaning.” Both scanned hands and our reactions to this evidence of labor count as activation.
Human evidence in the archives hasn’t always been disturbing and unsettling to us. There is an incredible database online that uses library lending cards to track the books that people like Simone de Beauvoir and Walter Benjamin checked out of their local libraries. Whether the folks in this database are admirable or not, this knowledge of stewardship changes the way these objects are viewed. This history of touch and possession is exciting and makes the reader feel connected to the previous user through a communal artifact. It makes one wonder about all the other books sitting in libraries that may have been touched by someone familiar, famous or not.
At the beginning of each year in middle school in suburban New Jersey, I remember my teachers handing out communal textbooks, distributing them row by row. They were bent at the corners and smelled so dusty that it made taking in a deep breath impossible. They were faded by years of sunbathing on windowsills every summer, the reds a diluted pink and the blues an unrecognizable gray. As soon as the person in front of us handed back our books, my classmates and I would frantically look at the list on the front cover to see which of our friends had the book in years prior. We were curious, “Who do I know that touched this very book? Does that change how I read it or care for it?”
Digitization cements labor in time and initiates a new chapter in an archive’s lifecycle.
That excitement subsides when the reader meets the anonymous scanner. The phantom hand is different from the stray bookmark or post-it note. A bookmark doesn’t have an identity; it’s easily cast aside, removable and not hard to forget. Marginalia are funny, erasable, or intriguing if they display a message or assessment of the text worth reading. But a hand—one that is congruent with those in positions of tedious, manual labor because of generations of systemic harm—lives in that document for as long as it exists on the internet. Any reader, much like Shaykin, must reckon with this labor as they flip through the pages. Unlike the middle school friend who had a textbook a year before you did, this laborer’s touch made accessing this record, and a thousand others like it, possible at all.
Most pages in Google Books have escaped the indelible grip of the hands that hold a book open for scanners to take photos. Readers like Shaykin don’t wish that oppressive wage-labor didn’t exist but, rather, long for the comfort of not knowing, of keeping those fingers in the margins that get trimmed by corrective technology.
A scanned finger or hand that becomes wedded to a digitized document participates in this type of archival rebirth.
Anthropologist and Data & Society Affiliate Madeleine Clare Elish talks about the illusion that AI is “magic” because companies design and implement AI systems in a way that purposely obscures the intimately linked human provenance and operation of those systems. The surprise that Shaykin feels reproduces the expectation that labor is absent from digitization. The occasional peeping finger therefore makes it a little more difficult to hide evidence of the work that makes our online access easy. When readers don’t find fingers or hands in the margins, they are able to remain carefree and innocent, naive to exploitation. As the volume and speed at which these documents are scanned increase, “creepy” glitches appear and we are forced to confront the relationship between the supposed ease of digitization and its inconspicuous stage crew.
Physical records and their corresponding digital twins are preserved in our digital archives, each activation communicating and encoding different elements of the society in which they are accessed. A scanned finger or hand that becomes wedded to a digitized document participates in this type of archival rebirth. It forever reshapes the record in a way that a dog eared page or differing interpretation can’t. These fingers and hands are artifacts of their exploited and invisible work. They don’t have a face and there is no one to thank. They confirm something we’ve either ignored or been naive to, and now they sit in the room with us and read over our shoulder.
Nazelie Doghramadjian is the Executive Assistant at Data & Society.
