Junk Shop Blues, Winehouse Rules

Finding good reason to save the digital past in the strangest of places

By David Cohea

After last week’s post — trying to find a few hopeful signs of success in the effort to preserve the exploding repository of born-digital news — I was pooped. Finding the good news was a stretch. I mean, does anyone really believe that our blistering, phantasmagorical future can be saved if we have such a hard time even imagining it?

Who am I kidding, presuming the task even has a shape? The Digital Library Federation hosts an annual forum to discuss ideas and approaches to digital preservation. Right now they’re taking votes on which of 209 proposals to consider. Ethics in data research. Optimization in institutional repositories. Scalable integration of EML metadata. Cultivating cross-sector communities. Metadata creation and data reuse in the era of linked data. Building an ecosystem of networked textbooks. And on and on and on.

We aren’t just trying to conceive the problem, we’re playing chess against a 3D future with analog brains.

Is that why the Gulliver of digital archival have such a weak pulse? Because there is monstrously so much that haven’t a clue who or what will need us tomorrow? In the face of immensity, do we blink and divert to something more manageable, like, say, get lost in Facebook feeds?

Perhaps the symbiotic relationship between communities and local news — largely obscured, turned to deserts by aggregation, listsickles and traffic — is weirdly duplicated in this flickering relation between cowering present and towering future. A disappearing act, where the magician gets pulled into his hat.

Has our medium truly destroyed its message?

* * *

Feeling like I felt like I had scratched a surface that had trebled in size by the time I had finished what I had to say about it, I threw in my insignificant little pipsqueak of a towel.

I took the next day off to drive my wife around Central Florida looking for stuff. She has a custom bedding business and is always trolling for lace and old linen. I bummed along, just happy to be away from my desk for a day.

One of the places we wandered through was an antiques mall near Wildwood, Florida. It was a huge place, a hangar of floor after floor after hall after room of stuff. Plus a warehouse in back cooled with these massive fans. It was like one of those dreams where you kept discovering rooms or wings of a house you never knew existed — an exponential gestalt.

And everywhere there was stuff and more stuff: Lamps and pictures and doilies and dolls, lampshades and LPs and comic books and Jadeite, bric-a-brac and gegaws and tchotchkes, lions and tigers and bears, oh my: Probably half a million castoffs and throwaways rescued from estate sales and yard sales or from the curb and given a last chance there.

If dogs run in packs, kangaroos mob and giraffes tower, what would you call such a bestiary of the lost?

An obsequies — no — an oblivion of stuff ….

My wife did find a tablecloth she liked, but except for that we walked out of Thingy Brigadoon empty-handed. Nada, zilch, snake-eyes. How could that have happened? Were we that picky, or was there really nothing we thought worth a few bucks’ reprieve from the landfill?

Stuff and more stuff, all of it staring at the cruel cool emptiness of another shopping day: Does this explains why no one seems to think much of the infinite ocean of binary doodads accumulating all around us, soon to disappear forever? I mean, what’s the point of even considering holding on to any of it, if the shelves are already jammed past bursting with crap no one wants any more?

* * *

The current Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, has announced his retirement. Some say he was forced out, following a recent GAO report severely criticizing the institution’s management for failing to implement an IT strategic plan. Billington, who is 86, is credited for making the Library more available to the public, but his reticence to hire a Chief Information Officer has kept the organization sluggish in its response to the digital age.

Certainly, the Library has some catching up to do, and it seems like the institution is ready. (Peggy McGgone wrote for the Washington Post, “One employee joked that some workers were thinking of organizing a conga line down Pennsylvania Avenue. Another said it felt like someone opened a window.”)

But did Billington’s refusal to grapple with the future put the institution too far behind? (There is a moment for entering the digital age, and it is passing fast.)

Is that refusal echoed in all who would dodge responsibility for what’s coming at us, sighing, “I won’t have to worry about it, because I’ll be dead.”

If we were convinced that our children’s survival depended on the preservation of their digital cultural heritage, would we then lift a finger?

What does it take?

* * *

Despairing of all this — just about ready to give up even on this present write about it — I read this morning about Amy, the new documentary on Amy Winehouse which all critics are raving about. Winehouse was a very messy smoky-voiced jazz singer who died of alcohol poisoning back in 2011 — a very public self-immolation which burnt a major talent right before our eyes.

Old news, yes? But then comes a startling documentary which brings her to life in a manner so unlike most documentaries about musicians. “I was gripped: it is like a séance or a lucid dream,” Peter Bradshaw wrote in his July 2 review for The Guardian. “She is brought compellingly, thrillingly back to life.”

What is different time? Apparently Asif Kapadia got extraordinary access to the singer’s life as well as exceptional creative license to weave the story of what he found.

Central to all of this was the material Kapadia had to work with. Manolia Dargis writes in her July 2 movie review in the New York Times:

Mr. Kapadia keeps his eyes — and yours — on Ms. Winehouse throughout. Shrewdly, he has pieced together the visuals exclusively from archival images, tapping into a trove of home videos, concert material, publicity interviews and recording sessions. … Like many who have come of age in the digital era, cataloging their waking and sleeping hours, their back-seat and backstage lulls; Mr. Shymanksky ((Winehouse’s first manager)) alone gave Mr. Kapadia 12 hours of video. All this personal documentation, as well as Mr. Kapadia’s decision not to incorporate any new on-camera interviews, sometimes gives the movie the feel of a diary.

This makes Amy an intensely intimate experience, which is delightful as you’re getting to know her early on, when she’s all shy, charming smiles and having her first successes. In its rise-and-fall arc, her star-is-born / star-is-dead story is painfully familiar; she is, bluntly, just one more name now etched on our pop-cultural mausoleum. Yet, as this movie reminds you again and again, the commercial entity known as Amy Winehouse was also a human being, and its this person, this Amy , whom you get to know through all the lovely little details, knowing winks, funny asides and barbed observations that make the movie memorable. Ms. Winehouse was surprisingly funny, down home, sharp and seemingly self-knowing, as suggested by her voiced fears about becoming famous.

Maybe it’s possible, as Ray Kurzweil believes, to bring back the dead with enough archival material; certainly talented hands can inflate and waft their animating imago before our eyes. If Amy is terrifying, it’s because none of us tried to stop the monster that was eating Winehouse from inside. And we have the archival footage to prove it.

Archives — complete, digitized, indexed with all of the metadata necessary for intimate access — too can resurrect a time, a culture, in full-color, surround-sound strum und drang. How we lived, how we died. For our children, for their children, for the alien culture who sifts through our wreckage trying to determine what went wrong, or for the grand vaults of memory encoded on the monolith we leave behind on the moons of Saturn.

* * *

Which brings us back to this beginning again, hopefully for the last time.

Do we need an answer today? Well, no, but we do need to be able to look back and see a beginning. The 2010 Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access put it thus:

Sustainable preservation strategies are not built all at once, nor are they static. Sustainable preservation is a series of timely actions taken to anticipate the dynamic nature of digital information. (5)

A series of timely actions, yes. We don’t have to do it all, but we do have to do something. And it’s not a something we have to fully understand, not now: we just have to begin. The jazz pianist Bill Evans once put it this way:

It is true of any subject that the person that succeeds in anything has the realistic viewpoint at the beginning and [knows] that the problem is large and that he has to take it a step at a time and that he has to enjoy the step-by-step learning procedure. (Documentary, The Universal Mind of Bill Evans)

Let’s just assume that the overwhelming majority of what we’re creating and consuming and texting and sharing now is junk — worthless as a Madame Alexander doll that’s missing her head.

In golden pre-decapitation days, there was a price book somewhere that lined up the dollar symbols. But those books are long gone. Still, the seller obstinately believes that someone out there is looking for a headless Madame Alexander doll, so there it sits.

With digital, things age out so fast that only the stuff with the freshest paint garners any notice at all. Who gets attached to anything for long any more?

Yet still, sellers remain stubborn. No one wants to be blamed for throwing it out, so it ends up in the forgotten wing of an uncooled warehouse where nobody has been by for decades.

Newspapers desperate for revenue streams think that someone must be willing to pay for its old news. They point to the likes of Ancestry.com and its rapacious appetite for newspaper obituaries. Technological tools do improve access, and it certainly is possible to try selling archive access (or make it part of the subscription model). But like what we end up with is a whole lot of cultural and community junk the owners can’t part with and for whom buyer are few, lost out on the long tail.

Post Community Media recently folded two of its Maryland newspapers, and as far as I’ve been able to find out, they are more willing to let their combined sum of online community news from those two newspapers rot away in cyberspace rather than consider donating it to a memory institution. End result, nada, zilch: two repositories both turning quickly into spotty soon worthless feed. As these news orgs were once too fixed on tomorrow’s news, their morgue is now too jealous of old news.

Let’s call it all junk and grease the wheels out to the preservation landfill.

On her last concert tour, Miley Cyrus dropped tons of junk she had collected over the years on her fans. Not a bad way to start. Clean house, folks.