Taming Chaos?
“That’s arrogant,” accused a new acquaintance at a party. Her response was not meant to extend the conversation; rather she was done with me. Moving on.
In her defense, there had already been a lot of wine drunk, and she seemed tired. I had simply answered her question — the inane one so frequently asked by strangers at parties during awkward silences: “What do you do for a living?” I thought my answer would be a conversation starter. In my defense, it normally is.
When faced with the need to quickly describe my career in a quick and witty way, I tell people that I’m a Chaos Tamer.
Indeed, one would need to be quite arrogant to think they can actually tame a goddess, especially the one who revels in disorder. But, isn’t that obvious? Isn’t that funny? Wouldn’t your interest thus be piqued? Maybe my delivery was too serious, or my resting bitch face too locked in. Maybe the joke is arrogant. I don’t know… Like my interrogator, I was probably tired with too much wine in my brain.
Steadfastly, I still use the snarky title everywhere (see tag line in this blog thing, here). I keep telling people I’m a professional Chaos Tamer because the title is apt. It’s a vain profession, really (see what I did there?!), for chaos reigns all the time, everywhere. And, to be fully transparent, Eris is my gal (Fnord!!).
So what the fuck am I talking about; what do I actually do for a living?
Whelp…the more professional job title I’m labelled with is Digital Curator and Archivist, and I’m very proud of that gig. To this day, my greatest career challenge is describing it in detail to those who want to know more about me, and to those who dismissively think they know more than me about my own area of expertise (an issue so many of us have in our careers). Many of these sorts of people are the ones who would fund archival projects and provide me with a living wage, so the stakes are quite high.
When I delve into the particulars of my work, the room gets hot, time slows down, and suddenly the stale dip across the room looks quite enticing. The act of archiving is in a weird liminal spot: everyone thinks they should know what it is, and that it’s pretty simple (“you save old shit, right?!”), but most people don’t realize that they need to specialize in such a thing. It’s very hard to advocate for my profession when so many already believe it’s an easy job that anyone could do. In reality, most have only a basic, abstract, and often romanticized understanding of what goes into the archival process. Once they hear a thing has been saved, stored, or filed, they think it’s archived and walk away assuming that there’s no more work to be done.
Multiply this problem tenfold or more for digital collections. Many people think that “digital is forever,” and representational of “the future,” our “advanced culture,” and “permanent,” yet nothing could be further from the truth. (Words in quotes represent phrases uttered by my various employers over the years.) Digital file formats and all the various forms of digital storage, software, and hardware are immensely complex and changing constantly. Keeping up with it all is mind numbing, and likely not possible. I recently heard digital archives referred to as a wicked problem; a moving target that is easily misunderstood, and misrepresented. Marketing and culture over the years have abstracted various digital tools for us that have oversimplified what they actually are. For example, do you know what The Cloud is? If you do, have you ever had to define it for someone? It’s not easy to define a thing for a person who barely understands how a computer works.
So, imagine my struggle when I try to tell someone not to trust Facebook (or Myspace or LiveJournal) to keep all their images and writings forever.
The very first paragraph of the above article on Hyperallergic reads, “Curator and art historian Ruben Cordova thought that Facebook was the perfect platform to archive the photographic materials equivalent to almost a decade’s worth of his research.” If you really want to ruin my day, tell me you’ve been wholly relying upon a social networking site to “archive…9 years’ worth of aggregated resources and materials.” Comments under the article are cruel, but indicate that I’m not the only person who knows that social media platforms cannot be trusted to store, preserve, and make collected digital information available for the foreseeable future.
“Oh come on, tell me he didn’t have his archives saved on a local hard drive also…you have got to be incredibly dumb to use facebook — a social media platform — as an actual archive. Social media means just that — it is a means to communicate between people. It is by no self definition an archival storage facility.”
But Professor Cordova is not alone.
Many perceive that an archive is a collection of information, and assume that any tool that allows them to store information will reliably be there for all time. As is the case with many archives trying to advocate for their value, sometimes you need a disaster to get your point across. Other times, the archivist gets blamed for not doing what they’ve been trying to do for years.
When I press someone to think deeper about archiving, they will often come up with the need for preservation and organization. Many people have dealt with erosion of documents, or loss of printed photographs. I usually have no problem getting them to consider that the identities of people in photos can be easily lost, so description is also important. I lose them a bit when I start talking about the preservation of context in which an item came from.
If they’re still with me at this point, I completely lose them when it comes to extending these archival actions to digital items, which include an overwhelming plethora of stuff, including emails, photographs, videos, websites, and anything created by computer, Raspberry Pi kit, digital camera, sound recorder, smart phone, etc.. Even light bulbs can generate digital information nowadays {archived}. Archiving digital ephemera is further complicated by the obsolescence of software, file formats, hardware, and storage devices, the overwhelming amount of it being generated, and the frequency for things to move and change. I’ll bet you haven’t tried listening to that 15 year old CD in awhile, right? Give it a shot. I dare you. It MIGHT still be readable. Oh…you don’t have a CD player anymore? Whelp…
Just like physical items, hard drives are made of metal that can corrode. They also provide small dark places that are attractive homes to pests. The plastic on DVDs break down, just as the zeroes and ones that make up a file can become corrupt, that a popular file type may not always be readable by a popular hardware device, that popular hardware device will likely become obsolete, and on and on. If that list of consumer items wasn’t overwhelming enough, think of archiving complex digital things, such as videos that contain thousands of image files with audio files, keyframes, and sometimes special effects; all those elements behave differently to different computer systems. Even more complex are online communities that interact with entertainment, such as massive multiplayer online video games. To archive such a game, an archivist considers the video software, artwork, music, storyline, the website created for it, the way it’s played, the tools and hardware used to play it and why it changes (if it changes), the millions of people who play it and the communities that talk about it or make spinoffs from it, the videos made about playing it, and the reaction videos to those videos…on and on and on… I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the challenges art museums face when preserving digital artwork created with proprietary programming languages that only the artist knew, and may not recall.
If you’re still reading, I think I may love you.
Maybe you can better understand why I call myself a Chaos Tamer. I pray to that particular goddess every waking moment, and I love her glorious mess. It’s what makes us human.
