According to Goldsmith, "Scavengers obsessively comb through page after page of Google Books, hoping to stumble upon some glitch that hasn’t yet been unearthed." These searches have resulted in a Tumblr called "The Art of Google Books", which captures facsimiles with distortions, glitchy scans, illustrations that have been scanned unfolded or through tissue paper, and hands turning or holding pages during scanning.
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| www.theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com |
Why are people fascinated with the errors of Google Books? "Because of the speed and volume with which Google is executing the project, the company can’t possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface," says Goldsmith. "There’s little doubt that generations to come will be stuck with both these antique stains and workers’ hands." I think the project is interesting because it is a good example of how digital works are not a pure experience of a published or out of print text, they are a genre into themselves. When digital works are well done, and "scrubbed" as Trettien repeatedly says, they do seem like a seamless integration of print and digital. However, when they leave errors and distortion due to inattention, they provide a way for us to see the process that goes into the final product.
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| www.theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com |
What I also find intriguing about the New Yorker article is that many of these print books turned digital books end up as physical artifacts again. Numerous designers and artists have saved the 'glitchy' digital works, printed them, and bound them as artists' books. In these physical works, "printed on thick, handmade paper, and accordion-folded into an expensive slipcase; the combination of the crappy and the crafted is weirdly effective. " Apparently, the transformation of mundane digital marks into works of art extends beyond digitization projects: Print books have also been made out of CAPTCHA codes and Google Earth screenshots.
Please check out both the article and the Tumblr. I think people have not only made really intriguing aesthetic choices with these weird traces of digitization, they have also opened up a discussion about the labour of digitization (as well as the social issues of class and race that tie into Google's digitization).
Bibliography:
Goldsmith, Kenneth. "The Artful Accidents of Google Books" The New Yorker. December 4, 2013.http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-artful-accidents-of-google-books
Trettien, Whitney Anne. "A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: the Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica." Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013): 1-28. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000150/000150.html.
Chrissy, I love the Google Books example. A friend in my book history class last year wrote an entire essay on the hands that miraculously appear in some digitized editions on Google Books. It's really interesting how these hands provide a new level of metadata and "humanity" to the digital object. They are themselves documentation on how the digital object was created.
ReplyDeleteLast semester I went on a tour of the internet archives in Robarts. It was really interesting to see the space and the processes behind which some of our largest digitization projects take place