storage

Abstract.The difficulty and expense of preserving digital information is a potential impediment to digital library development. Preservation of traditional materials became more successful and systematic after libraries and archives integrated preservation into overall planning and resource allocation. Digital preservation is largely experimental and replete with the risks associated with untested methods. Digital preservation strategies are shaped by the needs and constraints of repositories with little consideration for the requirements of current and future users of digital scholarly resources. This article discusses the present state of digital preservation, articulates requirements of both users and custodians, and suggests research needs in storage media, migration, conversion, and overall management strategies. Additional research in these areas would help developers of digital
libraries and other institutions with preservation responsibilities to integrate long-term preservation into program planning, administration, system architectures, and resource allocation.

This paper expands on some of the questions raised by my presentation at the 2009 Digital Arts and Culture conference, held last December at UC Irvine. While examining the work of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI), I asked what it might mean for a new media practitioner to intentionally disregard or shun many of the medium’s inherent capabilities. I was interested in the way in which YHCHI seemed to be protesting some of the assumptions or characteristics of the nascent canon of electronic literature, i.e. that works of new media are inherently multidirectional, adaptive, non-linear, etc.

With this paper, I turn from interrogating specific works of electronic literature to perform a broader analysis of the ideology that underpins (e-) canonicity. This paper responds to the Electronic Literature Organization’s conference theme “Archive and Innovate,” by positing that it might now be possible to move away from the rather exclusive notion of the canon, complete with its ideological, print historical baggage, and move toward a more inclusive, “open-source” mode of textual preservation: the archive. Building on Matthew Kirschenbaum’s quick nod to Freud’s Archive Fever as well as Lev Manovich’s discussion of the database as a “symbolic form,” I flesh out some of the significant differences between the traditional notion of the print canon and the innovative model of the digital archive. What might new modes of preservation, such as the Electronic Literature Organization’s online collection, offer that traditional modes of collection and storage do not? What could an electronic literary archive or database do at a conceptual level that might impact the way we write, access, or read these types of texts? In attempting to answer these questions and a few others, I hope to further encourage our discussion of (e-) textual preservation and storage.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

This article proposes a theoretical framework intended to facilitate descriptions and discussions of texts of works in different media. The main theoretical traditions which have inspired this endeavor are, on the one hand, textual criticism (with scholars such as Fredson Bowers, D. C. Greetham, Jerome J. McGann, D. F. McKenzie, Peter L. Shillingsburg, and G. Thomas Tanselle), and, on the other hand, hypertext theory (represented by theorists like Espen Aarseth, Jay David Bolter, Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Michael Joyce, George P. Landow, and Janet H. Murray). The study aims to combine and develop the perspectives of such theoretical traditions in order to suggest a more consistent and extensive set of concepts for the analysis of how narratives are stored and disseminated. The study examines the structural aspects of texts and works, and deals with storage, presentation and reproduction of works. Moreover, the structure of works and texts, as well as the navigation related to these structures, are discussed. The study also includes an in-depth discussion on links and linking, and a new terminology is suggested for the subject. The most important concepts discussed are work, text, version, variant, storage medium, storage sign, presentation medium, presentation sign, storage capacity, life expectancy, direct text access, indirect text access, copy, edition, impression, issue, monosequential, multisequential, content space and axial structure. Furthermore, the concepts of network structure and lateral structure as well as hypertext, ergodicity, link and linking are examined.