Off the Mark

I’m trying to keep my chin up as I remind myself that it is a very busy time of the year with semesters ending, traveling, holiday preparations, and so on. With that in mind, I’m still hoping Virtual Journal Club will take off. We had our 1st “meeting” yesterday and we only have a few postings so far. They are good ones though!

We looked at the award winning article, O’Sullivan, Catherine. “Diaries, On-line Diaries, and the Future Loss to Archives; or, blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them.” American Archivist 68 (1), Spring/Summer 2005: 53-73.

Feel free to join in at any time. The “meeting,” which isn’t anything of the sort, is only a target date. I’m hoping that as people catch their breath sometime during the Holiday(s) period that they’ll go ahead and post their thoughts. The articles for next month’s “meeting” are also posted.

With that said, here are (some of) my thoughts as I posted them on the O’Sullivan article (with some minor formatting changes allowed by this format):

Let me say up front that I thoroughly enjoyed this article. Unfortunately, it seemed a little light on the substance of interest to this discussion. I really enjoyed the historical overview of diaries, although 95% was irrelevant to our purposes. I found it fascinating as it ties various past and current threads of my reading together for me.

The short and sweet for our present purposes is that diaries have served as important archival materials for an assortment of reasons. Blogs, or at least some, should as well. An important distinction left untouched by the author is the wide variety of blogs that exist. Clearly many of these will be important to future scholars. The author clearly focuses on the blog as diary though. Seeing as she has provided us with an historical overview of diaries, this seems only fitting, even if ultimately limiting to the overall question of the value of archiving blogs.

The author asks three fundamental questions early on: “Will archivists have to adapt archival principles and practice to meet the needs and limitations of electronic records? Will archives have to modify their approach to administrative operations and policy-making procedures in the digital age? How do digital records factor into the collection development policies of collecting archives” (54)?

Clearly the answer to the first two is a definite yes. I would also hope that the archives community has been working on answers to these questions long before blogs came on the scene. [They have.] The last question is more complex, but then that is the question that motivates this discussion. Millions of electronic records are being created and millions are lost every day. The scholar of the future will need access to them in some organized fashion. Currently that is not being provided in any wide-scale, systematic fashion.

The diary as site of identity construction:

“…diaries developed as sites of self-exploration, self-expression, and self-construction. The process of self-monitoring adapted to meet the rhythms and demands of individualism, capitalism, nationalism, and industrialism, the hallmarks of modern society. The diary became a space where an individual’s identity was actively conceived and constructed” (60).

“Diaries were, to a large extent, self-referential and served as repositories of memory” (62). “…diaries acted as sites of memory, intended to preserve the diarist’s past from future oblivion” (62). My blog has, in fact, replaced the journal I had been keeping the last few years. Of course, that means much is left out of the account. Much could be said in the privacy of a Word file locked away safely on my hard drive vs. what I am willing to put on the open web. I know the same is true based on discussions in the biblioblogosphere and elsewhere about blog content. Does this then imply that online diaries are inferior to their print counterparts? Possibly. In many cases, yes. It depends on many factors, including how secure the diarist felt that their diary was and what the consequences of disclosure might be.

More democratic?

Angel has already addressed the more democratic aspect of blogs compared to early diary writing (65). This is, in one sense, a false dichotomy though, as it contrasts the early days of diary keeping to the early days of blogging. Or maybe I should say it is the wrong comparison, as these are what should be contrasted. The more interesting, and again not-quite-right, comparison is between opportunities to publish. This comparison is kind of odd, since most diaries were never meant to be published, while blogs are by definition. The important comment is the one by Todd Levin of Salon.com. He says that “on-line diaries occupy…one of the few places today where a “level ground for publishing” actually exists” (65). That, I believe, is the assertion that Angel is rightly contesting. It is much more affordable for someone to be able to obtain a cheap diary or some recycled paper to write in than it is to afford routine internet access. Both require a certain level of literacy, but blogging requires more forms of literacy. One must be able to read and write to maintain either form of diary, but one must also be conversant in various forms of computer literacy to maintain a blog.

“Seemingly trivial observations can shed light on major historic events. The evidential value that diaries possess for a particular age, or a particular diarist, cannot be overestimated” (64). With the value of the blog-as-diary as a given, what then does this mean for the archival enterprise?

Collection development concerns:

First comment. This article focuses exclusively on diary-like blogs. There are many other forms of blogs that will also be of value to future users of archives.

Admittedly, as the author says, much of the blogosphere is dross, but much is of value also. Value. This is always the $64,000 question. What is of value? And more importantly, what will be of value to “the future?”

I read another article that addresses and provides an answer to this question. It is interesting, although badly edited, but it is ultimately, in my humble opinion, wrong. [Gouge, Marianne K. "Blogs as a Means of Preservation Selection for the World Wide Web."] The author [Gouge] relies on blog aggregators and a set of archival criteria to determine what is of quality and should be saved. What this boils down to is another instantiation of Google page ranking. What the masses like (point at) determines quality. This is such utter nonsense that I am continually amazed at the large numbers of intelligent people taken in by it. The best that this sort of ranking can give us is what is of a certain kind of “quality” within pop culture. That is, what is the most popular. But to equate the popular with quality is just…well, let’s just call me elitist on this and move on. I will probably write about the Gouge article on my blog seeing as I have now read it’s 40 pages twice. Worth a read. Just wrong, although it is a start and may be part of the answer.

But the fact remains that there is much of quality that has nothing to do with pop culture. And then there is the pop culture that is of quality but not massively popular. How do we identify those?

The answer must be specifically targeted collection efforts based on an organization’s mission. It will take human decision making, perhaps influenced somewhat by various technological “suggestion systems” and also perhaps harvested by a program. But it will take a decision based on an expert human determination in the first place.

Regarding the physical differences:

One aspect of the construction of blogs makes them one of the simpler electronic formats to archive. That is the underlying HTML and CSS that generates a blog when it is rendered by a browser. This format is inherently much simpler to reproduce over the long haul than say Microsoft Word’s proprietary format. It can be stored as simple text and is rendered as a web page only when the time to view it comes. It also retains much of its semantics when viewed as text.

But the nature of the web adds a whole new level of complexity—the hyperlink—over a “simple” stand-alone document format such as MS Word. Trying to archive all outbound and inbound links from a blog, even a single blog post, would be nigh impossible. And even if possible, as least considering inbound links, it would be at best a snapshot in time. But without these links, much is lost in the way of context. How was this blog or post situated within the context of its blog, its community, discipline, time, and so on?

Another structural issue with blogs is the various forms of linking done within a blog. Directly related to the individual posts are comments and trackbacks from other blogs which contribute greatly to its context and as a possible (limited) “measure” of importance or influence. Other forms of linking are related to the blog as a whole. Blogrolls; Amazon wishlists; links to Amazon.com for current reads, listening to, etc.; ads; iPod playlists; images within the posts; and so on are all highly contextual and can provide a lot of information about a person. Most of these elements are also highly changeable.

The author states that, “…the physical nature of a manuscript diary reveals something of its history to the reader. The same cannot be said of documents viewed behind the flat, cold, glossy glare of a computer screen” (70). While I understand her claim to a point, I also disagree highly. As restrictive as the blog format seems to be, most blogging software (at least the non-free type) gives one a large amount of leeway regarding customization and layout. The specific layout and design elements utilized, whether someone is using a free account or paid, whether it is hosted or on one’s own domain, whether there is a blogroll, and other factors can tell quite a lot about a person and about the history of the blog. This is particularly the case if the blog has been archived over time. For instance, Jenica changes her title image and color scheme every few months and when she does she usually posts a bit about why. This would be valuable historical information revealing something of the history of her blog in just the sense that “the physical nature of the manuscript diary” does. [I'm not picking on you Jenica! You just make more frequent changes than me, and your "style" is...well, you have style. I don't.]

Revisability of most electronic documents is an issue. But it is one we are going to have to live with. Multiple snapshots over time may help towards mitigating this issue, at least in the case of blogs.

Future relevance? / Solutions

This actually takes us back to the question of collection development/management. How do we determine relevance, particularly future relevance? The author states that broadening acquisition policies “by developing collecting strategies that include on-line diaries” is where to begin (71). I could not agree more. The first decision to be made must be that these are worth preserving. The second, and admittedly much more difficult step, is to “develop a sound method of appraising” blogs to determine quality and relevance to a specific collection (71). This step is, as I see it, the most difficult and will require the greatest human input and decision making. The third step is to determine how to go about doing the actual acquiring once the previous determinations have been made. It is at this point that questions of copyright rear their multi-faceted heads. And as the author says, all of “[t]his needs to occur before a method of managing and preserving this information is developed” (71). Of course, the development of a good solution to the harvesting problem can include solutions to, or at a minimum work toward, the management issue. Preservation is related but is in reality a completely separate issue, although what exactly is harvested and how it is to be managed will impact on questions of preservation.

So the $64,000 question still remains. How do we determine quality and relevance? And how do we get a scalable answer to these questions? Unfortunately, I do not think there is going to be an adequate scalable solution, except by critically narrowing one’s collection focus. Various ranking algorithms and aggregator services can help to point us in the direction of content that might fit our needs, but they are not the solution. At best, they point us to the popular. And I will always maintain that there is much more of far better quality available and waiting to be discovered than that which is popular. So, a narrow focus implemented by collection developers who are well-versed in the field in which they are collecting and who have the time to actively search and browse, and then evaluate, the material they find or that which is brought to them via other means. Is this idealistic? Certainly. But, it is no more so than that which should drive most human acts that strive to construct and record meaning and the quality products of human effort. Perhaps along the way towards this lofty goal we will discover pragmatic compromises that can be made, just as we do in all such efforts. But to not begin with the ideal in mind is possibly more of a shame than to not begin at all.

Peripheral matter:

One concern that the author attributes to others completely baffles me. “Many communication and information technology specialists believe that blogs, being native to the Web, would lose all meaning and context if taken out of their natural environment” (73). Can anyone explain that concern to me? I can think of so many different angles from which to attack that thinking; and that includes even if we have poor solutions to one of the big context (links of all types) issues. Most blogs are, in the main, either text or pictures. And there is no “natural environment” for text or pictures. They only need to be represented as faithfully as possible, and even then it is only certain aspects that need to be faithfully reproduced. Yes, there is much pointing hither and thither on the web, but at the moment we are discussing blogs as diaries, not link blogs. Thus, while I agree they will lose some context and therefore some meaning, to claim that they “would lose all meaning and context” is simply asinine.

What we know of Aristotle’s thoughts is almost completely, and may be entirely, from lecture notes taken by his students and students of his students become teacher. Yet we practically ascribe the foundation of Western civilization to him. Based on what meaning and context left over from this transition from his words “natural environment” do we do this? We have the famous cave art at Lascaux, still in its “natural environment” (to some small degree), yet what do we know of its meaning and context? Them darn IT “boys” (usually boys) just drive me batty when they start talking about meaning. Most of them don’t know a thing about natural languages and how they work to construct meaning for humans, nor about any other aspect of human meaning making. I wish the author had provided some examples of people holding this view. I prefer to pick on real people since it easier to get further information on their views whereas it is much harder to do so from some disembodied group of “[m]any communication and information technology specialists.” Oh well.

I want to thank Lindsey for this and the other suggestions. I thought it was an excellent article overall, but then I also appreciated the history, tangential to our discussion be that as it may.