[Personal_archives] distinctions among user types and benignneglect as stewardship mode

Tue Apr 28 10:17:55 EDT 2009

I guess I can't help but think that the whole issue of being able to
relate fully to the document in order to be able to appraise, curate or
destroy it has something to do with the inherent intagability of digital
records.  Part of people not knowing what to do, shirking their
responsibilities for weeding and arranging their digital assets might
also have to do with the fact that these records do not reside in our
world.  If they are deleted, it is like they never were.  We do not have
to take out the garbage (or recycling), light a match and later clean up
the mess.  They are easily ignored because they are not physically
there, they are equally less easily missed because they were never
physically here (although this might change with the advent of digital
picture frames, for example).  The ease with which these records are
created and manipulated gives them a further fluidity, unreality,
replacability and perhaps even a sense of super-mundaneness.  They are a
bit halucinatory and perhaps this is the way the human mind chooses to
deal with proliferant physically unreal materials?  In this way, perhaps
the computer crash is just a nightmare to get over.  

________________________________

From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu
[mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Rodney
Carter
Sent: April 28, 2009 9:56 AM
To: Cathy Marshall
Cc: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] distinctions among user types and
benignneglect as stewardship mode

The notion of neglect *as* stewardship is an interesting one and I think
highlights the importance in understanding the psychology of records
creators/keepers that Catherine flagged at the start of yesterday's
discussion.

Certainly, for physical records, there are times when, despite any
logical or rational argument for keeping something, after performing
appraisal  on certain records and seeing no long term administrative,
legal, or historical value there is a reluctance to destroy the
documents. For records that are a significant age or fit into a personal
interest this can often be the case. Anonymous photographs in my
archives certainly have a home, despite my frequent inability to make a
solid case for their archival value. Perhaps we rely on technological
failures and fires & floods to make those hard choices for us. We cannot
bear to get rid of the records ourselves but we know subconsciously that
we'd be better off without them.

Heather D draws our attention to the connection of value to appraisal.
The trouble we can get into, particularly when dealing with personal
material that we cannot help but relate to subjectively, there is
personal history in relation to the items which can lead to holding on
to some material and hastily destroying others. Value, including
archival value, can be said to be "radically contingent" (following
axiologish Barbara Hernnstein Smith). In this articulation, the value
resides neither wholly in the object nor in the viewing subject but
arises as a product of the interaction of the subject and object at a
particular moment in time. As the properties of the object change, as
the psychological state of the subject shifts, and as the environment of
that the interaction takes place in alters, the value will change over
time. When weeding personal collections - I am thinking of boxes of
memorabilia from highschool or college, for example - things that were
of the utmost value at the time are of little or no value now, if not
entirely meaningless as the context is forgotten. This process, what
Cathy has highlighted as re-encountering, is, as she writes, much more
difficult with digital artifacts. We perhaps are still tied to the
tangible and it is much easier to delete a folder on the computer than
it is to throw out a file of papers or photos in the physical world (at
least for some - there are those who relish in "cleaning out their
office" - four words that send shivers down my spine at work).

If we agree that value of records can shift over time, I am very
interested to hear more about the idea of "intrinsic metadata" (from
"Rethinking..." Pt. 2, end of section 2). Are there technological
solutions to chart how things are used, moved and modified over time.
Certainly this information would be wonderful to have for physical
records as well, but if there are ways to have this information
automatically generated all the better. 

I'd like to thank Rick for his message and its detailed advice. I was
certainly armed with more knowledge about "what to do in the case of..."
than I was last thursday and armed with that I placed a call to the IT
guys who were looking after things. Thankfully, it seems that the
problem was not with the harddrive itself and I am told they were able
to save the data and tranfer it to a new harddrive. We'll see what state
my files are in when they arrive here in a few moments. 

Which makes me return to what Cathy said about moving on after a fire.
Speaking for myself, and others who are similarly tech-impaired, when a
crash occurs or "something mysterious happens" and things disappear (I
blame the gremlins in my computer) there is often a fatalism associated
with it. We throw up our arms and say "what can we possibly do!?!? It is
lost forever". We don't have the knowledge to even begin to know how to
approach the situation, similar to what we would do in the face of a
fire. Throw your arms up and move on and attempt to rebuild. Which, of
course, makes the preventative measures all the more important. But I am
wondering if the same fatalism prevails - harddrives crash, cds & dvds
fail, ISPs go out of existence and take our data with them. I wonder if
the focus can ever be put on data saving measures in a positive light,
particularly when there are folks who capitalize on generating fear in
order to sell back up devices and services. 

In a distributed storage model that Cathy highlights there is even more
difficulty as people must not only be worried about local harddrives but
things "in the cloud" as well.

Sorry if this was a bit all over the place. A great deal going through
my head this morning.

All the best

Rod

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:24 PM, Cathy Marshall
<cathymar at microsoft.com> wrote:

	Hi all,

	[...] 

	Rodney-I'm sorry to hear about your recent crash-I'm going to
say something now, and I'm curious what you'll think about it:

	I've noticed a somewhat puzzling pattern: people seem to be
relying on disk crashes, technology failure, and periodic obsolescence
as a way of pruning their collections. It's not that loss doesn't bother
them; it's rather that loss makes their collections more tractable. The
accumulated weight of these digital belongings is swept away, so that
the home computer users can focus their attention on the present. This
cycle of accumulation and accidental loss might underlie explanations
that consumers offer for failing to backup their computers. In the end,
people may be unhappy about data loss, but they shrug it off, all too
frequently saying exactly the same thing: 

	"I mean, if we would've had a fire, you just move on."

	All for tonight. Let me know what you think.

	best,

	Cathy

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