in Dublin during the 1742 season, but
it remains instructive and valuable to
know that his performance(s) aroused
such excitement, the Irish capital was
said the have been gripped with “Gar-
rick Fever.”
The corollary to abandoning the
notion of a single authoritative ‘ob-
ject’ of preservation, is to abandon the
idea of there being a single authorita-
tive act of preservation. As the com-
plexity of digital objects increases,
and the digital impinges on more and
more aspects of our lives, so does the
need to see preservation and curation
as an interdisciplinary team effort.c
The make-up of preservation teams
will vary depending on the object in
question, but might involve social sci-
entists, computer scientists, artists,d
and ethnographers, in addition to tra-
ditional curators and historians. Digi-
tal preservation involves much more
than simply saving bits, or putting up
a website. Dealing with complex in-
teractive software highlights the role
of nuanced, detailed and patient doc-
umentation in passing on to future
generations a rich understanding not
only of human-machine interaction,
but also human-human interaction
past and present.

As someone who spends most of his working life dealing with curators of one kind or another, I find it rather satisfying that as computer systems become ever more complex and nuanced, the prospects for complete automation of the preservation process are, at the bleeding edge of technology at least, getting further away, if anything.

 

c See for example http://bit.ly/2eqc63D.
d An interesting discussion on the topic of
“archive” as it relates to feminism and tech-
nology, is available at http://bit.ly/2enNRE9

References

1. Grau, O. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. The MIT Press, 2003, 207.

2. Laurel, B. Computers as Theatre. 1st edition Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Boston, MA, USA, 1991

3. Laurel, B. Computers as Theatre. 2nd edition. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Boston, MA, 2014.

4. McDonough, J. A tangled web: Metadata and problems in game preservation. In J. Delve and D.

Anderson, Preserving Complex Digital Objects, Facet Publishing, 2014.

David P. Anderson ( [e-mail]) is Professor of Digital Humanities at the Centre for Research & Development (Arts)/Cultural Informatics Research Group, University of Brighton, U.K.

Copyright held by author.

interaction significantly affects the process of preservation. For example, if we are trying to preserve a flight simulator, we need to consider not only the program as written but the affordances which it offers, and how these are experienced in practice, not all of which may be clear even to the programmer. Even the notion that there is a single ‘object’ of preservation cannot be treated as a given. Just as there is no single, entirely authoritative performance of Hamlet that can stand for all, we can say there is no single authoritative instance of the running of a flight simulator that having been preserved means we require no other. In both cases, serious curatorial skill needs to be brought to bear to decide what exactly ought to be preserved. In the language of mainstream preservation activity, we need to establish, as far as it is possible to do so, the “ significant properties” of the object of preservation, and capture those for future generations.

Although he was writing about art-
works Grau could just as easily have
been thinking about highly interactive
computer systems, as he expressed
well the essence of the problem: “The
strength of material works of art, both
past and present, lies principally in
their function as illuminating and vi-
brant testimonies of the social mem-
ory of humankind. For only fixed art-
works are able to preserve ideas and
concepts enduringly and conserve
the statements of individuals or an
epoch. An open work, which is depen-
dent on interaction with a contempo-
rary audience, or its advanced variant
that follows game theory—the work is
postulated as a game and the observ-
ers, according to the ‘degrees of free-
dom’, as players—effectively means
that images lose their capability to be
historical memory and testimony. In
its stead, there is a durable technical
system as framework and transient,
arbitrary, non-reproducible, and infi-
nitely manipulable images. The work
of art as a discrete object disappears.” 1

For anyone charged with the preservation of highly interactive computer systems, Grau’s view of matters, particularly as expressed in the quotation with which I began this column, is rather too bleak.

There are a number of approaches we can take that do much to ameliorate matters. First, we should, where appropriate, abandon the idea that there is a single authoritative ‘object’ of preservation, in favor of recognizing that sometimes the essence of an object, its most significant features, if you will, lie outside the materiality of the object. That is not to say the hardware and software do not matter—they clearly do—but there is, in addition, something intangible that must also be preserved and documented. There is no simple formula for determining which aspects of user “experience” need to be captured, as this will vary from situation to situation. This is an appraisal and documentation task of the greatest complexity and one which takes a great deal of skill to perform effectively. This might involve not only recording archetypical examples of interaction but potentially also noting how things might have been.

It may not always be possible to preserve complex interactive computer systems in such a way that they can be reproduced perfectly in the future. This might be due financial, technical or other reasons. In such cases, careful documentation of what are considered as the most important elements of the interaction represents a valuable resource for future generations. It is not possible to reproduce and experience at firsthand David Garrick’s first performance of Hamlet

As the complexity
of digital objects
increases, and
the digital impinges
on more and
more of our lives,
so does the need
to see preservation
and curation as
an interdisciplinary
team effort.