Archiving 2.0 – Your Local Git Depository
June 29
What will literary archives look like in the digital age? This was the question thrown up by Robert McCrum on the Guardian blog earlier last week, and the trail of urls from the comments page certainly led to some interesting results.
It’s fairly obvious that, as Dylan said, the times they are a changing. The humble paper and pen have been replaced by a bevy of digital technology (macs, notebooks, blackberries, Firefox, Google, Tweetdeck, the OED online et cetera et cetera). Of course there are still authors who write by hand, such as Neil Gaiman or Edna O’Brien, but generally speaking the process of drafting, redrafting and editing is lost in electronic space. So where then does that leave the researchers and archivists? How do you categorise, display and preserve a literary legacy when in fact there is nothing you can really lay you hands on? And, on the writers side, how do you donate/sell your archives to those wealthy institutions like Yale or Emory University, who have been know to fork out a pretty penny for famous works (Tom Stoppard’s papers were rumoured to have attracted a seven-figure sum), when all you have is your old laptop and a CD drive?
The first thing, according to Matthew Kirschenbaum at the University of Maryland, is to get creative: ‘You could potentially look at a browser history, see [if a particular author] visited a particular website on a particular day and time, and then if you were to go into the draft of one of [their] manuscripts, you could see that draft was edited at a particular day and hour, and you could establish a connection between something [they were] looking at on the web with something that [they] then wrote.’
The second thing, according to Cory Doctorow), is to get your digital git on. He and Thomas Gideon have been working on a fabulously nerdy free software program for writers called Flashbake. I’m no techie, so I’ll let Doctorow explain:
‘[Flashbake] is a set of Python scripts that check your hot files for changes every 15 minutes, and checks in any changed files to a local git repository. Git is a free “source control” program used by programmers to track changes to source-code, but it works equally well on any text file. If you write in a text-editor like I do, then Flashbake can keep track of your changes for you as you go.
‘Flashbake looks at any files that you ask it to check (I have it looking at all my fiction-in-progress, my to-do list, my file of useful bits of information, and the completed electronic versions of my recent books), and records any changes made since the last check, annotating them with the current timezone on the system-clock, the weather in that timezone as fetched from Google, and the last three headlines with your by-line under them in your blog’s RSS feed (I've been characterising this as “Where am I, what's it like there, and what am I thinking about?”). It also records your computer’s uptime.’
I’m not a huge archiving buff, but I do think this is pretty darn interesting (although if I ever used it, Flashbake would probably reveal a lot more about my procrastination habits than it would anything to do with the creative process). One issue may be that while the program works well with plain text files, I’m not sure how well it does with Word docs, where I’m guessing most people do a lot of their writing.
If you want to download flashbake, you can try it here. Although I’m guessing that some writers like Discworld author Terry Pratchett won’t be trying it any time soon. Here’s what he had to say about keeping records of his work: ‘I save about twenty drafts – that’s ten meg of disc space – and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there’s a cry here of “Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!” and the rest are wiped.’
JA
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Comments
29 Jun 09 at 5:57
Oh, brave for Pratchett - why the hell not. It kind of creeps me out seeing laptops in exhibitions: even though I do believe in digital traces, I'm not going to clap my hands to keep them alive.
...29 Jun 09 at 11:56
After talking with a friend who still handwrites novels because of the way he can retrieve earlier versions by virtue of them not being overwritten, I started versioning my drafts - every time I open a piece of writing that's still in progress I save as and add one to the version number.
I don't always make use of the earlier versions, but with poems particularly, sometimes when I've painted myself into a corner it's nice to have v4 or v5 to go back to - kind of a long-term manual undo function, I guess.
...29 Jun 09 at 12:17
I had checked out Flashbake when it was first being developed, but the bugs were a bit scarier than they are now and I soon removed it. To be honest, although there are all these great apps like Evernote and the now defunct Google Notebook for recording ideas, it seems like every time there's a large-scale poll on these matters (i.e. on 43things or Lifehacker) the humble pen and paper continues to win out for note taking and sketching concepts out.
That said, clever people like Doctorow and others are making the Internet and digital technology in general a more attractive alternative for sourcing inspiration. The job that our brain does in everyday life in taking all the sensory input and somehow combining it into that one moment of 'Aha!' that results in a story or poem is (very) slowly being approximated by bot scripts and lines of code.
Of course, you still need that spark of putting it all together, but if you can align all the elements together in an optimum orientation before they hit your head there's a greater chance they'll come together. That's where I think digital technology will begin to be a big influence.
...29 Jun 09 at 12:19
Oh, and for the record my preferred program for writing/'versioning'/archiving is The Guide. It's basically notepad with the ability to build hierarchies and rich text support built-in.
...29 Jun 09 at 12:36
Thanks, Phil, I'll check The Guide out. I have to say that archiving - digitally or otherwise does demand a level of organisation that I aspire to, but fail to achieve, when I'm doing my own writing. There is that strange thing, too, of having to consider one's words important enough to keep track of in a formal sense. As in, 'I might be famous one day so I better keep my archive in order'.
...29 Jun 09 at 15:23
For me, I find that writing digitally means I'm pretty lazy at keeping track of old work. I may back up things every once and a while, but other than that I always work off the one doc and and don't bother saving drafts.
There is a point at which my interest in archiving ends. But I do think that programs like flashbake etc are important because many people are interested in preserving work, and we will need a way of doing so in future as are more and more things move online.
...29 Jun 09 at 19:56
A perfectly timed post. For those who are interested, I highly recommend a nifty Firefox plugin called Zotero. It has some incredible time-shifting properties.
Might I ask where I can find the archives for this blog? Are they hiding under that sticky black banner?
...30 Jun 09 at 9:26
Brad, the archives aren't easily found at the moment but we're in the process of upgrading our site at which point you'll be able to access them. That's about a month away, I think.
...30 Jun 09 at 17:28
oh and here's a (kind of) related follow-up. Nabokov's archives have just become available at the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2009/09-128.html
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