"There’s been a revolution in remembrance. Digital photography’s democratised the night-shoot. One touch at the end of a sleepy phone call on your way home, you can freeze the halo from streetlamps, the occluded moon, night buses, cocoons shaking through brick cuts, past all-night shops. Right there in your pocket, a lit-up memory of now."
London’s Overthrow - China Miéville (via new-aesthetic)
(via new-aesthetic)
David Streitfield, “In a Flood Tide of Digital Data, an Ark Full of Books“
Mr. Kahle had the idea for the physical archive while working on the Internet Archive, which has digitized two million books. With a deep dedication to traditional printing — one of his sons is named Caslon, after the 18th-century type designer — he abhorred the notion of throwing out a book once it had been scanned. The volume that yielded the digital copy was special.
"Shortly after the September 11 attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps surveyed several hundred subjects about their memories of that awful day. The scientists then repeated the surveys, tracking how the stories steadily decayed. At one year out, 37 percent of the details had changed. By 2004 that number was approaching 50 percent. Some changes were innocuous—the stories got tighter and the narratives more coherent—but other adjustments involved a wholesale retrofit. Some people even altered where they were when the towers fell. Over and over, the act of repeating the narrative seemed to corrupt its content. The scientists aren’t sure about this mechanism, and they have yet to analyze the data from the entire 10-year survey. But Phelps expects it to reveal that many details will be make-believe. ‘What’s most troubling, of course, is that these people have no idea their memories have changed this much,’ she says. ‘The strength of the emotion makes them convinced it’s all true, even when it’s clearly not.’"
Jonah Lehrer, “The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever”
Nabokov’s retranslation of his own translation, from The Paris Review.
- BK: A raw .tif file or .jpg that was made 10 years ago can still be opened today. You couldn’t necessarily open them in other programs that became obsolete, like early page-composition programs. Some of the raw data can be used and saved. On the other hand, I make prints of my work. I have backed it up on paper, too.
- RB: That’s a lot of backing up.
- BK: That’s backing up several times digitally, myself. And then my publisher probably has them somewhere backed up. And then every time it was printed in a newspaper, there was a file, and those may be floating around. Who knows how retrievable this will be 100 years from now?
An archival photo from The New York Times shows news pictures being sorted in the newspaper’s photo “morgue,” which houses millions of images. Here they are — several each week — for you to see. Welcome to The Lively Morgue. Photo: The New York Times
Photos: Pages from a real-life Sherlock Holmes’ diary
Between 1909 and 1912, Detective Inspector Robert Mather of the Manchester Police kept scrupulous notes on 65 characters from the city’s criminal underworld, including Samuel Searson, a.k.a. Samuel Jackson, who most recently served six months for “stealing silver shields” and three elaborately coiffed individuals labelled as “brothel thieves.” (Photos: Bonhams/Reuters/handout)
“As a student of the history of the book, I am fascinated by paratext and peritext; that is, everything in and about a book beyond the body of the text,” Krissy Wilson, the creator of the Tumblr The Art of Google Books, in an interview with NewsHour Art Beat.
“…To me, used books are infinitely more interesting than the kinds of books that collectors covet.”
For some of us—like me—the new online archive of Modernist literary journals is pretty exciting. I mean, how can you resist reading a litmag with a cover like that?
(via Vol. 1 Brooklyn)
