You are here: Home › Archivalization › Emulation and Digital Preservation

Emulation and Digital Preservation

“Imagine having a record and no record player.”

So begins an interesting piece in the Times on preserving born-digital material, in this case Salman Rushdie’s PC (or Apple as it were). The article raises the usual points about how unreadable all this stuff is and how fragile digital material actually is. While we have been wringing our hands on how to digitize our print heritage (see the TLS Commentary November 20, 2009), we have been overlooking how to preserve our digital one (not everyone of course).

What I think is so interesting about this issue is not the technical one of how we are going to do this, but rather the theoretical one of how thinking about digital preservation actually changes how we will think about preservation.

In an earlier post I had asked whether digital culture will be marked by a permanent sense of presence, that all things online will be so in their latest versions all the time. I am continually struck by how ahistorical digital interfaces are (yes there is the internet archive, but it feels fantastically simple). This stood in stark contrast to the way book culture has developed such a refined sense of historicity and how important books and history are to modern life for the way they mutually reinforce one another. I asked whether online interfaces will one day develop a sense of time like that of books.

One possible answer I think lies in the problem of digital preservation or a particular answer to it: emulation. Emulation is the strategy through which a later computational infrastructure mimicks an earlier one in order to make it accessible. I’m just beginning to put some thought into this, but what I find fascinating about this problem is the way it so markedly differs from priorities of print preservation. To preserve a printed text one could put it somewhere safe (a library), copy it (facsimile), or reproduce it (edition). Each of these three strategies was driven by an ideology of authenticity, that the practice of preservation did its best to maintain the original in its original state.

Digital preservation is of course driven by this same idea of preserving an original. But where earlier hardware is no longer accessible, i.e. where earlier texts are no longer readable (no record player for the record), it must do so through a process of emulation. Emulation strikes me as a fascinating case because it marries translation with preservation — it says the best way to preserve something, to make it accessible, is to translate it rather than keep it the same.

A very viable process of preserving books was just putting them in very safe storage — no reproduction, no nothing, just the original. With digital material all acts of preservation, beyond a very short time horizon, will probably require continual translation into new readable formats. It makes it harder and harder to fetishize something original.

Indeed, will we still believe in preservation when it increasingly looks like translation?

2 Responses to "Emulation and Digital Preservation"

Everett A. Wilson says:

March 23, 2010 at 1:19 pm

“Digital Information Lasts Forever – or Five Years, Whichever Comes First.” — Jeff Rothenberg, RAND Corp.

“It is significant that Keynes should have said that in the long run we are all dead and that we have little other interest than that of living for the immediate future. Planning is a word to be used for short periods—for long periods it is suspect and with it the planner.” — Harold Adams Innis in “A Plea for Time,” The Bias of Communication.

“Information processing and flows need themselves to be controlled, so that information technologies must continue to be applied at higher and higher layers of control–certainly an ironic twist to the Control Revolution.” — James R. Beniger in The Control Revolution.

For a media policy seminar and mini graduate student colloquium at McGill, last fall 2009, I entertained the possibility that the current hype surrounding “emulation” as a viable preservation strategy might be just as quixotic as the lay belief that “Digital Information Lasts Forever.” Still, I fear that the conceptual shift to emulation might prove later, in hindsight, to be just as quixotic as many of the piecemeal efforts widely employed today, such as simple data/content conversion (e.g. converting magnetic tape to CD, or DVD to Hard Disk etc); refreshing data (opening and closing files routinely to ensure all bits remain in order); virus checking (along with painstakingly choreographed and documented data-rescue measures/standards); creating sufficient descriptive metadata to ensure that future generations know what’s in an archive (even if the digitized contents might no longer be readable!); and adherence to other best practices for managing bits and bytes in a digital world. Conceptually and theoretically, emulation sounds promising perhaps.
Even so, sober scepticism (or even cynicism) seems warranted in this case, not so much because there might be insurmountable road blocks on the technical side. To the contrary, emulation probably can be done…perhaps done very well, if enough care and thought went into planning, governing and (yes) controlling the highly technical processes of managing informational entropy. If Beniger’s systems theory contains any merit, the problem of entropy will likely never go away, but will always seek its own revenge at every turn. With each effort to lend order to chaos in the digital landscape, the forces of entropy will plot their revenge and return. After all, for Beniger, revolutions in the history of technology are rarely about radical breaks (e.g. akin to the French Revolution), but about a return to a prior state of control–a process of ‘revolving’ and returning back to a state that never lasts or finds permanent rest (thank goodness), but eventually breaks down again.
An assortment of archiving policies, governance models, professional standards and technological mechanisms converge under the banner of “digital preservation” with the aim of controlling something–controlling the future in some sense by making something last longer (or appear to last longer, via emulation/translation/conversion) than it would otherwise. Okay. Fine. That’s all well and good. To satirically paraphrase the optimism expressed by Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide, in the best of all possible worlds, digital preservation will likely work; and because we tend to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, we like to think that it will work.
To answer or perhaps to reframe your last question (so that I can answer it differently, maybe), I wonder if “believing in preservation” (whether the believers are laypeople who think that scanning their family photos to CD will do the trick, or whether the faithful are trained archivists who invest heavily in the latest preservation infrastructure, and pay through the nose for upgrades each year) might be a source of the current crisis … I wonder if “believing in preservation” is exactly the kind of self-delusion that is contributing to the perceived loss of cultural memory that Innis conveys so richly in his essay, “A Plea for Time.” Maybe “believing in preservation” is precisely what prevents most of us, when we sit down to create something, inscribe ideas on something and disseminate something, from asking the question as we choose and employ our tools: Do I want this ‘something’ to last more than five years? Do I want it to last more than fifty years? Do I want it to last at all? Do I want it to last forever? Do I care? Should I care?
Maybe “believing in preservation” is part of the problem? Maybe too many of us are thinking like Dr. Pangloss, or are unable to think differently about the future of cultural memory, when we sit down to make our inscriptions on unstable media? We resign. We shrug, and console ourselves that all will be well and good: “It will be preserved if its worthy of preservation, no matter how fragile. In this best of all possible worlds, which happens to be digital, why worry when we have digital preservationists busily contemplating the possibilities of emulation?”
Andrew Piper says:

March 29, 2010 at 2:29 pm

Hi Everett,

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I have a feeling we agree, but perhaps in orders of magnitude. I’m not sure I want to chuck out the very idea of preservation itself. I am a literary and media historian and thus find knowledge of the past valuable in and of itself. What I do like, however, is the way new media put pressure on the ideologies of permanence that surround most of our preservationist practices. When Goethe was thinking about our relationship to a past heritage — a past he felt was absolutely essential to any sense of cultural renewal — it was always in a transformative sense — that the past was preserved precisely by being changed through time. It is this dialectic, if you want to call it that, between preservation and renewal, that I find appealing and that I see being introduced in some ways (and not others) in new media.

So getting rid of preservation, yes, if by that we mean a subservience to permanent presence, but no, if by that we mean a kind of modernist perpetual cultural starting over.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply