I had the rare experience (for me) of reading that NYT Book Review piece on paper, when it came out, and this is just the thoughtful response that I'd hoped someone (probaby you, I thought) would provide.

I bet Robert will answer your email, but I bet he'll be reluctant to exchange his current version control system for CVS! The versioning project is a great idea, and it's good to start the experiment with some existing system. But there are a lot of issues that relate to the specific software used, not just its overall purpose, as you're well aware. What if I sent out a call to get a bunch of literary writers, poets, novelists, etc. together to write literary COMPUTER PROGRAMS, a new and exciting opportunity, and then I said that everyone would be learning to program in PowerBuilder?

...for those luck enough to be ignorant of this system:

http://www.sybase.com/products/developmentintegration/powerbuilder

Matt, I suppose one of the purposes of the remarks and the draft versions of the talk being polished for publication is to reassure folks concerned with such matters that electronic files can be preserved. It is the very same capabilites that enable filtering of the material destined to the archive and thereafter the electronic medium can be used to offer choices in what and how material archived can be accessed. I'm intrigued by the shoulds. We can save; should we? We can delete, should we? I see the remarks as calling for a more conscious use of the computing machine -- both as storage device and as a means to access records. I wonder how the imperatives would be marshalled if the remarks began with the statement about the crystal clock at the center of the CPU. Is this not the heart of the matter: time? Actually it is perhaps more a question of time investments. Your remarks make me realize that forgetting (and important stage in synthesize information into knowledge) may require its own investements of
time. A quibble... the number of minutes a file is open is not necessarily the number of temporal units spent editing. Attention can be on other open windows or evey away from the keyboard or input device. That particular bit of metadata is a machine view of the file. The human view may be different. Still it is significant to determine the time between opening and closing the file: it indicates its availability in sort sort of staging area. And a question: are electronicl objects self-documenting? Might it be more accurate to describe then as open to linking to metadata? For me, it is not the object that is self-documenting. It doesn't have that much autonomy. It is the relations between an object, other objects and an environment that lead to documentation about the states of those relations. What is being preserved is not just the object itself but the object as a trace of relations, social and technological.

The remarks make a somewhat seamless transition between the records management needs of individuals and institutions. The clock as timestamper and the clock as timer might provide a way of tracking the shift from individual to institution (from personal to historical) and align the question of preservation with one of transition. For in some ways the clock as timer helps manage the movement. Zadie Smith with an eye on the clock just might be a Zadie Smith able to manipulate her browser to have those emails from the free account provider saved to another place. In a sense I believe what you are calling for, Matt, is the time investment in learning how the machines work so that the records of interest may have a greater chance of being preserved, that is making the passage from personal and commercial routes to the institutions that tend to the archives and history making.

Francois, that's really fabulous and generous feedback. Thank you. I will put it to good use.

This probably won't be recieved due to a glitch in the preferences of my system. too many of us do not take the time to compose our thoughts in our processors before placing them in e-mail. My preference when i am taking my correspondence seriously is writing in a word processing program and due to my system glitch, copying into the e-mail composer. I then go back to the WP and edit, add to, or incorporate material into other manuscripts, in the same way perhaps that I maintain several pulp notebooks for long-hand jots.
I think that we take ourselves too lightly when responding directly in e-mail- I've read messages that were no better than machine generated spam.

Matt -- Well, it's taken me almost an entire month to comment on your thoughtful remarks at the Bits & Bytes symposium -- thank you for inspiring deeper thinking about records management. Though I see that Francois has already raised a quibble along the lines of mine, I will simply say that the information gained from the "Properties" window may or may not be as accurate as your remarks claim: "By opening my word processor’s Properties window I can ascertain, to the date- and millisecond, when the file was first created and when it was last edited. I can count the number of words and characters, but more interestingly the number of minutes spent editing the document." Francois has already commented on the fact that you can't really know the number of minutes spent editing, and I will add that you may not know when the text in question was in fact "first created." Sure, you can know when the file you are reading was first created, but that may or may not have a correlation to the creation of the text. For example, a text contained in a file that I have just renamed would appear, if someone looked at the "Properties" file, as if its date of creation is today. In fact, the file was simply renamed today. Nothing else in the file has changed for the past three years, though the "Properties" window tells you, in two different places, that the file was created and modified today (and that's only true for the file name, not for anything else in the document).

One might ask why I, a writer, critic, and editor with passionate interests in creative process, would not go to great lengths to document file migrations, renamings, etc. The fact is (and this speaks to something also noted above) that when allocating my time, I'd much rather devote it to the acts of creation themselves and what organizational strategies I need to maintain in order to advance the work -- if that means the "Properties" window does not render reliable information, then so be it. Perhaps I'm not being clear, and the following example from today's work will help: I just regularized the file names for different versions of a document I've been working on for the past nine months. If one looks only at the information in the "Properties" window, it appears that version 3 was created and modified AFTER the final (11th) version. The dates on the file names recount the order of revisions of that particular document.

Oh well, this is an overly long way of saying not all data is as objective and precise as those milliseconds make it appear.

You know, it's funny--I'd been tempted to close down comments on this entry for a while because of blog spam but have been resisting in hopes that more valuable feedback came in. I'm glad I did.

Martha, you are of course correct in all your specifics about how Properties works. But rather than trumpet the infallibility of any specific technology (and maybe I *did* do a bit too much of that) I think that in writing this short piece my objectives were twofold: first, to stress that preservation is ultimately social rather than technological--while recognizing the very real techninical hurdles we nonetheless need to start making smart decisions about how we work with our data and not simply write its longevity off to the conventional wisdom that digital data is ephemeral; and second, to make the point that we can *model* electronic documents any way we choose, and to the extent that current electronic records are fragile, deceptive, etc. this is at least partly the result of implicit decisions made in the modeling. We see this if we look at various content management systems and the way they enforce stricter editing regimes. I think the kind of data captured in Properties is in many ways just a glimpse of the potential, for better *and* worse, that electronic texts have for a revolution in textual practice.