Twenty-four: Arsenic and Old Interface

I want to begin with a little story of Batsto Mansion in New Jersey, built by the Richards family in the 1800s, who were among the wealthiest New Jerseyans, and then expanded by Joseph Wharton (of the University of Pennsylvania Business School fame). If you take a tour around the house you will be shown into Wharton’s library, which was quite magnificent for the time; but what is most significant for our purposes is that in the corner abutting some bookshelves you will see a sink.

When you see this you will probably wonder what it is doing in a library, and you will possibly think that Wharton liked to mix his Bourbon with some water and, being such a generous employer, he would not have wanted to disturb the servants; but you would be wrong in thinking this. Wharton did not make all his money being a generous employer and pouring his own drinks.

The reason that the sink is there, you will be informed by your very knowledgeable guide, Gail Hunt, is because all the books on the shelves were pasted with arsenic along the edges to kill the termites and any other bugs that might want to eat the pages.

This little fact seems important to me, not just because it provides these short remarks with a title – “Arsenic and Old Interface” – but because of what it says about that old interface – that it was not an eternal form that would necessarily survive all forms of threats. Books could rot, or be destroyed in fires or floods [and one wonders how books fared recently in the tornados of the South and mid-west]. In the case of Batsto, the termites were ready to strike, and, if one forgot to wash one’s hands before dinner, one could find that one’s own interest in books was extinguished quite excruciatingly.

That is my starting point when thinking about sustainability of digital publishing and the personnel process – which is to say that I have never really been animated about the question of whether something will survive intact, as a reason to support or deny someone tenure. Indeed, when I was asked to talk about the buzz word sustainability, my first thought was “how does he know that Stockton College claims to be New Jersey’s green college – Wow our PR people are really doing a good job if they’ve heard about this in Virginia.” Much to my disappointment I learned that I should be talking about whether or not digital work will survive and what bearing this has on tenure and promotion decisions.

Well, I have had one person come up for promotion to full professor, who had done scant work in the old medium of books (since s/he had been tenured), and s/he had published most of her work (which was top-notch, in my view) digitally on line. It didn’t occur to me to ask whether or not it would be around in five years, ten years, or fifty. I am not particularly concerned about whether or not it is. For three reasons – which, since we are in the Old South talking about enslavement to the Old Interface, I want to fit into the categories of Necessary Evil and Positive Good:

1) My first reason might fit into the category of Necessary Evil. We no longer have the luxury of publishing everything that we would like in hardcopy. That is unsustainable – partly because the University Presses can no longer publish and make a profit from all the work that needs to be produced by academics. And even if they could, the existence of a new medium to which more and more people are turning means that it would only be spitting in the wind to complain that the new work isn’t going to be around for ever. Moreover, at most small colleges across the country we want to see increased research and publication, and the fact that the digital route is now available to our faculty means that they have greater opportunities than before – to be wanting faculty to increase their public and scholarly record, while demanding that they stick to a moribund medium would be cruel and unusual punishment.  So complaining about the limited longevity of digital work would be cutting off our noses to spite our faces, however much we might think our faces look better in hardcopy than on the web.

2) My second reason might fit the category of Positive Good: It is that we shouldn’t be thinking about digital publishing as a surrogate or replacement for hardcopy publishing. The best work, in my humble opinion, is often going to be something that cannot really be replicated in the old medium – I didn’t get a look at all the work yesterday, but I know that much of the work on display could not be done as well – or perhaps at all – simply in book form. As such, it is immaterial whether or not it survives as long as a book can survive. Longevity has its uses, but for its own sake has no great advantage.  If something is important, it will survive, if it doesn’t, it won’t. Predicting what will and won’t survive may be beyond our ken – we can and should only evaluate the content. Our libraries are replete with volumes that are no longer turned to and which are gathering dust, but they will survive long enough for the library to sell them off, like the seven volumes from George Bancroft’s 8-volume History of the United States that I saved from being tossed by Bryn Mawr College Library not so long ago. One volume had previously been destroyed – perhaps by the termites.

3) My third reason sounds more like Lincoln’s view of the natural decline of slavery – and so doesn’t fit either with Positive Good or Necessary Evil. It is this: Something that is interesting and makes a statement or contribution will survive if it remains so and continues to do these things, whether or not it is in hardcopy or is digital. Personally, I have two books and an encyclopedia and tons of articles that I have published in paper; I have one blog that I kept between about 2003 and 2008, and a book that I published on line in 2003. The books are seldom referenced; while the blog and the on-line books continually get reactions – from people who like and vehemently dislike them. My best work, for what it is worth, is a comparative history volume called Inside Out, Outside In, published in hardcopy by Macmillan/Palgrave, but few people have read it. When Robin Kelley came to Stockton a few weeks ago, the first thing he said to me was we had to talk about my Histrionyx project. I didn’t even know I had a project, but Histrionics/onyx was the name of both the blog and the on-line book, and it was what he had found when he looked me up. As such, the chances are that in a few years time (particularly after I pull together a second-volume of the on-line book) Histrionyx is more likely than Inside Out to be what survives in the memory of historians about my work.

I am sure I could be or should be talking about TEI encoding. I can say very little about TEI encoding – except that TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative, and what this work seems to suggest to me, is that as more publishing is done on-line, and as more resources are directed towards this, and away from older forms, we will find better ways to ensure longevity. 

I will finish with two thoughts: Firstly, is the question of sustainability and longevity a last ditch effort to reaffirm the primacy of hardcopy? If so, how concerned about this should we really be about it?

Secondly, I remember all the paperback books from the 1950s that were on my parents’ shelves growing up. These Penguins have long since crumbled to dust, but new imprints have been issued in their place. When digital works have influence, they will be continue to have life, certainly for as long as those flimsy orange paperbacks that not even any arsenic could have saved from oblivion.