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- Martinez, Merisa
(författare)
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Material Awareness : Exploring the Entanglement of Library Digitization and Digital Textual Scholarship
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the past thirty years, the significant technical developments of digital imaging have shifted the ways that library staff produce digital collections derived from textual materials. This shift has introduced new digitization workflows, new partners, and new internal and external tensions. Those tensions, partners, and workflows present an opportunity to reconsider the role of library staff in the development of digital textual scholarship. Digitization has previously been described as a neutral, “clerical” task, devoid of “any critical or bibliographical analysis;” serving merely as a preamble to the critical and intellectual work performed by textual scholars situated in academic departments. However, this description obscures the often complex, symbiotic relationship among textual scholars and a range of library staff involved in digitization – a relationship which evolves depending upon the aims and outputs of each project. This relationship between library digitizers and textual scholars has not been analyzed to any great extent in library and information science (LIS) or digital humanities (DH) literature. To address this gap, this doctoral dissertation explores concepts drawn from library and information science and textual scholarship and uses those concepts as a framework to analyze the activities involved in library digitization and how the people who perform those activities characterize their community of practice. The dissertation also identifies the tensions and barriers faced by both library digitizers and textual scholars and how those factors affect their collaboration. Drawing on a small handful of previous studies and the empirical, ethnographic work performed for this thesis, the dissertation argues that digitization activities in libraries are quickly becoming more advanced, and that several phases can involve aspects of textual, image, and material criticism. Aside from possessing technical skills, library staff must make critical choices and judgments throughout the digitization process, from selection of materials to production, presentation, preservation, and beyond. Carefully documenting those choices and motivations provides empirical grounding for the claim that digitization is a critically informed process that can shape future collaborations and research outputs. In particular, the critical decisions surrounding the creative production of digital artifacts significantly condition their use and reuse in digital scholarship projects. As such, advanced library digitization represents a set of critical transmission activities wherein library staff can serve not only as helpmates but also as intellectual partners in the production of digital textual scholarship.
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| 3. |
- Dahlström, Mats
(författare)
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Selecting everything
- 2023
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Ingår i: Cultivating Information, Organizing Culture. - Växjö : Linnaeus University Press. - 9789180821148 ; , s. 9-9
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)
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| 4. |
- Dahlström, Mats
(författare)
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Digitalisatens proveniens
- 2022
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Kulturarvsdigitalisering utgör inte sällan en komplicerad kedja av händelser, aktörer samt tekniska och kvalitetsmässiga alternativ. Samtidigt närmar sig både allmänhet och forskare digitala reproduktioner (s.k. digitalisat) med en ”face value”-attityd. Digitalisatet antas vara identiskt med det fysiska originalet, trots att det egentligen är en simulering, och trots att en serie av redigeringar ofta har företagits mellan den ursprungliga bildfångsten och det användaren ser framför sig på skärmen. Dessutom saknas ofta den historiska och bibliografiska länken mellan det användaren ser på skärmen och det fysiska föremål detta påstår sig avbilda. Sådana länkar uttrycker digital proveniens. Digitalisering antas föra samhällets kulturarv närmare användaren, men paradoxalt nog kan på det här sättet ytterligare avstånd införas mellan kulturarv och allmänhet. Vilka verktyg kan de digitaliserande institutionerna erbjuda för att användare ska kunna bedöma digitalisatens proveniens, autenticitet och tillförlitlighet?
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Dahlström, Mats, 1964-
(författare)
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Documentary provenance and paradata
- 2020
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Scholarly users of digital reproductions (so-called facsimiles) in digitized collections tend to approach the reproductions on a face value basis, but how can they be certain that what they see on the screen is "the same" as the physical source document the reproduction purports to reproduce? Digitizing institutions may provide keys for the user to unlock this kind of digital provenance, where paradata and metadata will be important, together with e.g. extant project documentation, paratextual material, and access to the uncompressed master files from which the reproduction presented on screen derives.
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| 7. |
- Dahlström, Mats, 1964-
(författare)
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En textkritisk blick på digitala faksimiler.
- 2020
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Ingår i: Keynote paper for the conference Om tekstbegrebet (= On the concept of text), University of Copenhagen, January 17, 2020. - Köpenhamn.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Den vetenskapliga textutgivningens forskningsobjekt är definitionsmässigt ’text’’. Historiskt har produkten av detta textkritiska arbete framför allt antagit formen av en enskild etablerad, sekventiell transkriptionstext. Dagens digitala utgåvor letar efter andra former, vyer och nivåer. Mest omedelbart sker detta genom s.k. digitala faksimiler som åtföljer hela transkriptionstexten. Faksimilerna ska verifiera grunden för den etablerade transkriptionstexten genom att erbjuda fotografier av textvittnen som ett slags objektiva rådata, gentemot vilka användaren t.ex. kritiskt kan pröva utgivarens textetablering. Men hur vet användaren vad det är för avbildad källa han eller hon ser framför sig på skärmen, finns t.ex. uppgifter om reproduktionens proveniens? Man kan också ifrågasätta faksimilbildernas objektivitet. Behöver vi ”se” dem med en mer (text)kritisk blick? Finns det rentav anledning att betrakta dem som delar av utgivarens forskningsobjekt på nivå med ’text’?
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| 8. |
- Dahlström, Mats
(författare)
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Copies and Facsimiles
- 2019
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Ingår i: International Journal of Digital Humanities. - : Springer. - 2524-7832 .- 2524-7840. ; 1:2, s. 195-208
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The concepts of original and copy, of source and facsimile, always convey particular understandings of the process of reproducing documents. This essay is an analysis of these concepts, in particular copies and facsimiles, framed within the context of digital reproduction. The activities and cases discussed are picked from two areas: digital scholarly editing and cultural heritage digitization performed by research libraries. The conceptual analysis draws on three fields of scholarly inquiry: scholarly editing, library and information science, and philosophical aesthetics.
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| 9. |
- Dahlström, Mats, et al.
(författare)
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Documentary Provenance and Digitized Collections
- 2019
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Ingår i: The Document Academy (DOCAM) Annual meeting 2019 of Documents and Data.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- For decades, memory institutions such as libraries and archives have been engaged in digitizing cultural heritage materials in their holdings (also in the form of large private-public partnerships such as Google Books). The collections usually take on the form of image reproductions (scans, digital photographs), text transcriptions (OCR’d or manually keyed) and varying degrees and types of metadata (usually legal and rudimentary bibliographic metadata). Although there are signs that public funding for large-scale digitization is decreasing in the US and many European countries, significant resources are still being invested in digitization. A whole range of humanities research depends on having these digitized collections available. Further, in humanities research such as digital scholarly editing, digital reproductions produced by memory institutions are not only referred to but incorporated as building blocks in the editions themselves. In such cases, they are not only used as mere illustrations accompanying a scholarly text transcription, but can also serve as research tools and as instruments for accountability and accessibility. Nevertheless, the critical inquiry of scholarly editors is directed towards text transcriptions, whereas digital images are often uncritically taken at face value, as objective representations of the source documents. There seems to be room for an increased critical understanding of such images as interpretations based on scholarly informed deliberation, or a ’document criticism’ for digital image reproductions in the manner of how textual criticism has been established since centuries to establish the history, relation and provenance of texts and their versions. Partly, this face value approach is fostered by mass digitization, with projects such as Google Books as a paradigm, where there is little room for scholarly considerations during the image capture. As a result, image capture is portrayed as a fairly trivial and straightforward task that can be more or less automated. But there are in fact many types and levels of library digitization, suggesting a map of variety with mass digitization in one corner and what has been termed critical or slow digitization in the other. The choices made in terms of preferred processes have been shown to matter to the way memory institutions such as museums, archives and libraries are conceived of (Dahlström, Hansson and Kjellman 2012).A relatively small amount of research has explored the accuracy, usability and reusability of these digital representations to humanities scholars, the kind of research questions they open up for, and what degree of authenticity and trust we are able to ascribe to them. This paper explores the needs and potentials of such keys, instruments with which users can “investigate the road that documents have travelled”, to use the phrase from the CFP for this conference. What pieces of information (if any) do the digitizing institutions provide for users to ascertain the link between the digital representation on screen and the physical source document it purports to represent? The paper will:address some of the critical considerations libraries and archives face when digitizing their holdings of text-based materials, with significant bearing on the value and (re)usability of the digital reproductions when placed within a scholarly contextdiscuss if and how scholarly inquiry is hindered by the way digitized collections are selected, formatted, made available and presenteddiscuss crucial concepts to understand the relation between digital image reproductions and represented sources, andpropose research avenues for exploring these concepts and questions in depth.Key concepts discussed in the paper are:mass/speedy digitization versus critical/slow digitization and their un/critical management of digital reproductionsrelation between source and reproduction:linearityhistorical provenance (to a single object, to several objects, or to a series of historical anchor points) and the variety of potential trajectoriesauthenticity, faithfulness and exhaustiveness of digital reproductions vis-à-vis sourcestransparency and keys:metadata and paradata (paradata concerns the processes of collecting, digitizing and curating the materials)The digital image reproduction invokes the virtual presence of the source, so the bond between reproduction and source is not only graphical and material but is also defined by a retrospective relationship between two points in history, the then and the now. A heightened awareness of this on the basis of a dedicated image criticism could serve as an incentive for digitizing institutions to increase the transparency of the production history of such images and to subject their degree of authenticity and (un)certainty to better scrutiny. Exhaustive paradata and metadata for the images, for instance, might be of paramount importance, providing information about states, production history, and digital provenance. What is missing for many current reproductions in digitized collections is the historical-bibliographical link between, on the one hand, what we see on the screen and, on the other, a particular identified artefact in a physical collection. In other words, which document was actually used when producing a given digital reproduction?
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| 10. |
- Dahlström, Mats, et al.
(författare)
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Documentary Provenance and Digitized Collections : Concepts and Problems
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings from the Document Academy. - Akron, OH : The University of Akron Press. - 2473-215X. ; 6:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Provenance research in digitized memory institution collections is mainly devoted to documenting and mapping the trajectories of the physical source documents across time, place and contexts, primarily by developing metadata standards and data models. The provenance of the digital reproduction and its relation to one or several physical source documents is however not being subjected to much inquiry. A possible explanation for this is the face-value approach with which we tend to regard digital reproductions. Looking more closely at such reproductions and their complex digitization process suggests a far from straightforward and linear provenance relation, and begs the question of what it is we actually see on the screen and what source document the digital reproduction purports to reproduce. To ascertain this provenance bond and hence the value, authenticity and usability of the digital reproduction, users need to be provided with keys such as a thorough account of the digitization process, access to various states of the digital images, exhaustive metadata for the reproduction, and not least paradata documenting the digitization process, including conversion, editing, curation, and decisions made during the process.
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