From Scroll to Screen: Cultural Memory in Transition
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68219/kkdye964Keywords:
Digital Forensic Philology, Ontological Rupture, Synthetic Philology, Human-Centered Computational Hermeneutics, Archival Vigilance, Digital HumanitiesAbstract
Digitization is one of those topics that many people think of as inherently uncomfortable. However, it is not at all a method of saving our culture. The primary purpose of this paper is to develop an argument composed of three distinct levels of proof that demonstrate the fundamental difference between the digital forms of documentation produced by converting physical forms of documents created before the development of digital technology (scrolls & codices/ manuscripts, etc.) and those produced using digital technologies to create new documents (e.g. emails/texts). These differences are what I refer to the "ontological rupture" of digitization. In other words: Digitization creates a completely new type of document compared to the types of documents created in pre-digital times. It is not simply an upgrade; digitization represents an entirely new form of documentation. The first section will present my concept of "Digital Forensic Philology," which is similar to methods used by medieval scholars in reading parchment scrolls. The second section will explain the issue of power; more specifically, who controls the global archive? All of us recognize that there are many access/communication issues related to the domination of information in today's society. The third section of this paper will examine a terrifying dimension of this process: Generative AI. I will use the term "Synthetic Philology" to describe the possibility that machines are rewriting our shared cultural history, and I will propose the concept of Human-Centered Computational Hermeneutics as the only viable reaction to this phenomenon. Throughout the paper, I argue that Academic Associations can no longer simply sustain the cultural memories of their communities; rather, they must assume the role of architects of an idea I call "archival vigilance". Finally, I conclude with a specific agenda for future research because, if we do not take action, we are walking ourselves into a "Digital Dark Age". Keywords: Digital Forensic Philology, Epistemic Sovereignty, Synthetic Philology, Critical Algorithmic Hermeneutics, Thick Metadata, Scroll-to-Screen Transmission, Cultural Memory, Academic Societies, Post-Human Archive, TEI/LOD.
Downloads
References
1. Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacres et simulation. Éditions Galilée.
(English edition: Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.)
2. Benjamin, W. (1936). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 5(1), 40–68.
3. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? ???? In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 610–623). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
4. Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The costs of connection: How data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford University Press.
5. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. Basic Books.
6. Hayles, N. K. (2012). How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. University of Chicago Press.
7. Heidorn, P. B. (2008). Shedding light on the dark data in the long tail of science. Library Trends, 57(2), 280–299. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.0.0036
8. Kirschenbaum, M. G. (2008). Mechanisms: New media and the forensic imagination. MIT Press.
9. Kuny, T. (1997). A digital dark age? Challenges in the preservation of electronic information. International Preservation News, 17, 8–13.
(Note: Your original journal attribution appears incorrect.)
10. Masanet, E., Shehabi, A., Lei, N., Smith, S., & Koomey, J. (2020). Recalibrating global data center energy-use estimates. Science, 367(6481), 984–986. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aba3758
11. McKenzie, D. F. (1999). Bibliography and the sociology of texts. Cambridge University Press.
12. Moretti, F. (2000). Conjectures on world literature. New Left Review, 1, 54–68.
13. Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Harvard University Press.
14. Pearce-Moses, R. (2005). A glossary of archival and records terminology. Society of American Archivists.
15. Posner, M. (2015). Humanities, digital labor, and the future of the profession. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9(2).
16. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.
