Track Changes: Preservation and the research process

My research project is one that has me a bit out of my comfort zone. Usually, I always choose the physical reading material over digital, and I prefer to take notes and do my work by hand – meaning pen and paper. The nature of digital collation, however, means that I will be working with digital images, and processing them using software. Unlike my usual mode of working, the method itself will be entirely digital.

Archival theory has a lot to say about digital preservation. In short, that it is an ongoing process which requires dedicated resources and long-term planning; ideally with a budget to match (Forde & Rhys-Lewis, 2013). With this in mind, I consider my research in two categories: what can be saved, and what should be saved.

Since my work is entirely in a digital environment, I could potentially use screen-capture or streaming software to record my entire work process and save it. Every click, every image, every shift of the transparency toggle. I could even keep a running audio commentary. I could save the exact copy of every image I use for every page that I collate (for each copy of the book). Online software is available for me to store a spreadsheet of my findings, and to also track all changes over time and save my version history. Word processing software can allow me to use and save comments on my work as I go.

The realm of can is a big one with a project like this. But what about should? Due to the heavy costs of ongoing digital preservation and the realities of hardware constraints (running three RAM-intensive programs at once isn't a great idea in terms of computer longevity), I don’t think I would go so far as to document every detail of my process, even though the technology is technically there. For this particular type of research, I can see the value in maintaining a drive of the precise images that I use for my collation. It would be valuable to compare those images which I am relying on to the actual printed source in order to later rule out any digital additions or anomalies in the images. These same images are hosted by institutions with much larger budgets and greater capacity for preservation than I have access to, but I would want to preserve my own images to guard the research against changing and updated versions hosted by the institutions, and to protect against possible future removal of the images.

As for how, I’m looking to archival standards and am going with the simplest advice. Keep the image resolution as large as possible, and avoid proprietary file types and drives.

When working through the readings for last week, I was struck by Arsem’s description of the process of archival research and how that inspired her method of documentation for her Writing Ada project (2009).  Though her end result might be more accurately described as a collection rather than an archive, the idea of tracking process, content, change and reaction in a single place is thought-provoking. I’m hesitant to apply it to work like mine though, because I feel that the process of collation can be described comfortably within a methods section, in writing. While the joy of the ‘Ah-ha!’ moment might be lost, I’m not sure how important to me it is to record that feeling of discovery. It’s something for me to think on though. 

Sources:

Arsem, M. (2009). Performed research: Audience as investigator. In S.R. Riley & L. Hunter, (Eds.), Mapping landscapes for performance as research: Scholarly acts and creative cartographies (pp. 206-13). London: Palgrave-Macmillan. 

Forde, H., & Rhys-Lewis, J. (2013). Preserving archives. London: Facet.