Waiting for the Upload

As anyone who has tried to set up a web site knows, it takes a good while to put the pieces together, so that they look anything like a competent presentation.  My first attempts at a web site really amounted to my ordinary c.v. set on a shocking green background.  Somehow I equated web design with color, the text I kept the same on the site as on the old typed up document.  How to hurry up the production process without falling into old writing systems?

For all the speed in research that digital humanities provides, I find myself falling back onto books when I cannot get what I want.  My favorite site, Stanford’s Republic of Letters https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/ promises a string of material that I just cannot wait to see, and I have a wish list of material I want to see them archive and integrate into their map of European/North American intellectual circuits.  But I have to wait.  It takes time for them to develop their case studies.  They have a nifty map of Franceso Algarotti’s travels through the courts of Europe.  Algarotti was easily one of the brainiest courtiers in the eighteenth century.  Wrote stylish treatises, dispensed clever advice, slept with kings (ok, maybe just one king).  So reading his letters, tracing his thoughts on music and architecture, rhetoric and painting would make any dix-huitiémiste happy.

Helas pour moi, I must wait until the web site is ready to run, for there are scholars assembling the material in a responsible, scholarly way.  Apparently designing a digital humanities site takes time, just like writing a book.  In the meantime, I just interlibrary an old tome with Algarotti’s letters.

In other words, the back catalogue is what makes the book invaluable.

Just as when Sony buys a movie studio or record company, it is not just interested in what stars they have signed up right now, Sony also wants the archive of old movies and studio recordings for its future use.  Black and white scenes of couples dancing, gangsters blasting their way into a speakeasy, Marvin Gaye’s unfinished album—these are just as valuable in the long run.

Libraries are the back catalogue, it’s where you go while you cool your heels waiting for the web site to upload.  Because if you have to satisfy that burning rage inside your head for reading material, then you are back to consuming books.  Instant gratification is the point of the internet.  If you are filled with a lust to read, and it has to be high quality, not the Hershey's candy of tabloid sociability, then you wind up circling back around to the old media.  Heiroglyphs, anyone?