This might be a bit convoluted, so bear with me. Prof. Galey questioned whether we can actually read the ancient manuscripts we saw in the Fisher library, suggesting that despite their relative physical intactness, they might actually be lost to us because we don't possess the necessary linguistic and cultural knowledge to decipher them. This brought to mind an interesting experience I'm currently going through with my daughter.
A little background: I was born in Russia, but grew up in Israel. The only reason I maintained a semi-decent Russian is because from a very young age I was a crazy bookworm. Since I started reading in Russian before moving to Israel, I continued reading in Russian even when my spoken abilities were declining due to using Hebrew almost exclusively (with my friends, at school, basically everywhere except at home). When my daughter was born, I made a very conscious (and at time exhausting) effort to teach her spoken and written Russian. As part of this effort, I read to her in Russian almost every day. What do I read? Well, I read books that I read as a kid. What books did I read as a kid? Those that my mom thought were the best ones out there (as in, the ones that she herself was familiar with). Which means that my daughter is now listening to (and reading!) books from the 1950s Soviet Union. I will state the obvious: life was very different back there and then. Communal apartments. Communist youth groups. Holidays that no one under the age of 35 even remembers. The space race. Sometimes there are references to items and events I can barely understand myself, let alone explain coherently to my kid. It's fascinating, but at times it feels like we're reading about life on Mars.
And yet, because the text is presented in familiar Cyrillic letters, and because I can open the book, flip the pages, and parse out words, sentences, and chapters, I can read it. No two people will ever read the same text in the same way. If we really want to get nit-picky about it, a child in 1950s Moscow and a child from a 1950s tiny village of Rubtsovsk would have had a different way of understanding the stories. So, no - I am not reading to my daughter with the same understanding that my mom had when she was reading these stories to me, but at least I have a base from which to start. If I really wanted to (or perhaps if my daughter really wants to), there are resources out there that can help me understand the context better.
On the other hand (based on my understanding of preservation issues from my archives class), a major problem with digital texts is that once the hardware is obsolete the text is lost, unless it has been translated into a format that fits the newer hardware. I might have the most amazing and insightful essays in the world on my floppy disk, but there is no way they will ever see the light of day unless someone has the right drive for it. Unlike digital texts, the "hardware" for books, and even scrolls, is still valid. I think that this issue is something that we should seriously consider when thinking about preservation of digital artifacts.
A little background: I was born in Russia, but grew up in Israel. The only reason I maintained a semi-decent Russian is because from a very young age I was a crazy bookworm. Since I started reading in Russian before moving to Israel, I continued reading in Russian even when my spoken abilities were declining due to using Hebrew almost exclusively (with my friends, at school, basically everywhere except at home). When my daughter was born, I made a very conscious (and at time exhausting) effort to teach her spoken and written Russian. As part of this effort, I read to her in Russian almost every day. What do I read? Well, I read books that I read as a kid. What books did I read as a kid? Those that my mom thought were the best ones out there (as in, the ones that she herself was familiar with). Which means that my daughter is now listening to (and reading!) books from the 1950s Soviet Union. I will state the obvious: life was very different back there and then. Communal apartments. Communist youth groups. Holidays that no one under the age of 35 even remembers. The space race. Sometimes there are references to items and events I can barely understand myself, let alone explain coherently to my kid. It's fascinating, but at times it feels like we're reading about life on Mars.
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And yet, because the text is presented in familiar Cyrillic letters, and because I can open the book, flip the pages, and parse out words, sentences, and chapters, I can read it. No two people will ever read the same text in the same way. If we really want to get nit-picky about it, a child in 1950s Moscow and a child from a 1950s tiny village of Rubtsovsk would have had a different way of understanding the stories. So, no - I am not reading to my daughter with the same understanding that my mom had when she was reading these stories to me, but at least I have a base from which to start. If I really wanted to (or perhaps if my daughter really wants to), there are resources out there that can help me understand the context better.
On the other hand (based on my understanding of preservation issues from my archives class), a major problem with digital texts is that once the hardware is obsolete the text is lost, unless it has been translated into a format that fits the newer hardware. I might have the most amazing and insightful essays in the world on my floppy disk, but there is no way they will ever see the light of day unless someone has the right drive for it. Unlike digital texts, the "hardware" for books, and even scrolls, is still valid. I think that this issue is something that we should seriously consider when thinking about preservation of digital artifacts.
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