13/02/2023
I read an article a few weeks back that has resonated with me ever since and it has made me realise how much society has changed in my lifetime. The article was 'Writer's craft is now a ghost in the machine by Steve Meacham in the Sydney Morning Herald from way back in 2012 which was itself a condensation/review of a 10,000-word essay for the Australian Book Review by Dr Rachel Buchanan...
Obsolescence is built into computers,'' Buchanan says. ''That's why it is so hard to preserve any of this digital material. It rots. It leeches. It decays. On the other hand, paper, which seems so fragile and transient, can last for centuries.
What stimulated the historian's interest in what many might consider a stuffy subject was a story about a first-generation nuclear power station in Britain, written by an English librarian. When the plant was decommissioned, the librarian pointed out, the British nuclear agency was required to preserve the complete record in perpetuity. But how? Much of the original record was stored on forgotten formats on long-obsolete computers. ''They decided the only way of preserving the records in perpetuity was to print them out and keep them on paper,'' Buchanan laughs. ''When I read that, I realised paper is the solid medium. Digital is the fragile one.''
Her verdict was reinforced when she asked Australia's latest Nobel prize winner, astrophysicist Professor Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University, how the correspondence and research that resulted in his award is being preserved. ''I emailed him, and a spokesman got back to say no one was collecting his personal papers. And even if they wanted to, bad luck, because he works electronically and most of it is lost.''
Yet Einstein's letters are included in Handwritten, an exhibition at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, along with handwritten documents by the likes of Beethoven, Galileo and Michelangelo...
https://www.nla.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/handwritten #
[See the transcript pdf on the end]
In Peter Carey's award-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang, the novelist metamorphosed into an archivist, claiming to be publishing 13 parcels of soiled and rust-stained papers supposedly written by Ned Kelly in the unmistakeable grammar and syntax we recognise from the bushranger's famous....