Interrupting digitization and thinking about text or digitization and the form of digital text

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Rockwell, Geoffrey

• Enthusiasm for digitization hides the complexity of processes involved and the significance of the cultural changes achieved in our time. Itʹs worth examining again the ways in which we usually see the digital, often considered as an interruption of the continuous flow into discrete intervals. Equally important is to make clear how one can use digital documents and what is lost when digitizing the analog representation. Thinking about the way we conceive the difference between these two types of representation leads us to understand that in the digital world there is information encoded in the medium we use to codify and to represent content. When we consider the abstract concept of digitization we actually learn much more about our media and culture than about the files of which we believe we are speaking. Therefore the interruption of the computer can help us understand the machine as machine

• Date created

  2009

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Digitization
  • Analog records
  • Content mediums

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3HX1644D

• License

  © 2009 Geoffrey Rockwell et al. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.