“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Douglas Eyman”
Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019
Sustainability in the Digital Realm
Xchanges: You in particular, and in concert with Cheryl Ball, have done a lot of work in identifying the sustainability issues of digital scholarship. In your article with Ball, “History of A Broken Thing: The Multi-Journal Special Issue on Electronic Publication,” you defined the critical infrastructures needed to mitigate archival risks. One of these infrastructures is technological.
Is there a need to teach indexing/archiving/coding skills to editors? To authors? Should everyone who wants to communicate in the digital world learn to code?
DE: I don’t subscribe to the idea that there should be a blanket approach, like everybody should learn to code because we don’t really know what that means. Does that mean everybody should learn Python? Should everybody learn JavaScript? Should everybody learn HTML? There’s a difference between markup and coding and programming. It’s important for anybody to be a functional citizen in our current digital network environment to understand what algorithms are and how they work, what coding is in both a programming and markup sense, and what affordances exist for those. Then, everyone ought to get to know at least one model for thinking through coding so that you get a sense of how that operates and how it operates on you.
These are the same kinds of arguments if we go back and look at why we ask students to learn foreign languages. To better understand the culture is to better understand their own language and how language in general operates. In a way, understanding coding is very similar. It helps them understand how their own systems operate. When I teach technical editing, for example, I have a component where I ask students to work with XML. A lot of publishing systems use XML, and students’ understanding of how that works as part of a technical editing project prepares them to use it when they get into the workplace.
Xchanges: Another infrastructure concern that you and Dr. Ball identify is archival infrastructure. But the nature of digital composition seems always to be situated in a moment in time and to potentially disappear.
How do you reconcile the mercurial nature of internet communication with the need to preserve scholarly communication?
DE: I’m going to say that it depends on the context because there is plenty of work out there on the internet that it would be fine if it disappeared. At the same time, for the purposes of scholarship and research, we want archives. Let’s say, for example, we’re studying the websites of white supremacists. If we disappear all those things just because it’s the nature of the internet, then we can’t actually study them.
On the one hand, there’s a kind of beauty to the idea that things are ephemeral in the digital realm. I think it’s also something that we should strive to overcome to some extent, especially for purposes of research and archiving. There are a lot of archiving projects now creating emulators, so we can read old files that are in formats that nobody can read anymore. An example is an initiative like the European Union’s Right To Be Forgotten. The Internet Archive itself also seems to agree with this notion that things should disappear because of the way it uses robots.txt files. If we want work on the internet to last for people to see it for a longer period of time, we have to take steps to make sure that we continue to control the spaces where those things are published.
I think this is also a good place to point out the value of Document Object Identifiers. I recommend using DOI, as well as your own archives, as well as putting things in Perma.cc. I think that’s really important for researchers to create their own archives of any digital text that they’re looking at.