Nov 30, 2011

Our class visited the British Library today and we were given a tour of the Digital Lives project.
We spent some time in the Digital Forensics lab, where the computers of authors and scientists are taken and analysed (with permission) using the same digital forensics software that law enforcement use. It’s all aimed at providing a new type of insight into how authors think and create, giving researchers an invaluable resource. And it makes for a fascinating ride.

The procedure involves imaging the author’s hard disk and then using virtualization to simulate their machine on any other computer.

The entire experience looked and felt strangely fascinating. You spend the boot-up time watching a screen that they watched for years. Their desktop is as they left it. Their latest files, some documents half-finished, others done and archived. You see their folder structure and their system settings, their wallpaper. Any games they may have (imagine playing through their saves!). The number of icons on their desktop, their choice of OS and browser… It’s all a surprisingly intense and private experience, and most of all a voyeuristic buzz.

I couldn’t help but drift into thinking about what it would have been like to have a resource like this for authors from the past century. Would Joyce have used a Mac? An obscure flavour of Linux for Ginsberg? Hemingway seems an obvious Windows man. I’d pay good money to see Huxley’s wallpaper… And so on.

The experience is completed by a full all-angle panorama of the authors’ workspace. Ted Hughes uses large planks of wood on his desk to separate his projects. Moving them around, it was suggested, is the physical equivalent of resizing a window.

It would be pointless to go over how important a place the digital now has in our lives, how deeply personal, even intimate, our computers are, as spaces we inhabit.

Catching a glimpse of that, in a state that is frozen forever, would be utterly captivating. It would provide a more meaningful connection to an author than watching pictures of them or even reading their biography. It is not a frozen moment, but a frozen interactive state. A piece of their world, alive and captured at the same time. It goes beyond the static nature of photography and the linear nature of biography. It is better than archive footage, because there is no fourth wall. There is no end to what you can discover and deduce. Any photograph, footage or biography implies a forced mediation, an author of their own, forcing the spectator to view things through their perspective, captured finitely in a single, monolithic object. Browsing a disk image is neither finite, nor mediated, or static. It is literally a living piece, cut out from the world and preserved; the only equivalent would be a 100% accurate holodeck recreation of a slice of time from the author’s life, with no detail left to a director’s imagination. And it is plainly obvious that holodeck simulations have never been 100% accurate.

A sense of history is embedded in the age of the operating system and the design of the interface, while the date in the corner of the screen invites a strange meditation. The author’s works, saved in the original editable files, would seem alive and fresh, so far from the finite, “untouchable” printed editions.

Why not imagine a time when the tour of an author’s home will include precious minutes spent on their computer? Or being able to do this online, from your own home? I could see myself spending countless hours in the digital worlds of my favourite authors. I imagine someone trying to write a book in another author’s style, or world, on their computer. Or writing their biography.

Most of all, I imagine how amazing it would be to be part of the team that creates that first online museum.