Om bokarkiv

Aaaaarg.org, det fantastiska textarkivet, både lever och frodas. Mute publicerade nyligen ett samtal mellan aaaaargkitekten Sean Dockray och medieteoretikern Matthew Fuller. Där sägs en hel del intressanta saker om böcker, arkiv och digitalisering.

Först handlar det om behovet av att se hur alla textkulturer består av mer än bara de tre traditionella rollfigurerna (författaren, förläggaren och läsaren). Matthew Fuller:

Aaaaarg.org suggests some other actors that are necessary for a real culture of text; firstly that books also have some specific kind of activity to themselves, even if in many cases it is only a latent quality, of storage, of lying in wait and, secondly, that within the site, there is also this other kind of work done, that of the public reception and digestion, the response to the texts, their milieu, which involves other texts, but also systems and organisations, and platforms, such as Aaaaarg.

Sean Dockray om varför Aaaaarg varken strävar efter komplett metadata eller komplett utbud:

The dominant sensibility of Aaaaarg at the beginning was the highly partial and subjective nature to the contents and that is something I would want to preserve, which is why I never thought it to be particularly exciting to have lots of high quality metadata – it doesn’t have the publication date, it doesn’t have all the great metadata that say Amazon might provide. The system is pretty dismal in that way, but I don’t mind that so much. I read something on the Internet which said it was like being in the porn section of a video store with all black text on white labels, it was an absolutely beautiful way of describing it.

Angående bokmediets dubbelkaraktär – innehåll och metadata i materiella relationer av skiftande slag – se även min bok Boken & biblioteket som i höst utkommer på Ink bokförlag. Där resonerar jag om bok- och biblioteksväsen ur en lång rad olika aspekter, men mer om detta senare.

Delvis relaterat: Nina Lekander om e-boksformat.