0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room

I undertook the project partly as a laboratory experiment to explore the critical and interpretive capabilities of digital technology, and partly to create a scholarly edition of Rossetti’s work. As a laboratory experiment the project was a remarkable educational experience—a clear success, I should say. I used to measure that success in theoretical and intellectual terms—as indexed in the series of books, lectures, and essays that spun off those years of the Archive’s development. I now measure it by its institutional position and relations: where it came from (IATH and the digital initiatives at U. of Virginia); and what it led to (Speclab, Arp, and finally NINES). I measure it even more particularly by the names of the people who worked with me in various ways and at various stages. Most important here are those young men and women, then graduate students, who are now the generation of scholars shaping the future of humanities research and education.

On the other hand, if the Archive is judged strictly as a scholarly edition, the jury is still out. One simple and deplorable reason explains why: no one knows how it or projects like it will be or could be sustained. And here is the supreme irony of this adventure: I am now thinking that, to preserve what I have come to see as the permanent core of its scholarly materials, I shall have to print it out. It will probably fill two dozen or more large volumes. I have also come to think that the Archive’s most important scholarly “content” is nothing digital at all.

Iii

The Rossetti Archive and projects like it are most important, I now think, partly because they are already obsolete. More precisely, they are important because their process of development exposed their conceptual and institutional limits within the digital environment that spawned them. These limits, which lie concealed by the (often) impressive appearance of such works, are institutional and not algorithmic. Currently these projects are research environments, but as the online World Library emerges, their scholarly functions will become standardized and distributed. The process is even now transforming these works into historical artifacts, less engines of scholarship than objects of scholastic interest. They will not be sustained. They will be—we hope their most significant parts will be—preserved.

The very amplitude of The Rossetti Archive is instructive. Scholarship assumes that an investigator will have access to everything that might be relevant—everything of Rossetti’s, of course, but also everything that makes up the context of his work. The Archive was designed to meet those requirements: on one hand it comprises those scores of thousands of files; on the other it is designed for integration into a comprehensive online scholarly environment. I thought I might build a small model of how objects in an online World Library—assuming the existence of such a library—would have to be designed.

The investigation was, I think, successful, though not at all in the way I was expecting. I was less exhilarated than sobered by the outcome. The completed Archive implicitly argued that, so far as scholarship is concerned, something as thickly empirical as The Rossetti Archive would have to be created for our entire mediated inheritance, which is by no means only semasiographic. Not just all the documentary (or non-documentary) remains of Rossetti or Blake or Whitman, or Washington or Jefferson, but the same for everyone they touched as well as everyone they did not touch; and not just those individuals but all the social agents, individual and otherwise, who left their mark on the record. More, it argued that the socio-historical structures that deliver our inheritance to us must also be preserved and passed on—that would be all the metadata that organizes the complex socio-history of our human records as well as all the imbedded forms—think XML and TEI—that define its general and local shapes.