0.15 A response to the responses of john unsworth and john rink on  (Page 2/7)

I would like to stress that the EVIA Project is concerned with preservation, but the project was never envisioned as a preservation-only project. Mellon did not set out to fund a preservation-only project and we never saw the project that way. I have foregrounded preservation in my paper because all too often it gets lost or presumed as part of digital arts and humanities projects. For all of the talk about cyberinfrastructure and digital tools for research, unless we work to preserve our audiovisual resources during our generation, they will likely be lost to those of the future.

Unsworth takes the EVIA Project to task for what he perceives as the slow pace of preservation as it relates to the amount of video and the amount of funding. His criticism is well placed but is misleading. While at the time of this writing, we have only made seventy hours of video recordings available online, we have indeed made digital preservation transfers of five hundred hours of video signal under the Mellon funding for the EVIA Project. Of those that remain unpublished, one hundred eighty hours are extremely close to publication and the rest are on their way to online publication and availability. An additional eight hundred hours are being ingested as part of a two-year NEH project and we are on target to complete the transfers and annotation of that material in May 2011. It is true that the scholarly annotation process slows down our ability to make these materials available. The nature of the materials we are dealing with makes them different from many other projects of digital preservation and online humanities scholarship. In distinction from many of the resources discussed at this conference, they are not part of a canonical body with accompanying lines of scholarly discussion and critique. Indeed, within the ethnographic mode, critical analysis of the material is largely absent from the materials in the EVIA Digital Archive Project. Instead, the focus is on qualitative description and cultural analysis based around salient cultural performances. Unsworth argues for “lowering the bar” so that preservation may be unhindered, but the descriptions and cultural analysis that form one of the bottlenecks to accessibility is extremely important. The nature of the ethnographic material argues, in my view, for maximizing the information that the documenting scholar brings to the process. First, a high number of ethnographic scholars work in cultural domains that are poorly documented otherwise, and they may be only one of a handful of scholars who have worked in that place and time. The value of the recordings increases dramatically with the depth and quality of the accompanying documentation. The EVIA Project thus far has worked with living scholars and primarily with collections that had not been institutionally accessioned. If these recordings are digitally preserved only, with little expert description, they are in danger of being curiosities of the future—interesting, but largely inscrutable moving images. An argument we make with the EVIA Project is that we should maximize the value of these cultural documents by giving scholars the tools to share their knowledge and to better collaborate with their research subjects.