Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

ever-increasing storage densities
(now over 200 gigabits per square
inch). The only reasonably effective
(short-term) strategy is to keep
multiple backup copies in different
physical locations – something only
large corporations such as Google
can afford to do on an industrial
scale. 274 And although a digital copy
can be deleted within a second,
multiplying access to scanned documents
by spreading copies (stored
on different computers and at dif-
ferent locations) can possibly help to preserve them in our collective
memory. Seen from the perspective of such (unfortunately very realistic)
doomsday scenarios, the digitising of printed sources should not be
considered as ‘archiving’ in any real sense, but merely as a method of
‘accessing’ the content (‘access’ is in itself a superlative buzzword, and
of course the sheer thrill of being able to remotely access important
printed content is certainly a major incentive for these huge ongoing
‘archiving’ efforts).
All good intentions aside though, we would do well to remember the
vision expressed by the famous Argentine author and librarian Jorge
Luis Borges, an undisputed literary master, in his timeless short story
The Library of Babel. 275 This fictitious library is in fact a complete (and
inhabited) universe: a seemingly endless grid of interlocking hexagonal
rooms all filled with bookshelves. The narrator describes how “like
all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth; I have wandered
in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues.” This library
universe described by Borges illustrates the utopia of a finite index
of the whole of human knowledge; as a compass, or a directory, of
everything ever written and published. It also reminds us of the spiralling
vastness of language in all its infinite variations. The utopia of a
library of libraries is, in fact, disturbingly similar to the utopian vision
propagated by the previously mentioned ‘online giants’. Is it feasible
(or even desirable) to definitively organise the whole of human knowledge
(in its most traditional and extensive form: the printed word) in
an ordered, searchable and indexable form? In Borges’ short story, this
vision turns out to be unmanageable, requiring an effort that stretches
out into infinity: indeed, a library of Babel. Since it carries every single
conceivable book (given a finite amount of letters, the number of books
of finite length is not infinite), the library theoretically contains the
125
Rosetta Disk micro-etched with over 13,000 pages of
language documentation, 2009