Analog and Digital

This weekend, I worked on a few images that are going to appear in a long article in a well-respected journal. The images are digital but built atop an analog base. The original analog images were hand-drawn by field architects and then scanned at a reasonable, but not outstanding resolution. The base images are state plans and serve their purpose well, but do very little to show the various structures and phases present at the site.

You can see the images below:

To make these images more legible in print, I’ve added some digital enhancements which are primarily thickened lines to show the courses of walls associated with particular phases or, in some cases, adding features that were removed over the course of excavation. In other words, these are digitally enhanced images.

The journal editorial and production team has some qualms about the quality of the underlying analog images. While this journal is known for its impeccable production quality protected by merciless editorial standards, I have to admit that their critique of the analogue images gave me particular pause. The fuzzy lines of the analog drawing reflects the character of the original in ink on mylar and, in particular, the limits to the technologies available to bring these images into a digital medium. A super high resolution scan is possible, of course, but at the scale of the original illustrations, the size of this scan would make it difficult to manipulate. Moreover, a high resolution scan would make the lines more precise, but also introduce more analog flotsam – smudges, flecks of ink, dirt, and other detritus from the material world – that would require digital manipulation to remove. In short, the current scan is a compromise between the material realities of an analog object and the requirements of digital manipulation. The comparison of these analog base plans to the relatively more immaterial and perfect digital components of the figure only serves to bring out their imperfect character more clearly.

What’s particular interesting for this project is that most of the work my co-authors and I have done is to bring information collected in analog ways – notebooks, field illustration, and unanalyzed pottery – into digital forms. In other words, the project itself is an exercise in digital remediation which invariably involves processing the information selectively to create normalized, regularized, and standardized objects that can be compared, remixed, and combined across the site. In this context, preserving the analog images with the digital enhancement is more than simply an act of convenience, but an effort to represent the work of the larger project in as honest a way as possible.

In some ways, the different standards applied to analog and digital work offer a nice analogy for the different standards expected during the work of archaeological reconstruction. Roshni Khunti’s recent article in Studies in Digital Heritage which unpacks the political and ethical issues surrounding the 3D-printed version of Palymra’s now-destroyed arch. While the tension between the analog and digital character in the illustrations posted above does not have the politically charged context that surrounds the reconstruction of Palmyra’s arch, some of the issues are the same. For example, efforts to tidy up the digitized versions of the analog images would constitute a digital adjustment to the analog originals that would obscure the limits of the analog in potentially compromising ways. Whereas the main thrust of the larger project involves converting and remediating the analog material into new digital forms that are in no way commensurate or comparable to the original, adjusting the analog state plans, however, hints at a kind of dishonesty. Tidying them up overwrites their analog character and blurs the distinction between the digital enhancements and the analog original. 

Of course, I’m not accusing this particular journal of making unethical demands. They’re doing what they need to do to create a legible, aesthetically pleasing, and intentional publication. On the other hand, as moving objects between the analog and digital realms becomes easier and as this can produce digital objects that are essentially indistinguishable from their analog counterparts, we need to think more carefully what we need to do to ensure that the relationship between the analog and digital world remains clear.