The collection of articles under review explores how various organisations deal with multiple issues arising in the process of information creation, capture, preservation and discovery in the digital age. The main focus of this volume is to take a discussion beyond the ‘e-hype’ (p. xv) and make the audience rethink their assumptions about all things digital by showing a multitude of ways the digital and the analogue are intertwined and intermingled in the modern world of information. In the view of the recent Australian census debacle which demonstrated how things can go dramatically wrong in a ‘hybrid’ system that is transitioning between the analogue and the digital environments, the importance of such a discussion cannot be emphasised enough.
The collection comprises nine chapters and an introduction, covering a wide span of issues both theoretical and practical. Among the topics covered are Semantic Web, crowdsourcing, EDRMS (Electronic Data and Records Management Systems) and information management systems, digital archives and digital humanities, as well as digital security and privacy concerns. It is pitched to students of information studies programmes but may also be of benefit to anyone in search of better solutions to the information problems of the digital age. The volume explores the hybrid character of the contemporary world of information from different perspectives. It starts by asking a philosophical question about our conception of technology: Do we see it as a neutral tool or as an independent agency (p. 5)? Regardless of the side one might prefer in this debate, however, technology emerges as a force to be reckoned with, respected for its potential to do both good and evil and to be engaged with responsibly.
The fact that technology is ethically agnostic becomes compounded in systems that make an uneasy transition from the analogue to the digital. Alongside dead-end solutions such as EDRMS that attempted a simplistic ‘copy-and-paste’ approach to the transition from an analogue to a digital environment, libraries, archives and research institutions, on the other hand, are trying to tame the digital by slowly adjusting to the digital environment while retaining some of the core rules from paper-based days. Many of those rules, such as emphasis on provenance and context for the archivists and on quality control and process for the librarians, form the foundation of professional identities and are carefully guarded. Adherence to these rules makes systems safer and more reliable, but also slower and difficult to use, all of which put information professionals on a collision course with those digital users who ‘like it easy’ (p. 31).
Few players in the information field have managed to fully embrace the digital world by accepting the new rules of the game. This has allowed them to discover new opportunities and led to creative results. Chapter 6 explores examples of a successful transition from the analogue to the digital under the slogan ‘… loss of context can be seen as liberating and enlightening’ (p. 191). Multiple digitisation projects such as Trove’s newspaper project, Google’s and Internet Archive’s book digitisation and many more ‘unleashed a transformative process that adds another layer’ for researchers to make sense of (p. 193). While Big Data and data mining tools such as Google’s Ngram Viewer do breathe new life into humanities, a truly ‘radical shift in humanities research comes from combining other forms of data with purely textual’, such as GIS, for example, to produce ‘deep maps’ of historic locations where time becomes a fourth dimension (p. 207).
To conclude, the volume under review is timely and relevant, although it does not speak in one voice and the contributions oscillate widely in their style and readability. This might be seen as the volume’s strength, however, and readers will have an opportunity to choose whether to engage with the mathematical models of hacker behaviour (p. 156) and the gobbledegook of the Sematic Web (p. 36), or to ‘bounce’ promiscuously from page to page (pp. 23–24), as we, digital users, do.
University of Sydney
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© 2016 Yulia Ulyannikova
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2016.1262730