Movies in the digital era

We information professionals have long asserted that the transition from paper- and film-based to digital means of recording information will be profoundly destabilizing. However, when one's working life focuses on the quotidian aspects of facilitating, managing, and mitigating the risks associated with this transition, it's easy to lose sight of just how sweeping the changes will be. And that's why Gendy Alimurung's long, thought-provoking article in last week's L.A. Weekly warrants close reading. Alimurung focuses on the film industry's transition to digital filmmaking and, in particular, projection, which is being hastened along by studios enthralled by the cost savings they will achieve once they no longer have to produce and distribute vast quantities of 35 mm prints. However, as Alimurung points out, this transition and the manner in which it is unfolding has profoundly unsettling implications:

• The cost of digital projection equipment is much higher than that of 35 mm film projection equipment, and even with the subsidies provided by the big studios, a lot of independent theaters are going to find the transition to digital projection prohibitively expensive.
• Most of the big production companies are ceasing distribution of all 35 mm prints, including those of older films for which theater-quality digital versions are not available, a move that will likely cause a substantial number of repertory and art house cinemas to shut their doors or to fall back upon screening DVDs or BluRay discs, both of which look dull and flat when projected onto a theater-sized screen.
  
• Preservation of digital films is substantially more expensive than preservation of 35 mm films, and the speed with which digital cinema formats change makes preservation even more of a challenge than it would be otherwise. Moreover, just as many silent films were destroyed or quietly allowed to disintegrate after the coming of sound, many older 35 mm films may be allowed to die of neglect.
• The nature of filmmaking itself will likely change -- and not always for the better. As one of Alimurung's sources points out, shooting a movie on 35 mm film imposes a certain discipline: one can shoot only ten minutes of 35 mm footage at a time, and goofing around while a 35 mm film camera is rolling costs money. Some directors will no doubt find that the the freedom and flexibility of digital filmmaking enables them to do amazing things, but some novices, in particular, might not develop the focus and restraint needed to make a halfway decent movie.

I'm really not doing justice to Alimurung's fine article, and I encourage you to read it and the accompanying reader comments, some of which add additional weight to her assessment and some of which offer interesting counter-arguments. And the next time one of your cinephile friends asks why you're so wound up about all of this electronic records stuff, giving him or her a copy of this article ought to be explanation enough.

Digitization can save lives

Archivists are accustomed to asserting that creating digital surrogates of paper records and analog recordings will increase access and facilitate genealogical and other types of historical research. We're not used to thinking about the ways in which digitization can save lives, but a new short film, Saving Data, Saving Lives, highlights just how digitizing historical weather data can save the lives of millions of people who might otherwise perish as a result of floods, drought, and other catastrophic weather events.

The film, which is an entry in LinkTV's ViewChange Online Film Contest, focuses on the work of the International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO), which digitizes developing nations' weather observations and makes the results freely available to scientists who can identify areas that are particularly flood-prone and predict the frequency of catastrophic weather events. Governments and individuals living within these nations can then plan accordingly.

Saving Data, Saving Lives is a little more than 5 minutes long, and I strongly encourage you to take the time needed to watch it (note: the audio sounded muffled when played through my speakers, but was okay when played through headphones). I also encourage you to register at LinkTV and affirm the importance of IEDRO's work by voting for Saving Data, Saving Lives. You may cast one vote every 24 hours until 12:00 PM Pacific Time, 15 September 2010; details are available here.

Thanks to Chris Muller for alerting me to this video!

The impact of archival records on American Buddhism

Today, the New York Times published an article by Mark Oppenheimer about American Buddhists' efforts to come to grips with revelations that some of their spiritual leaders have been romantically and sexually involved with their adult students. The source of these some of these revelations: the personal papers of American Buddhist leader Robert Aitken, which the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's Special Research Collections staff unsealed in 2008.

The unsealed papers included files in which Aitken documented the sexual relationships that Eido Shimano, who is now the spiritual leader of New York's Zen Studies Society, had with adult female students between the mid-1960s and the early 2000s.

Oppenheimer notes that the debates about the conduct of Shimano and other Buddhist spiritual teachers are, for a variety of reasons, distinctively American. Digitized copies of Aitken's Shimano files found their way onto the Internet and engendered considerable discussion in the blogosphere. The American news media, which played a key role in publicizing scandals that have rocked other faith communities, is now on the lookout for clerical impropriety. Moreover, American Buddhist spiritual communities generally consist of both men and women, and Asian Buddhist leaders accustomed to working only with male students may have been unprepared for the temptations that awaited them in the United States.

In response to these and other developments, American Buddhist attitudes about student-teacher relationships, which were once seen as uniquely privileged and private, are changing: in July, revelations concerning a recent relationship between Shimano and a female student forced Shimano and his wife to depart from the board of the Zen Studies Society, which has drafted a new set of ethical guidelines for its leaders and members.

In the absence of the Web, the blogosphere that the Web made possible, and news media outlets primed to expose clerical sexual misconduct, the information in Aitken's files might have been unknown to anyone except a handful of academics and Buddhists interested in Aitken's life and work. However, in our Webby, bloggy, clerical-impropriety-is-big-news age, the information in Aitken's papers has been widely disseminated and has had significant impact.

I have the feeling that in the years to come, we're going to see more and more instances in which the Web and, in particular, Web 2.0, gives the information contained within archival records explosive force. By and large, this is a very good thing: as those of us partial to freedom of information laws are fond of noting, sunlight really is the best disinfectant. However, I suspect that it's also going to pose some challenges for the archival profession. Those of us who work with manuscript collections may find that some donors want to restrict access to their papers for increasingly lengthy periods of time, and those of us who work with government records may find that creators are less and less inclined to document their activities completely or to transfer their records to the archives.

BPE 2009: Did You Know ?

Dr. Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, the Chief Information Officer of New York State, spoke at the Best Practices Exchange on the morning of 2 September. She prefaced her talk, which concerned the State's Strategy for Openness and its Empire 2.0 social networking initiative, with this video, Did You Know ? 3.0.

The Did You Know ? series, which is jointly produced by The Economist and XPLANE, presents facts and statistics concerning recent changes in media, communications, and technology. They don't address concerns specific to electronic records archivists or digital librarians, but they provide a quick, compelling, and unnerving overview of the information ecosystem in which we exist.



Yesterday, XPLANE released Did You Know? 4.0. Thanks to Jean Green for posting this link on Facebook!

This is your brain on the Web

While I was at SAA last week, Slate published a fascinating piece by Emily Yoffe that summarizes research into the mammalian seeking drive and its connection to our behavior online. The desire to explore the world and to experience sensation isn't limited to things that are pleasurable; mammals -- humans included -- will repeatedly seek out unpleasant stimuli provided that said stimuli are dished out consistently.

Unlike animals, humans seek both physical and abstract stimuli, and the World Wide Web's ability to dish out tidbits of information that we can tie together, analyze, and otherwise manipulate stokes our seeking drive astonishingly well. Moreover, the same brain chemical circuitry that propels our seeking behavior -- that which governs production of the neurotransmitter dopamine -- also regulates our sense of time, which no doubt helps to account for the way that surfing the Web causes many of us to fall into temporal black holes.

Incidentally, stimulant drugs such as cocaine and crystal meth also keep our dopamine circuitry humming. Are you even mildly surprised?

The question of what our constant immersion in the dopamine-rich bath of the Web means for us as individuals, as creators and keepers of records, and as a society has yet to be answered, but the changes that ensue are likely to be both subtle and overt, trivial and profound. Studying past information revolutions may give us some sense of what lies ahead, but we may also be in for all kinds of unanticipated developments. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night . . . .