Hello, Please forgive my rather large post to this list. But I wish to share an article in full (see below) for the sake of placing a question in context. I hope this is alright to do ... Has anyone heard of someone bequeathing their 'cloud' of personal info to a loved one/ family member? In the world of computer forensics, can a family member legally gain access to/take ownership of a deceased family members' mobile me accounts (the contents of it), for example? Is anyone researching this aspect of e-writing? thank you for your time, joan (canada) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 11:58:07 EDT Subject: [vel] archiving writers' e-work http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i31/31a00102.htm From the issue dated April 10, 2009 <Archiving Writers' Work in the Age of E-Mail Digital preservation lets scholars learn more than ever about authors By STEVE KOLOWICH Leslie Morris is used to handling John Updike's personal effects. For decades, Mr. Updike had been sending a steady stream of manuscripts and papers to Harvard University's Houghton Library, where Ms. Morris serves as a curator. But in late February, several weeks after the iconic writer died, some boxes arrived with unexpected contents: approximately 50 three-and-a-halfand five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks â?" artifacts from late in the author's career when he, like many of his peers, began using a word processor. The floppies have presented a bit of a problem. While relatively modern to Mr. Updike â?" who rose to prominence back when publishers were still using Linotype machines â?" the disks are outmoded and damage-prone by today's standards. Ms. Morris, who curates modern books and manuscripts, has carefully stored them alongside his papers in a temperature-controlled room in the library "until we have a procedure here at Harvard on how to handle these materials." Harvard isn't the only university puzzling over new media from old â?" and not-so-old â?" masters. Emory University recently received four laptops, an external hard drive, and a Palm Treo personal digital assistant from Salman Rushdie. The University of Texas at Austin recently acquired a series of Zip disks and a laptop containing Norman Mailer's files. "Once we learned how to preserve paper, we were good," says Naomi L. Nelson, interim director of the manuscript, archives, and rare-book library at Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library. "That really hasn't changed a lot. With computers it's a whole different ballgame." Still, three things are becoming clear. First, these trappings of the digital age will transform the way libraries preserve and exhibit literary collections. Second, universities are going to have to spend money on new equipment and training for their archivists. And finally, scholars will be able to learn more about writers than they ever have before. In With the Old Personal computers and external storage devices have been around for more than a quarter-century, but only now, as the famous literary figures of the 20th century begin to pass away, are these technologies showing up on archivists' doorsteps. According to Ms. Morris, the Updike papers will be the first in the Houghton catalog to have a "significant magnetic-media component," and she realizes that old floppy disks are just the tip of the iceberg. The great American novelists of the digital era â?" the ones who own BlackBerrys, use Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, and compose only on computer screens â?" will soon begin shipping their hard drives off to university libraries. What happens then is something much on the minds of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (The Chronicle, August 17, 2007) and Douglas L. Reside. Both Mr. Kirschenbaum, associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, and Mr. Reside, an assistant director at the institute, possess the collection of skills that may eventually be required of all 21st-century curators. In addition to holding doctorates in English, they are computer experts. The institute, located in an austere warren of offices in the basement of the university's McKeldin Library, houses a mix of sleek new machines and clunky old ones. An easy office-chair roll away from his newest computer sits Mr. Kirschenbaum's oldest one: a small, gray box known as the Apple II. Mr. Reside's office contains similar artifacts, including a Commodore 64 gaming console. Amid the institute's state-of-the-art machines, these ridiculous-looking antiques are stark reminders of how rapidly computer technology has evolved, producing one of the major challenges of preservation in the digital age: compatibility. The problem with the dizzying pace of computer evolution is that new machines are often incapable of learning old tricks â?" even if the tricks are not really that old. For instance, most new computers don't come with floppy-disk drives. And while Harvard will surely procure machines that can safely read Mr. Updike's disk-based papers, what if those papers were trapped inside an even older storage device â?" say, something resembling a Commodore 64 game cartridge? Future archivists must have the skills to retrieve them. Brave New World Archivists must also know how to transfer their data to new machines, since old machines can survive for only so long before their circuits give out. That, Ms. Nelson says, calls for people with intimate knowledge of how the new stuff works, plus the resourcefulness to retrofit modernity's round holes to accommodate antiquity's square pegs. "We're still going to need people who are experts in the history of the book, people who study handwriting, organize paper collections, handle obsolete video formats, traditional photography. ... We're going to do everything we've been doing, and then we're going to be doing this." Ms. Nelson understands this better than most: While Mr. Updike's floppy disks at Harvard probably contain simple text documents, the digital devices Mr. Rushdie donated to Emory contain entire ecosystems of data. Writers today do a lot more on computers than they used to, and modern devices hold a lot more information about their users than old ones did. The laptop (and now the mobile device) has become the locus of social life as correspondence has migrated from letters and phone calls to e-mail and text chatting. Recreational reading and research have also increasingly moved to the Web. Since a laptop logs basically everything its user does, preserving these data environments will allow the scholars of the future unprecedented insight into the minds of literary geniuses. "It's basically like giving someone the keys to your house," says Mr. Kirschenbaum. The influence of authors' environments on their writing has always interested scholars. Marcel Proust, for example, is known to have been heavily influenced by the paintings he surrounded himself with when he penned the novel Remembrance of Things Past, between 1909 and 1922. Imagine if Proust had been writing 100 years later, on a laptop: What else we might be able to learn about his creative process. The implications for scholarship are tremendous, Mr. Kirschenbaum says. Take a great digital-era author: "You could potentially look at a browser history, see that he visited a particular Web site on a particular day and time," he says. "And then if you were to go into the draft of one of his manuscripts, you could see that draft was edited at a particular day and hour, and you could establish a connection between something he was looking at on the Web with something that he then wrote." In some cases, computer forensics can even hint at an author's influences beyond the screen. Mr. Reside recently mined data from old equipment belonging to Jonathan Larson, the late composer and playwright who earned a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for the musical Rent. In an early draft, Larson had a character suggest that the moonlight coming through the window is really "fluorescent light from the Gap." In the final draft, the lyric was "Spike Lee shooting down the street." "From the time stamp on the digital files," Mr. Reside says, "I learned that the lyric was changed in the spring of 1992 ... when, I believe, Spike Lee was shooting Malcolm X in New York City." A Deluge of Data That is really just scratching the surface. Imagine how mapping the content of an author's Facebook profile, MySpace page, Flickr account, or Twitter feed might help scholars dissect that author's life and letters. The social-media generation has developed a habit of casually volunteering biographical information. When the great authors of that generation emerge, scholars may be pleased to find plenty of fodder for study already on the public record. But that is where things get tricky. Information that lives inside a writer's personal hardware â?" like the data on Mr. Updike's floppy disks or Mr. Rush die's hard drives â?" may not have physical dimensions, but it is at least attached to a single device that is owned by somebody. "It's physically here," says Mr. Kirschenbaum, gesturing toward a shelf of Apple Classic computers, donated to the Maryland institute by the poet Deena Larsen. "I can wrap my arms around it." Not so with e-mail and social-media content. These are not programs run on individual computers; they are Web-based services, hosted remotely by companies like Facebook and Google. The content exists in an ethereal mass of data known in information-technology circles as "the cloud." There, Mr. Kirschenbaum says, "you get into this wilderness of competing terms of service." With more and more information being stored on the Web, it is no longer clear who owns what. For example, in February, Facebook rewrote its terms of service to stake a claim on all content that users put on their profiles. After a backlash, the company hastily backed off and reiterated that users own their own profile content. But the case is a reminder of the fluidity and ambiguity of ownership laws in the dawning era of shared media. "Consumers don't really know their rights here, and many are so wowed with the convenience that they aren't asking themselves the tough questions yet," says Susan E. Thomas, digital archivist at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library. "Right now we can collect boxes from the attic, but if the family request a cloud service to transfer the archive of their loved one to the Bodleian Library, will that happen? We haven't tried it yet, so I can't tell you." "That's sort of the brick wall that every archivist knows they're hurtling toward at 100 miles per hour," says Mr. Kirschenbaum. No Manual Many other questions also remain unanswered. For example, how much information is too much? A 20th-century author's personal papers might be of manageable quantity â?" say, what she was able to store in her attic. Digital storage, on the other hand, is cheap, easy, and virtually unlimited. Mining, sorting, and archiving every bit of data stored an author's computers could become a chore of paralyzing tedium and diminishing value. At present, researchers are wary of discarding anything. "The work of an author over their entire lifetime is such a fraction of the space you have on a server hard disk, so there's no reason to throw any of that away," says Mr. Kirschenbaum. However, he added, unless scholars are able to find what they want in that sea of data, it is not worth archiving in the first place. The good news is that as computers are logging more data, reference technology is growing more sophisticated. And Ms. Nelson suggests that the new tools for interacting with born-digital artifacts â?" including a wiki functionality that could allow researchers to annotate materials and share their insights with others â?" may not be too far away. New tools and new training, however, mean new money. Richard Ovenden, associate director of Oxford's Bodleian Library, says the speed at which universities adopt digital curation may depend on their willingness to divert funds from more traditional areas. And that could be at a slower pace than the speed of technological invention itself. http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 55, Issue 31, Page A1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------