Book II, Part I

David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward, Part I

My roommate saw this book on the kitchen table a few days ago and asked me what it was about. I’d just read an entire chapter about a deli receipt. I started in on the history of numbers (and how we had no zero!) and letters and the meaning of documents and was surprised when she responded, "I want to read it." You know a book is good when it sparks dinner-table conversation. I had heard that people were buried in wool for a while to avoid using valuable cotton and linen, and I’d heard some stories about uppercase and lowercase, but this book artfully weaves interesting historical facts with sensible critique and interpretation. I find myself almost in dialogue with the book, asking it questions and debating what it has to say.

Levy handles the subject of digital documents so well. He points out that paper documents aren’t static, though their changes are slower. Leaves of Grass seems to be a perfect example, having gone through so many editions, and it’s true for many books—but I’d say in the end that although some books undergo many changes and versions, the means to enact such changes are built-in online and therefore much more likely to occur. Levy looks at van Leeuwen’s digitized Leaves of Grass and makes a very good point: it’s not enough to scan in the pages of a book. The result is inferior to the book, because that particular content was meant to be physically laid out in a book format. The same content could (and should) be taken and adapted for an online environment. Similarly, a printed version of a web page sucks. It wasn't meant to be a paper document.

Levy says that we have come to attach value to documents now based on their output as “information delivery vehicles” (57), or how accurately, cheaply, and quickly they provide information. Stating our preferences in these terms leaves some things out, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we also value documents for their scope? Their history? Their beauty, even?

More soon.