Editorial

As we write this editorial (in November 2011), the British Library are celebrating the launch of a huge project to digitize their newspaper content and make it available via the internet. Researchers will be familiar with Gale's digital archive of The Times 1785–1985 and other 19th-century newspapers. Now The British Library has teamed up with Brightsolid to create the britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (Brightsolid, 2012). Users can access 4 million pages from 200 newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries, and the long term aim is to make every paper ever printed in Britain available online. Chris van der Kuyl from Brightsolid asserted that every single person in the UK will be able to find a story in the online newspaper archive that relates to them, either via family, friends or the place in which they live (BBC News UK, 2011). In this it complements other online resources that document various aspects of social history, like The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 (Old Bailey Online, 2011), which enable users to search the court’s criminal trial records and explore the lives of non-elite people. As the number of these online resources increases, so too do the number and complexity of the possible narratives that can be constructed about our lives.

It seems highly appropriate therefore that this issue starts with a special Debates section on archiving digital narrative, introduced by Tom Abba. While the British Library and Old Bailey projects have digitized existing analogue material, the essays in this section emanated from a symposium Abba organized at the University of the West of England to explore issues relating to narratives that are born digital. Despite popular perception to the contrary, archiving digital artefacts – preserving them for the future – is, as Abba demonstrates fraught with challenges, both practical and financial. But as he goes on to explain, the difficulties are multiplied when the ‘artefact’ is participatory, experiential, and hence highly ephemeral, with no pre-existing fixed analogue point of reference. In his contribution to this section James Newman offers a specific example of such challenges through an examination of Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog game series, exploring the impact of it being ported (transferred and translated) to different operating systems and platforms with differing hardware and software capabilities, and patched (updated to fix bugs or modify gameplay mechanics). His discussion very clearly demonstrates how such digital artefacts are inherently unstable and confront the archivist and curator with a growing and mutating collection of many objects rather than a singular static object. Kamilla Pietrzyk, in her essay, suggests that these problems are compounded by the way in which the internet, with its speeding up of communication, has exacerbated a cultural shift to preoccupations with short-term concerns – with what Harold Innis has termed the ‘obsession with present-mindedness’. This, she contends, has produced a lack of interest in the problems of duration which is impacting on our efforts to preserve digital narratives – to the extent that, contrary to the endeavours of British Library and Old Bailey projects, we risk losing our shared cultural heritage and leaving future historians with ‘a maddening blank’.

While Newman addresses the field of game narratives, Helle Sjøvaag and Eirik Stavelin in their research article turn their attention to news narratives. Having undertaken a quantitative analysis of the online news output of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), their article focuses on the methodological issues which arise from the analysis of online news sites. They argue that research methods need to be redesigned to account for the medium specific news features on the internet and present a new methodology for this kind of research. Researchers in this field will benefit from their experience of designing a methodology for measuring a broadcaster’s online news content. Anders Larsson also focuses on online news, exploring what kinds of narratives we can construct by examining the kinds of interactive features that are available on newspaper websites. Undertaking a case study of Swedish newspapers and employing Chung’s typology of interactive features, he assesses and discusses the factors that seem to influence the utilization of particular features.

Also contributing to the emerging and multiplying digital narratives are, of course, the various activities of activists, artists and ‘prosumers’. William Brown and Meetali Kutty’s article focuses on emerging visual narratives by exploring the aesthetic possibilities opened up by the practice of ‘datamoshing’, where audiovisual artists downgrade the quality of digital images to produce a more ‘raw’ aesthetic on screen. As they move on to explore the ways in which datamoshing as a practice highlights the decay that digital images undergo over time, there are interesting points of connection with the preservation issues raised in our Debates section.

The collective nature of online narrative construction is flagged up by Jessica Linde and Simon Lindgren’s article addressing online piracy. Through a Swedish case study, they apply a sociological approach to the collective and participatory act of file sharing. Combining notions of subpolitics, subactivism and cognitive praxis, they explore the roles of pro- and anti-piracy organizations, as well as the everyday practices of users to better understand the nature of collective action and the production of knowledge. Rob Cover’s research article is also concerned with an area of collective online narrative construction – that of social networking sites – but by contrast he focuses on the issue of performing identity online and the narratives we tell about ourselves. He argues, however, that two key facets of online social networking – the use of profiles and identity performance – are incompatible and risk the ‘undoing’ of a coherent online identity.

Cover also draws attention to the fact that Facebook pages never become a finished artefact or, in the context of our discussion here, ‘narrative’, but are instead constantly under construction. Any sense of identity or narrative is continually being reconfigured. This is something that is explored by Robert Furze and Patrick Brereton in their review of the 2011 MIT7 conference, which completes this issue of Convergence. The conference was entitled Unstable Platforms – The Promise and Peril of Transition and offered a snapshot of the research being done around digital narratives. Their review returns us to the question of preservation of digital narratives raised in the Debates section, albeit with specific focus on the seeming surplus of new and updated systems and digital formats. They argue that the wide range of papers presented at the conference testified to the fact that we do indeed ‘exist in a time of increased media instability’ but they end by quoting speaker Janet Sternberg who argued that the fact that the conference openly engaged with the idea of ‘peril’ as a facet of media in constant transition should be viewed as a positive move, enabling us to draw out the benefits – the ‘promise’ – more effectively.