10:07 a.m.
Time: 4 March, 9am
Location: https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/64735625753
On the “Art of Losing”—Some Notes on Digitization, Copying, and Cultural Heritage
Copying is a creative “art of losing” that sustains culture and lends substance to
heritage. This talk will aim to unpack the meaning of this statement and unravel some of
the many paradoxes inherent in copying what has been inherited as culture using digital
technologies. How is it that cultural reproduction and representation always entail loss
while also always perpetuate things and ideas valued as culture and as heritage? What
kinds of loss do digital technologies ensure? In what ways do new digital technologies
sustain culture and enable heritage to persist? Attempting to unravel some of the
conceptual and practical knots that formulate riddles like these, the first half of the
talk will investigate a few key terms—copying, culture, and heritage. It will also survey
a few of the important technologies used to copy texts in East Asia and on the Korean
peninsula—brushes, bamboo slips, paper, woodblocks, new and old forms of movable metal
type, photography and various forms of lithography, digital imaging, encoding schema, and
forms of machine learning. This brief survey will help to situate a discussion in the
second half of the talk about the current state of our creative “arts of loss” as they
concern creating digital copies of cultural heritage objects. To suggest the current state
of our arts, two research projects will be introduced. The first is an effort by nuns at
the Taiwanese Buddhist Temple Fo Guang Shan to create an accurate digital transcription of
every historical instantiation of the massive Buddhist canon. Their aim is to help ensure
Buddhist heritage. The second is an effort by the National Library of Korea to make more
of Korea’s textual heritage available to its patrons as digital transcriptions by using
deep learning to overcome long-standing difficulties associated with the automated
transcription of Korean texts. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop suggests in her poem
“One Art” that “the art of losing is not hard to master.” This talk will suggest that
Bishop’s poetic insight is helpful for thinking about digitization and cultural heritage.
Loss is inevitable when reproducing cultural heritage by means of digital technologies.
These losses are not necessarily a disaster. Each copy makes what has been inherited
available again to new places and times. But how we practice this “art of losing” is
important to consider since how we copy with our digital tools formulates what is
inherited as cultural heritage.
Wayne de Fremery is an associate professor in the School of Media, Arts, and Science at
Sogang University in Seoul and Director of the Korea Text Initiative at the Cambridge
Institute for the Study of Korea in Cambridge, Massachusetts (http://www.koreatext.org/)
He also currently represents the Korean National Body at ISO as Convener of a working
group on document description, processing languages, and semantic metadata (ISO/IEC JTC
1/SC 34 WG 9). Wayne’s research integrates approaches from literary studies, bibliography,
and design, as well as information science and artificial intelligence. Recent articles
and book chapters by Wayne have appeared in The Materiality of Reading (Aarhus University
Press, 2020), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature (Ken Seigneurie ed.,
2020), and Library Hi-Tech (2020). Wayne’s bibliographical study of Chindallaekkot
(Azaleas), a canonical book of modern Korean poetry, appeared in 2014 from Somyŏng
Publishing. In 2011, his book-length translation of poetry by Jeongrye Choi, Instances,
appeared from Parlor Press. Books designed and produced by Wayne have appeared from the
Korea Institute at Harvard University, the University of Washington Press, and Tamal Vista
Publications, an award-winning press he ran before joining the faculty of Sogang
University. Some of his recent research projects have concerned the use of deep learning
to improve Korean optical character recognition (funded by the National Library of Korea),
technology and literary translation (paper forthcoming from Translation Review), and “copy
theory” (paper under review). Wayne’s degrees are from Whitman College, Seoul National
University, and Harvard.
Med vänliga hälsningar,
Kora
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Professor Koraljka Golub
Head of iInstitute, http://lnu.se/en//iinstitute/<http://lnu.se/en/iinstitute/>
Digital Humanities co-leader
Linnaeus University
Sweden