digitization in Ludovico 2013


iginal in English
First published by Springerin 3/2013 (German version); Eurozine (English
version)

Contributed by Springerin © Alessandro Ludovico / Springerin / Eurozine



or not)
emerging in scanned pages, which can be purely material - such as scribbled
notes, parts of the scanning person's hand, dried flowers - or typographical
or linguistic, or deleted or missing parts, all of them precisely annotated.
This small selection of illustrations of how physicality causes technology to
fail may be self-reflective, but it shows a particular aspect of a larger
development. In fact, industrial scanning is only one side of the coin. The
other is the private and personal digitization and sharing of books.

On the basis of brilliant open source tools like the DIY Bookscanner,3 there
are various technical and conceptual efforts to building specialist digital
libraries. _Monoskop_4 is exemplary: its creator Dusan Barok has transformed
his impressive personal collection of media (about contemporary art, culture
and politics, with a special focus on eastern Europe) into a common resource,
freely downloadable and regularly updated. It is a remarkably inspired
selection that can be

 

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