Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic RecordingMain MenuAboutAbstract for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PIntroductionIntroduction to Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic RecordingNotesNotes for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PMediaMedia for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PAcknowledgmentsAcknowledgments for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PTechnical InformationTechnical Information for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PReferencesReferences for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U PJentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339This essay is part of the “New Media” special issue of American Literature (volume 85, number 4, December 2013). See http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230. Version 1 of the site is (c) 2013 by Duke University Press.
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12013-10-14T14:31:12-07:00Jentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca53392492All data is constructed or "taken"plain2013-11-08T15:37:46-08:00Anonymous8. In their research on computation and new media, Wendy Chun and Johanna Drucker make similar observations about the construction—rather than the capture or permanence—of records and data. Chun (2008, 167) writes: “Digital media, which is allegedly more permanent and durable than other media (film stock, paper, and so on), depends on a degeneration actively denied and repressed. This degeneration, which engineers would like to divide into useful and harmful (eraseability versus signal decomposition, information versus noise) belies the promise of digital computers as permanent memory machines. If our memory machines’ memories are more permanent, if they enable a permanence that we seem to lack, it is because they are constantly refreshed so that their ephemerality endures, so that they may store the programs that seem to drive our machines.” Meanwhile, Drucker (2011, para. 3) observes the following: “Differences in the etymological roots of the terms data and capta make the distinction between constructivist and realist approaches clear. Capta is ‘taken’ actively while data is assumed to be a ‘given’ able to be recorded and observed. From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.” In this essay, I extend Drucker’s constructivist logic even further and replace “taken” with “making.” My argument is also informed by Chun’s (2008) enduring ephemeral and her emphasis on degenerating materials and memories—on active forgetting.
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12013-11-16T22:12:19-08:00Jentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339NotesJentery Sayers2Notes for the Articleplain2013-11-17T09:02:31-08:00Jentery Sayersbecbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339
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12013-12-12T11:09:43-08:00Prehistory for Today’s Magnetic Media11The Particulars of Magnetic Recording Necessarily Frame Our Understanding of Contemporary Computing and Storageplain2014-01-01T07:10:19-08:00Still, the once-new device helps us better understand how people initially learned to simultaneously ignore, trust, and desire magnetic storage—to examine how faith in magnetic recording emerged between the 1870s and 1910s, well before now-ubiquitous hard drives (not to mention seemingly unlimited cloud storage). Put this way, the story of a failed sound machine offers a prehistory for contemporary computing, invested as it often is in the automagical transubstantiation of magnetic impressions (on platters) into data expressions (on screens and through speakers).
This prehistory matters because it not only contextualizes contemporary computing and today’s magnetic media through mechanical age audio cultures. It also sparks some speculation about what artifacts are not at hand, in the archive, or on file—about what does not ultimately go into storage. If, during the development of early magnetic technologies and media, the perfect record would never lie and would never be written, then we must ask how such a record was actively constructed, through what material procedures of impression and playback, and in what relation to transforming notions of proof, evidence, perception, and memory. To be clear, then, this prehistory is an account of making records, not giving or taking them.