A Selective Digital History: Limitations within Digitisation Practices and their Implications

Abstract

The Greg Burgess Archive (GBA) is perhaps the most complete, and arguably the most valuable architectural practice archive in Australia. However, its physical size presents a problem to both visibility, and longevity, and plans are in place to digitise the collection. While in storage at Avington, Victoria, an archival team – including Burgess himself – have begun repairing the 447 models, scanning the hundreds of tubes of drawings, and extracting data from countless obsolete media. Yet how reasonable is it to assume the efficacy of a program of digitisation? What are the implications for an objective architectural historiography if the process fails? Precipitated by difficulties in accurately digitising Burgess’ intricate physical models, this piece explores both questions. Firstly, the digitisation process for the GBA acts as a case study. Then, the technical limitations encountered are placed within a wider context of archival concerns in today’s diverse, digital age. These archival concerns are recognised in the eliding of ephemeral archival material – bodies, experiences, spoken histories – all of which may elude Western archival frameworks. What is illustrated here is that the same underrepresentation may extend into digitised collections, and that what is omitted is precisely the contents of the GBA – intricate, tectonic objects which do not conform to the idiosyncrasies of the technology at hand. The subsequent discussion then proceeds to advance, and explicate, the notion of the third object. Curation, then, is surrendered to the archival process itself, and the agency to reify our material history is at risk of being left to the machines, and their preference for certain types of ethnocultural artifact. Considering this, alternative strategies are presented for both the GBA and institutions at large, yet archivists and historians must be conscious of these limitations, or risk the failings of traditional, institutional archival systems spreading throughout a growing digital landscape.