Jessica Weare
Stanford University
Panel: “The Material Object in Digital Culture”

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Video of this event is hosted at the Internet Archive.

Jessica Weare’s paper “The Dark Tide: Digital Preservation, Interpretive Loss, and the Google Books Project” takes as its case study one obscure 1920s novel’s digitization for the Google Books Project. As the subject of a post-publication libel suit, the first edition of Vera Brittain’s The Dark Tide was emended with a sticker apologizing for its semi-scandalous content. During the Google Books digitization process, Stanford library’s copy of The Dark Tide was stripped of its sticker; the only extant digital copy of the text is thus an incomplete one. Weare’s paper examines what sort of preservation the Google Books project aims for, what sort of preservation literary scholars might expect, and how university libraries mediate between the two.