Digitizing Alberta Street News
Writing in the Digital Sphere
Alberta Street News is a monthly street newspaper started in 2003 by Linda Dumont of Edmonton to give voices to people who otherwise go unrecognized and unremarked in society. You can find out more on its website here Alberta Street News (ASN). As a volunteer board member and writer for several years I had to the chance to interview twenty-five of the vendors and write profiles for the paper. More recently I facilitated the digitization of back copies through the University of Alberta, and one hundred seventy-four digitized newspapers now reside in the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alberta-street-news.) Taproot Publishing wrote about it here Taproot ASN
I originally thought of this process as simply a means of preserving the back copies in perpetuity. However, some recent readings from the Digital Humanities field forced me to reconsider the ramifications of digitization. With print in a newspaper we are usually removed by time and distance from what we’re reading about, and we accept this abstraction as part of the process. However, print in the digital space incorporates new levels of abstraction like how the text is embedded in a specific website in a specific way.
For one example, think about the way you might buy a copy of Alberta Street News from a vendor selling it on the street corner. You are outside, sharing the same sidewalk and weather as the vendor. You approach while noticing their stance, clothing, and general physical condition. You make eye contact, and go through the mental calculation of how much to pay for the paper (How much change do you have? Is it worth a fiver? What will they do with the money?) You hand money to the vendor, receive the paper, and exchange thanks verbally, knowing that you’ve helped a fellow human being. The paper is then read in the comfort of your home, or in a coffee shop, slowly flipping through the pages. You have already shared so much with the vendor, and the experience of buying the paper now becomes the context within which you read stories about marginalized people just like them.
Compare this to your experience reading the paper online from the digital archive. All 174 papers are shown as thumbnails, and can be sorted by views, title, or date published. To select an individual paper you need to click on it, then expand the text to a readable size with another click. To move through the pages you need to click an arrow, or hold the cursor and scroll. How much empathy do you feel for the subjects you’re now reading about?
Another function available to a user on the Digital Archive site is a search function. The user can search for any text item. They could find the one hundred-three instances of the word “dead” and determine which related to a person, or the sixty-two instances of the word “beaten” and determine which instances related to physical violence. Does this type of collation and analysis add to the value of the collection, or detract? Does this search capability change the way people interact with the content, or how they view the individual stories about poverty, abuse, and homelessness?
When we analyze how digital presentation of information affects us we should consider not only the information (text or otherwise), but what that information was originally meant to convey or make us experience. Has digitizing Alberta Street News helped in our understanding of marginalized people in our city?