Overview
[AI Summary]: Andrew Piper’s foundational essay traces the evolution of digitization from David H. Shephard’s 1951 “robot reader” (early OCR scanner) to contemporary computational modeling. The work examines digitization as a process of conversion rather than mere reproduction, highlighting how information transforms across formats with inherent loss and uncertainty. Piper explores key concepts including discretization and quantization in digital sampling, Claude Shannon’s information theory and compression, the role of standards (like OCR-A and JPEG) in encoding human perception limits, and computational modeling as a second phase of digitization that enables testable hypotheses about history. The essay emphasizes that digitization fundamentally involves transformation, standardization, embodiment, and modeling - creating probabilistic rather than exact representations of cultural objects, thus introducing productive uncertainty into humanities research methods.
- Author: Andrew Piper (McGill University)
- Year: 2021
- Original Publication: Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton University Press)
- Translator: Wen Zhi (文之)
- Language: Chinese translation