Let’s assume that “where there’s a will there’s a way,” and that anyone who wants to crack open a digital history and alter its contents may do so. It’s inevitable someone will, if only for the hell of it. Corruption trips lightly, but its effects are profound.

Surprisingly, though, this is not an argument about security. Rather, this is an interrogation of Web 2.O. http://my.sxsw.com/e/416

Digital history, like any history — like the papers and collections of its authors– requires physical archiving. Put another way, what resides in the “cloud” needs also to reside on the ground. A bumper sticker: “Work globally; Secure locally.” (I’ll send that one to the TSA.) The meaning is really quite simple: if you take your work seriously, store it in a safe place, safer even than your mother’s apron. As secure as the cloud maybe, it’s really just a clump of electrons.

I’m searching for a phrase, something like, “there is power in locality.” Unfortunately, the phrase has a geeky ring, despite the fact that it’s spot on. The integrity of digital history, and thus anything of real value that appears on a computer screen, rests on the ability of its authors to back up their work… in its entirety.

Simply put, the beauty of digital history is that it resides in the cloud. Concretely, the virtue of digital history is accessibility. It’s there for users 24-7. But that same virtue is its vulnerability. The solution to the problem is simple. Copies. Copies must be retained by authoritative individuals — and, better yet, institutions — where they may be preserved should questions about text or research arise.

This has been a big dance around a little fire, but it reflects on my recent blog about the digital historian’s obligation to his readers. (“Some Implications of Writing digital History”) In that piece, I worried about altering my own work as additional information became available to me, and whether that might somehow undermine my readers’ confidence in my work. There is more of course, and here I’m thinking about the — for want of a better word — democratization of digital history; in other words, the ability of readers to contribute and comment on the work. That’s a virtue. But the distinction between the author’s production, and those who contribute and comment on the work must remain distinct, and that distinction must be obvious.

In the case of this brief blog about the virtues of local archiving, I take the obligation of the digital author to the digital reader one step up the ladder. Digital history represents as rich and important a development to historians as movable type. Those who work the medium understand that. Those who take up the medium as consumers and readers should as well.

Around 1992, Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web energized and organized the atomized universe of the personal computer, much as Gutenberg’s movable type vitalized the written word into the portable book, only with this difference: the power and impact of the World Wide Web has been immediate; it has spread exponentially faster than the crude technology of the printing press, which traveled the slow horse-back route outward from town to hamlet, across an agrarian landscape. Already, within two brief decades, the World Wide Web has raveled itself into the most distant societies, even out to the edges of our Solar System and beyond. Witness Google Earth or NASA’s Mars Rovers.

Speculating about how this unprecedented new media will affect our future is something of a sport.

For me, and for my work on the History News Network (hnn.us/blogs/74.hml), digital history raises questions of responsibility. In a word, I am talking about “revision”: the opportunity to return to a text and revise it after the reader has read and made up his mind about the information.

There is the question, when will the digital history ever be finished? The answer is, never. Or at least not as long as the author and researcher is alive. And not even then, necessarily. Should this undermine the confidence the reader places in the author? Perhaps. On the other hand, if the author is sedulous in handling his material, then time and revision become assets unique to digital history.

Let me first take a step back. Throughout my practice as a writer, I have found myself learning in stages. Strunk and White, for instance. At first, after reading the book, I quit on adjectives. Cold turkey. I just dropped them. Now I know adjectives have their place, and perhaps that was E.B. White’s plan: to make the writer less casual with his craft. Sorry if I am stating the obvious. Another example of the stages through which writing has taken me is the attention to the rhythms and durations of sentences. The need for short sentences, for example. And long sentences.

MacSpeech has produced a similar experience. I’ve jumped a shark, or a stage.

At times, I can actually see the page in my mind. Going from the spoken word, to the computer, I have a graphical image of what I am writing on (within?) my interior mental space.

On another note, a convention I see emerging from the computer is the use of shorter paragraphs, an almost journalistic touch aimed at keeping the attention of the reader. For certain, reading on a computer — as opposed to perhaps an e-book — is not always pleasant. The short paragraphs help the reader; my guess, is by way of creating an analogy between the written page and the pixilated page. That is, with short paragraphs you can see the piece from beginning to end, as you see the pages in a book. The paragraphing provides a sense of duration. They thus solve a problem for the reader: the short sentence conveys a signal: this piece will probably be relatively short. As well, mini-graphs convey to the reader that what follows is more informative than momentous. The short paragraphs signify to the reader that they are getting a capsule not a dissertation. So do short sentences.

And so do short blog entries.

In my world, the fourth wall is a glaring white page. Perhaps not the best analogy, but one that works for me. As intellectual prosthetics go, MacSpeech has allowed me to break the fourth wall of composition. As a result, I write more easily, I am more prolific, and I make fewer mistakes.

The truly incredible thing for me in this experience is the accuracy and speed of MacSpeech. Just as important, is the ability the software gives me to separate myself from the tyranny of the keyboard. With MacSpeech I am able to pace around as I “write,” to speak out loud, as nearly perfect text appears on the screen.

I am struck by the realization that I am able to translate the words in my mind directly onto the page. One instant there is a thought, the next instant produces the thought on the page. With my cranky cognitive processor, my brain, there is usually many a slip twixt cup and lip or, in this case, between brain and keyboard.

I remember a time in middle school when I could not understand why it was that the words I had in my mind did not translate into the words I wrote. I would be thinking one thing and writing another. What was that?

It was an article of faith with me that there should be a direct connection between what I thought and what I penned. There was not. In fact there was many a slip. MacSpeech changes that.

MacSpeech makes thought — intellection — literal. Ideas, instantly evoked. Reflection equals composition. And by combining the varieties of prosthetics available when words atomize into pixels and bytes, I am able to think in new ways. It’s like getting a good massage. By combining different forms of outliners, alternate thought processors (DEVONthink, for instance), and collection tools like Evernote, I gain the freedom to think and compose simultaneously.

What’s going on? This pen is hot and evolving. But the pace of innovation can be telling. Look at the growth of apps for the iPhone/iPod. With 25-thousand apps in January, Flurry says that the apps numbered 65-thousand in July. There’s a message in those numbers. Interest. Opportunity. Success! The public is on fire. Not at Livescribe. They need to get the developer community churning.

They could start with notepads. Humble but powerful. The standard notebook that comes with the pen is fine, but a variety of note taking notebooks would be … value added, a little spice in the process. I already break up the page in a modified Cornell Notes style, as I take notes with the smartpen. How about a notebook with no lines, but grids for notes, summaries and questions? The good news is that there’s already buzz among developers about moving to a new line of notepads… But is it real?

A small moleskin-style notebook would be great for the smartpen. A natural. The neat little notebooks on sale now are too thick and clunky for quick-draw writers and note takers.

On the other hand, the pen is not exactly fast on the draw, either. It’s big, which suggests a modified smartpen of the future. A whole new line. How about a smart pen with one flat side to keep it from rolling off the table? In classrooms, many desks are slanted for comfort. That can be dangerous for a delicate $200 writing device.

Or what about microphones. I did an interview the other day in a noisy restaurant. Ambient noise can be a problem for the pen. I got around the loud music and louder clientele by using the smartpen’s earphone/microphones like a lavaliere mic, planting them just next to my subject’s fork. It worked great. But why not a lavaliere mic for the smartpen? Add a little Bluetooth device to the pen and connect it through a Bluetooth mic… Farewell unsightly wires. Professionals like me would pay for add-ons that make work easier and more accurate. There are probably dozens of ways to modify existing pens to employ Bluetooth… But any kind of microphone that plugged into the pen would do.

Users like me want to see energy and stability from brilliant and innovative companies with products like the smartpen… And I’m watching for signs.

I just bought smartpen number two from livescribe for my son who begins high school in two weeks. Smartpen number one is mine. Bet on that. I use it for teaching and for interviewing.

Here’s the deal. Say you’re in a lecture, and you whip out your smartpen. Naturally, you begin taking notes. Your smartpen uses “special” paper (same price as “regular” paper), which allows the pen to simultaneously capture every word on the page as the pen’s microphone records every word in the lecture. Or, in my case, the interview. Back at your desk, you slip the pen into its “cradle,” and everything flows into a free software package. Now for the magic.

Every word in your funky handwritten notes is searchable! Pulse smartpen from Livescribe

And more, if you don’t understand those inky gobs others call your handwritten notes, there’s remedy. You simply touch the pen to the scrambled words and the pen replays the lecture/interview from the garbled blob of cursive in question. Word! Watch how University of Kansas professor, cool Mike Wesch and his class, use the pen: SmartPen as Digital Ethnography Tool

This is serious stuff with lots of opportunities for those in search of intellectual prosthetics, and we haven’t begun to address the opening questions raised by this blog. Not to mention one or two improvements and a problem-O…

To be continued…

Until now, the idea behind this blog has been to examine the affect of software on the writing process. But now that I’m on the other side of the mirror, which is to say, writing code — in essence, turning the writing into software — I need to reflect on my original aims.

To be brief, coding interferes with writing. It’s just tedious. However, I’m convinced it improves the reading experience, which is crucial, perhaps the whole point. It occurs to me that The History News Network could present a problem (hnn.us/blogs/74.html) because their interface is so limited. It’s really not designed for “digital literary non-fiction.” Comparing The Honey Trap with, say, The Dolly Madison Digital Edition, from UVA can be disheartenting, although it may be missing the point.

Perhaps what I need to do is to set limits, to define what THT can actually achieve digitally.

Here’s one idea: To make the Honey Trap sufficiently interactive that other scholars can employ my links and resources to prove, disprove, augment or even transmute the story of OSS, the origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Madame Brousse. Digitizing THT should provide historians with resources to advance the story, beyond what I am able to achieve.

Next up: How using software to produce digital copy changes the art/craft of writing.

More recently, I tried to produce dialogue via facebook status lines, but failed because the continuity was lost, except on my own page (and who reads that?). There was a worse problem, though. One I can’t fix. My dialogue ran in reverse order. Egad. But, nice try, nonetheless.

I have two thoughts about my failures, maybe three. I can’t be the first person to have tried this. Second, it’s not yet possible to create live self-updating contiguous posts via social networks. Too bad. Any developers listening? This should be possible, a value-added feature. Mr. Zuckerman? There’s poetry to be done, songs to be written, short stories…

Second point (or is this the third?), the prosthetic element of Web 2.0 social software played no role in the “creative” process, no symbiosis, no synergy, no ghost in the machine, just chatter and clutter. In fact, the social network software got in the way. (I may try this with a Hash (#) Twitter, we’ll see. It could work.) Worse, no one gave a damn, but what else is new? No difference to me.

Time to make a statement:

Social networking should offer a new twist on publishing, something live and interactive and available to readers — if there are any (left) — to comment and possibly drive the story. See my post below on the Japanese women who write novels on their cell phones. What am I missing? What is social networking missing (a simple, intuitive way to reverse order status lines)? What have those Japanese thumbsters got that I ain’t got?

Who are these characters? They’re the synthesized voices of my Mac.

I’ve actually been using Princess for some time now, but I’ve just discovered Alex, a new voice that comes with Leopard. He’s really pretty good. Unlike other synthesizers, Alex will actually breathe as he reads, which is a nice touch. In some ways (read: my fragile ego), Alex is better than an editor, which is why I parted ways with my most recent red-pencil type. Synthetic Alex. He supplies the electronic prosthetic I most need as a writer.

I’ll be honest, I’ve got a processing defect in the CPU-between-my-ears. It means I not only don’t realize when I’m leaving out words, misspelling them or barfing-up sentences. It’s actually worse than that. I fail completely when it comes to proofing my own copy. I can’t see a word I write, or fail to write.

The difference is Alex. He’ll read everything I write just as I write it. He’s one cold dude. And more, when he speaks I listen. And when I listen, I hear the errors I fail to read.

Good-bye red pencils. Thank you, Alex, you intellectual prosthetic you. And did I mention Alex doesn’t charge for his services?