Not long ago, the U.S. Library of Congress asked me to design and build the analog electronics they will use to transfer their collection of over two million electro- mechanical recordings (vinyl LPs, 16’s, 33’s. 45’s, 78’s, 16” transcriptions, pre-1930’s Edison acoustics, Edison cylinders, etc..). I feel a tremendous weight of responsibility – knowing that the ultimate purity of our 19th and 20th century analog recording archive will, in some part, be determined by the effectiveness of my work. Thousands of years from now, when someone listens to our contemporary recordings, they will be listening to the LOC transcriptions.

I recently had an opportunity to visit the brand new Library of Congress Audio / Visual Conservation Center about an hour south of Washington D.C. – where my electronics will be installed and used to transfer our analog records to digital bits. An entire wing of the new building is devoted to audio digitizing and restoration – the most extensive archiving project in the history of recorded media.

The AVCC was built with a $150M gift from David Packard (vis Hewlett-Packard) – the largest private gift to the U.S. legislative branch. Over 90 miles of underground audio, film, and other media will be archived here in temperature-controlled underground vaults. By this time next year, the AVCC will be the world’s largest consumer of hard disk drive storage, surpassing Google – using not gigabytes, nor terabytes, but petabyes of data each year.

Here’s a typical LOC audio transfer room and transcribing rig – of which six are currently being built. The turntable was created by Simon Yorke in Spain, my electronics are in the racks below.

My day at the LOC got me thinking about transcription in general – specifically, creating copies that maintain unfailing authenticity to the original. Perhaps some would consider me a contemporary “scribe” (greek: ska`rifos) – applying my skills to assure that audio copies remain faithful to the original. It’s my passion to assure that thousands of years from now, Miles, Mingus, Ella, Tatum, and Bird sound like they did exactly in the concert or recording session. Nothing added, nothing taken away. As a high-tech scribe, my electronic papyrus should be invisible to the task.

But when transferring from legacy source to digital archive, 100% accuracy simply isn’t possible. Though I strive to minimize corruption in the copy, certain nuances will always be “lost in translation.” No such translation is entirely accurate. There is always some degree of distortion (what we call nonlinearity) with each transfer.

One of the Library’s technicians showed me around the endless film vaults – miles of underground catacombs of 25 degree (brrr!) crypts housing original 8, 16, 35, 70, IMAX, and other film formats (old nitrate film is highly flammable and decomposes via heat.)

The Library houses an industrial scale film processing plant. Rare films which arrive in poor condition, and cannot be immediately digitized, are duplicated onto new film and processed in-house. Then something remarkable happens. In one of two “A/B Screening” rooms, a council of SMPTE-qualified judges view the copy against the original – side by side.

A film safety copy is expected to exhibit slight variations from the original. The council of judges determines if the copy varies too far from the original. And if it does, additional copies are made until an acceptable print is achieved. Here’s one of the A/B screening rooms (under construction).

As I walked around the Library’s vast audio and video archives, I envisioned the great library at Alexandria and wondered about the “scribes” of antiquity – those who were entrusted to assure faithful copies of original manuscripts. The writers of the NT documents had little or no quality review, no contemporary boards of experts to pour over their work.

And what’s worse, according to theologian Bart Ehrman, “not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have, in most cases, are… copies made centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places… There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.”

Ehrman continues, “…what is one to make of all these differences? If one insists that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would the point be if we don’t have the very words of scripture? In some places, we simply can’t be sure we have reconstructed the original texts accurately. It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are!”

Caveat: Eherman (one of today’s preeminent scholars of NT textual history and criticism) later says in Misquoting Jesus that many of these scribal variations are “insignificant.” Regardless, our NT-era copyists made countless mistakes – spelling, punctuation and capitalization (little of either was used), usage, tense, attribution, errant parsing of scriptuo continua, etc.. with the earliest NT manuscripts exhibiting the greatest variations – all attributable to scribal error.

The earliest NT copies were made not by professional scribes, but by those who wanted the texts for personal or communal use. It follows that errors in early NT transcription were likely more common than with manuscripts made by later copyists. Church father Origen complained in the third century:

The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists, or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or in the process checking, they make additions and deletions as they please.

This is an observation from someone who was among the most literate of all church fathers. He created what might be called the first university of Christian thought – at the Archives of Alexandria, no less. The desire for accurate transcriptions, and the problem of achieving such, is not new, but reaches thousands of years into history. (by the time of Origen at Alexandria, Xn documents were being transcribed with far superior accuracy).

The famous passage of Revelation in which the reader is warned against “adding” or “removing” any words from the text under threat of “plagues” and “banishment from the holy city” (Rev 22: 18-19) is actually a warning to scribes and copyists. Numerous ecclesial writers of that era made similar, even identical, threats to transcribers – threatening fire and brimstone to those who added or removed even one word of their work.

Ehrman points out that, on certain occasion, scribes caused significant changes to earlier NT documents. Two examples are given: John 7:53 – 8:12, and the last 12 verses of Mark.

The first example is the well-known story of the woman caught in adultery (I wonder… where is the man? Pharisaical law required both to be stoned..). This narrative was not part of the original Gospel of John, but added later by scribes. Some of the earliest examples place the passage into Jn 21 and even Luke (!). Erhman notes that to “most textual critics” the passage is “not considered part of the Bible.”

In the second example of scribal liberty, the verses are absent from the earliest manuscripts of Mark, added later by unknown scribes. Some scholars believe that our earliest Mark manuscripts perhaps had the 12-verse ending, but were lost. Anything’s possible, but the fact remains that scribes of antiquity took great liberties in transcription.

We’re fortunate to live in an era when our sources can now be digitized into an unchanging format. The age of analog to digital conversion. We’re living in the last era of scribal error, as all media becomes saved and duplicated not with human skill, but by machines which rarely make mistakes. And when they do make a mistake, they self-correct.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Science & Technology, Transition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.