Digitizing Heritage: More than Clicking on a Button, Producing good Copies

This article examines the visual practices that support the production of digitized heritage representations observed during an extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Brazilian Heritage institutions. Ethnographic data allows focusing on digitization processes as “digitization in action” - extending the iconic Latourian proposition (1995) to study “science in action”, avoiding normative or idealized accounts of scientific endeavors. As such, the digitization processes I observed involved the definition of "good" copies and the practical means to produce and evaluate their quality – where visually qualifying the copies is central and relies on onsite available resources. Following three digitizing operators in one setting, I will show how each has devised a different way of producing and verifying the copies for their quality. This heritage work (Smith, 2006) of reproduction strives for the visual uniformity of digital copies more than their alignment with their original counterparts. Individuated modes of producing digital copies show up in a lack of uniformity which is deemed problematic – and while solutions to arrive at this uniformity are devised, they demonstrate that good copies result from intense work and question the responsibilities distributed among the team. This, in turn, provides a way to understand how digitization and heritage convene in shifting repartitions and considerations about what heritage consists of and who is to care about the quality of its digital copies.