Established in 1954 in California, Treise Engineering designed machines are used by motion picture film laboratories, film archive and restoration operations and feature film and TV post production facilities. Treise products are now being built in the RTI 60,000 square foot Lincolnwood, Illinois factory. Treise will custom design film processing equipment and upgrades for most film formats and speeds, and can offer laboratory design and installation consultancy services. uneven conversations about digital preservation that continue into the present day.
Brian: In fact, the issue of uneven technology diffusion and uneven response on the part of the information professions became a major theme of the course.
Trevor: It strikes me that there are two related but different values in historicizing digital preservation education. On the one hand, the artifacts now making their ways into libraries, archives and museums come from different historical periods and as such an internalist understanding of different digital technologies and their features and affordances is valuable. With that said, more broadly, there is a value in understanding that computing has a social and cultural history. That is, a significant part of understanding (or for that matter, preserving, describing, and interpreting) a digital object involves entering into the past as a foreign country and coming to see it as someone in a different historical circumstance saw it. I am curious to know if you see a similar tension between these two values for historicizing and if in designing your syllabus there was any tension between focusing on the internalist story of devices and technologies changing over time and the externalist story of what those devices and technologies mean to different people in different historical contexts?
Alison: This tension is critical to our course design. In many ways, our entire course was predicated on this same observation. It is important to know both an insider’s history of computing as well as the social and subject effects of IT infrastructure.