Translating movement

The materials this week alongside our two field trips to the New York Municipal Archives and the Brooklyn Public Library provide us with particular glimpses at the sensory possibilities that infrastructure can either contribute to or deny. To take, for example, the Warburg library – much of the “poetic composition” of the library seems to be dependent on the way one moves through the physical space of the shelves, which guide the visitor along lines of an “uninterrupted association of titles, not a linear order with a beginning and an end” (Manguel, 204). Is it possible for a sensory experience to exist in a comparable manner without the aid of movement through physical space? Is it possible for the sensorial exploratory atmosphere created by the geospatial arrangement system of the shelves (Kissinger), the nearness of certain titles to others, the cross-pollinations of images and texts due to proximity, to be transferable to the digital? The question I’m trying to ask is not whether there is a sensorial exploratory aspect to digital collections, as there certainly is. Rather, I’m wondering if it is possible to digitize the original physical arrangement, and its particular sensory experience, of the collection itself. And if it is possible, the question of “should it?” remains. Should a digitized collection strive to induce the same sensory experience as the original physical collection, or can the digitized be allowed to form its own particular sensorium? I ask this in specific reference to Henry Wilhelm’s initial commentary on the Corbis Image Vault as aiming towards preservation, when he laments the deterioration of photographs. Can deterioration exist in the archive without being treated as a spiteful pest?