Old Problem, New Scale

This article provided by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (which is quite an interesting program in and of itself), notes that the problem of authenticating sources used for research is not a new one in the humanities. Scholars in fields such as art and history have always had to use their specialized knowledge to try to determine the authenticity of the works or documents which they examine. However, Bearman and Trant, the authors of the article, feel that the current digital era has led to an enormous increase in the scale of the problem. Whereas in the past it took much specialized skill to create a credible copy or forgery, the mere act of hitting a button or two can create a digital object nearly indistinguishable from the original (other than the lack of physicality, of course.) Also, more and more scholars are turning to digital research as a way of maximizing research time and for the thoroughness it affords. Yet, they no longer can use physical clues (for example, handwriting) to infer authenticity

Bearman and Trant see a number of possible solutions to the problem without really recommending one single method. They divide their methods into public methods, secret methods, and functionally dependent methods. Public methods may either be social (e.g. creating a collecting institution of record along the lines of a certified website which raises issues of who performs the certification) or technological, such as using public key encryption to create digital signatures for documents. Secret methods consist mainly of technological clues buried in empty space within files such as stegonography. Functionally dependent methods probably do the best job in authenticating because the very working of the file is tied to the end user's ability to authenticate it. However, this is much trickier to set up and probably a bit overkill. (After all, there is a certain amount of responsibility traditionally borne by the scholar...)

I found this article interesting largely because of my history background. When evaluating physical reprints or translations of primary sources, a historical scholar will check the publisher (kind of an early form of public authentication, I suppose.) But in digitizing, nearly anyone can be a publisher, so count me as convinced, scholarly responsibility notwithstanding, that some sort of authenticity determination scheme will be necessary as more and more primary documents are digitized