Google has made a good business recently of digitizing the real world--but there's a problem. The real world, uppity as it is, keeps asserting itself. Whether it's phantom pink fingers in scanned books or adeer impacted by the Street View van, it seems that our actuals keep on sticking their grubby bits right into the middle of our digitals.
Sometimes, though, the reminders aren't so disruptive. I was looking for books by Yeats in the Google Books collection and came across this image on the copyright page of The Cutting of an Agate. It shows two tiny pencil sketches of faces in profile--both with long noses and downcast eyes. It's hard to say when the drawings might have been made--the hairstyles look awfully turn-of-the-century--but the book itself is from 1912. But unlike street-view shots of burning houses, this is a much gentler reminder of the real world's tenacious fight to be more than an object for mapping. More than a species of itself.
