Digital Structure

In this chapter, I consider whether digital images are digital in the strongest sense; namely, qua images. Assuming that a digital image is one that is made and screened digitally, there is a further question as to whether the representational scheme to which the image belongs has a fundamentally digital structure. Answering this question requires close analysis of Nelson Goodman’s classical account of the analog/digital distinction. It also requires a response to Goodman’s insistence on the essential analogicity of the pictorial. Such a response points to the uses of digital sampling and quantization technology to impose digital structure on encoded, replicable images.