Words’ End

I’m so tired of travel.

On Friday I came back from the latest – to Maryland on Tuesday, to give a talk at MITH; and then DC for the Reinvention Center conference. This was my fourth trip in just under two months: the other three were to Nebraska (digital humanities workshop), Fredericton (text-analysis conference) and Chester, Vermont (Readex Digital Institute, which got extensively blogged here). On Tuesday I leave for Chester again, to return on Wednesday after a meeting. This is the blessed last trip for the foreseeable future.

Don’t get me wrong: all the events I went to have been fabulous (see below), and I’m looking forward to going back to Readex. But – and I’ve known this from the start – this is too much travel right now.

The talk at MITH went well. I guess the crowd was a bit diminished compared to their usual; it was election day, and there was a Human-Computer Interaction event precisely coinciding with my talk. Nevertheless, it was a good group, and boy, they really mean it when they call these things “Digital Dialogues.” They jumped right in about five minutes into my talk, and the lively conversation didn’t stop for the next hour and a half or so. I showed the Virtual Humanities Lab and we talked about collaboration, its logistical issues and benefits-vs-drawbacks and ways in which VHL can be made a more friendly collaboration environment. It was great to receive feedback from people not only interested, but way more knowledgeable about the state of the field. It felt easy to be there; they’ve created a great atmosphere both for conversation and for work.

Wednesday I took advantage of MITH’s generous offer to use their “coffeehouse” space for work. That evening I found myself at the downtown Washington hotel where the Reinvention Center conference was to take place in the next two days.

I’ve a ton of notes from that conference. I only got to go because my dissertation director was leading one of the sessions, and asked me to be his session recorder; this way the Center gives a few grad students the opportunity to see what’s going on in research universities around the country, while at the same time getting young’uns to more or less write the proceedings. A more than fair price, I must say.

So I’d been reasonably interested in the conference, but had no idea how useful it would be and how much new information I would get that will be applicable in my near-future work. For one thing, I saw the largest concentration of high-level university administrators that I’ve ever seen before. Not sure what the ratio of administrators (and staff, like librarians) to faculty was, but it felt something like 2:1 or maybe even 3:1, and perhaps 300 people in attendance. (I may be wildly off here. It’s just an estimate.) I’ll have to go over my notes later and perhaps write it up here, if I get to it.

If I get to it. Friday I came back; and yesterday my adored husband took me out for a romantic evening out that stretched well into this morning. I had no idea what we were doing; turned out, we were going to an Ani DiFranco concert. Well, holy shit: I hadn’t been to a concert in a long, long time, and had only seen Ani in concert once. It was a treat. Not only does she rock the the house, but she is touring while quite pregnant, and her happiness with where she is and what she’s doing could be felt all the way at the back bar where we were standing. She had with her a stand-up-bassist and a percussionist with a xylophone and a steel drum and a bunch of other unusual rhythm instruments. Beautiful sound, mostly good crowd, amazing energy.

Then we reconnected over dinner and conversation and general dalliance. This past summer, going into early fall, was difficult for both of us. We both had to reduce and eventually stop taking anti-depressants: welcome to U.S. health care, which left us scrambling for two months (three in Ethan’s case). In the fall we both dove into new work, and have been trying to catch up with each other ever since. Last evening (orchestrated in part by a kind friend – many thanks!) was a badly needed one.

And now… now there’s more work. The final VHL report to the NEH is due at the end of the month. My write-up of our session at the Reinvention Center conference is due at the same time. I’ve got a job app to send out tomorrow, blessedly almost done but still on the to-do list. Tuesday-Wednesday there’s the trip, and my next task for the dissertation is the transcription and encoding of around 600 lines of poetry. Then there’s another fellowship app to get together.

And then there’s the social life, without which Vika gets to be a dull and sad girl. Tonight we were treated by our fabulous housemate to Marie Antoinette the movie, which had an unexpected soundtrack (Aphex Twin!) and was generally not half bad. Monday (tomorrow!) we have a friend visiting. Haven’t seen her in a long long time, so I’m really looking forward to it, and to the inevitable good food associated with the visit.

So what do I do? Instead of getting some sleep I write a long blog entry. Ah well, at least now I have a de facto to do list. There’s more to write about – details of the movie, Sean McMullen’s The Miocene Arrow which I’m enjoying these days, my relationship with the uncertainties of life after May, various anxieties about whether I’ll finish the dissertation in time. But all these can wait. Good night now.

Steven F. Daniel, NewsBank [parent company of Readex]. “Around the world in 80 documents: International content in 19th-century congressional publications.” Last presentation of the institute! Go Readex, y’all inspired me to blog THE WHOLE THING. That’s a first.

Get this: it’s possible for Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg (protagonist of Around the World in 80 Days) to go through Readex’s Congressional Serial Set and pull a document on every country he visits during his journey. Not only that, he can pull information on every steamship line involved. Awesome.

Steven takes us through every one of the places that Fogg visits on his travels. We are shown documents relating to:

- the London Penitentiary Congress (1872);

- Paris Commune: Letters from the US Ambassador;

- P&O Steamship Co.;

- Suez Canal at the Philadelphia Exposition;

- Irrigation in India, a letter from the Secretary of the Treasury;

- Elephants, a letter from the King of Siam proposing to populate America’s forests with them;

- Singapore, with photographs from Commodore Perry’s report on his voyage to Japan in the 1850s;

- Hong Kong: Letters from the US Consulate;

- Slavery in China: Letters from Shanhai Consulate;

- Tea in Japan, a letter from the Secretary of State;

- Pacific Mail Steamship Co. (Fogg takes it to across the Pacific, from Asia to San Francisco);

- Railroad across America (a Memorial of the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California);

- Cunard Line [of ships] (Fogg misses this one and has to take another ship);

- Irish labor conditions (a letter from the Secretary of State); aaand

- London Exposition (another letter from the Secretary of State regarding the exhibition of 1871).

Other tasks, projects, fun things to do with the Serial Set:

- write a paper at 2am in your dorm room;

- sail up the Amazon;

- study the antiquities of Easter Island;

- read a biography of the last Emperor of Brazil;

- explore the Congo;

- sail the Dead Sea;

- cool off in the Arctic or Antarctic;

- study the sieve of Sebastopol [vz: Sevastopol] or learn why Bolivia has no seacoast.

What a way to demo a digital document collection. That’s awesome. A great note to leave the institute on. Thank you, Readex.

[The second talk of the morning was mine; I was a bit busy and didn't blog it. It went very well.]

Terry Reese, Oregon State University, “Breaking out of the box: Libraries without walls.”

Terry is not just a librarian but also a client-oriented infrastructure and application developer. He “lives metadata,” all the time, is a firm believer in metadata. He builds tools for handling metadata. He thinks that the most important thing that librarians do is not digitization, but creating metadata for digitized objects. Go metadata!

(For the record, I’m totally with him here.)

Libraries today are suffering from an identity crisis, trapped between the traditional roles of a library and the current expectations of its users. So what do undergraduates want? They want a library that fits into an ipod, they wanna use google and other software they’re already familiar with.

Libraries are their communities’ (esp. small communities’) primary information providers. Libraries have also started facilitating, for example, borrowing from other institutions (interlibrary loan), providing e-resources. Nowadays, libraries are one of the many information providers available to their users.

Libraries’ evolving roles aren’t new. They’ve traditionally evolved with technology. But up until now they were central repositories of trusted information, and now they’re no longer in that center. (vz: or not in the center alone.)

Evolution isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It underlines libraries’ past successes, and it also demonstrates a vibrant information ecosystem of which libraries are now a part. But with evolution comes the necessity to learn a new language. Syndication; blogs and blogging; reviews and user-driven ratings all are parts of that same ecosystem.

Library 2.0: socially driven content; social networking; social bookmarking; personalization. Folksonomies, tagging and tag clouds. This may be scary for librarians, but it’s also what the users want to do. New programming tools: AJAX, API, ruby on rails, Python, LAMP. From there follows: open access, open source, open content. (Metadata wants to be free! Free the metadata!)

Also, Library 2.0 is about web services. Digital library dev’t needs to start with an understanding that the library needs to be more transparent (a sort of business model; for example, label everything so that users know where their information is coming from). Libraries need to look outside the library community for usable technologies. Maybe libraries could start collaborating as groups, and develop software of their own, perhaps starting with some open-source software and customizing it for librarians’ purposes.

How the user sees the library in the digital world. Looking to the past: library -> individual materials. Looking to the present: library [as middleware] -> a complex interconnected lot of materials.

“Unlibrary”: digitization is not enough; accessibility only through the library isn’t sufficient.

In 5 years, in Terry’s library, simple aggregation of resources will not be enough. Databases and websites will be replaced by mechanisms that fetch information into users’ workflows. Single points of access for information will be the goal. Also, “intermediate environments” (mashups, aggregations, workflow – think Spell with Flickr… and, oh my gawd, hamster sudoku! And, holy $#!7, Massachusetts campaign contribution map) will be consumers of library services, just like more traditional users.

An example of how libraries could usefully do that sort of thing is umlaut by Ross Singer. There are also search engine that search multiple resources, whether within or outside the library.

So what can libraries do? They can work with partners: no library, LC or the smallest of them, is large enough to solve these problems themselves. They can also continue to innovate: libraries need to do more development. They should depend less on their vendors and more on developing solutions to their problems themselves. These solutions should be open-source. Finally, libraries can open their current systems to outside users. This is something libraries don’t like to do right now. But libraries expects groups like publishers, Google etc. to provide harvested metadata, but they don’t build this facility into their own systems.

Another thing to do is insist on metadata from vendors as part of the RFP (request for proposal) process, in the course of licensing negotiations, etc.

Lastly, interoperability. Terry talked about a proposed technical protocol named IHP that seem to be library-specific, and all of that information went straight over my head. Sorry, Terry.

Ed Redmond, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress (LC), “Digital Maps and Digital Map Reference.”

LC has been around since 1800, and has been collecting maps for the entire time. Over 5 million map sheets dating from 1830 to the present! That’s a lot of maps. In fact, more than anyone else in the world.

1995 – they decided to digitally scan historical maps. What do they scan: American Memory stuff; documents for the Congressional Relations Office; documents for the general public. Scanning goals: research quality images (not perfect reproductions); controlled access; persistent URLs. Priorities: cartobibliographies, out-of-copyright stuff (pre-1923); items with existing catalog records. They also scan atlases.

Their scanner is HUGE, and is called JumboScanner. Can do maps 3×5 feet in one pass. It takes 15-30 minutes per map. Scans are saved as TIFF and converted into JPEG2000. Like most projects I’ve seen at this institute, theirs seems to be [almost] entirely Windows-based.

Other benefits to scanning (besides preservation and public access): LC has in the past supported international mediation of geographically based conflicts (?). They don’t do that anymore, but they do have the resources to make maps for various Congressional divisions on demand. Confidentiality issues are involved with those kinds of maps, so they can’t put them into the catalogue without the requester’s consent.

The LC Map Collections website now features more than 10,000 cartographic items. The American Memory site also has an LC Learning Page, created especially for teachers. Collection Connections marries digital content with education standards, offering among other things sample lesson plans. They even do video conferences featuring maps, where LC specialists talk to classes via video.

Ed proceeded to show us a bunch of fascinating historical maps. Check out the website, it’s awesomely outrageous.

Mary Molinaro, University of Kentucky. “Finding your niche: Leveraging limited resources to build a digital program.” Oh, this will be great. Resources are almost never sufficient in the humanities, as Mary herself mentions right at the beginning. :)

First, though, she demonstrates a VHS tape she found titled “Richard Simmons groovin’ in the house.” Go Readex! They know how to relax!

MM distinguishes between project and program: quit thinking about “digital initiatives” and “projects.” They imply temporary status. “Program” implies infrastructure and sustainability, which is advantageous even within the project, for morale and a better mentality.

Good news/bad news: we’re hopelessly lost, but we’re making good time (or rushing headlong into… something). There’s no set formula for building digital programs. Some of what MM will say isn’t news, but is good to remember as lessons from our non-digital past. MM will list general pointers for building a program, and then proceed to talk about her KY group’s experience with building a program, going point by point. That specific information is in parentheses below.

1. Look to the future. It’s easy to get into the daily routine with no end game in sight, particularly if you’re trying to distinguish yourself or your project. How do you find a new place where you can make a significant contribution, find your niche? Look to the future.

2. Look to the past, too. Where are your areas of strength? Where’ve you been successful in the past? Can you look at those things in a new way, that’ll turn them into assets for building a new program?

3. Assess your strengths (follows from previous point). Can you itemize the useful stuff you have that you can leverage – people, equipment, good will? (50 yrs of microfilming; 30 yrs of oral history; good relationship with partners in the state)

4. Acknowledge weaknesses. Priorities are always competing. How do you convince people that yours are the ones that ought to be supported? Also, work with the staff you have. Take note of their expertise (or not) and move forward from there. (high competition for resources; mired in activities they can’t easily jettison; ‘wring our hands’ mentality)

5. Seek opportunities. One thing can lead to another. It’s seldom that someone just comes to you and offers you $1M to move forward on your project. Be proactive about funding especially. (opportunity to coordinate state digital library, and hire a digital librarian; looked for, and found!, just the right grant)

6. Take opportunities that do come your way. (And/but:) Choose your projects strategically. (U of KY chose board of trustees minutes; yearbooks; student newspaper. not something the public is clamoring for, but when the project was finished the trustees were very, very impressed, and so looked favorably upon expanding the program for participation in the NDNP project mentioned in the previous post)

7. Beware mission drift. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Without focus it’s really easy to fall away. (too easy to say yes to fund-generating proposals such as in 6 above)

8. Continually stretch. Generate more ideas than you can possibly realize, then pick out of them. This is better than looking for that One Perfect Idea, and pushes the upper bound higher. (MM’s group brainstormed regularly and had a whiteboard dedicated to the ideas generated and a list of needs! – could do this electronically, but this is visible to anyone walking in including potential donors, and this visibility is very important)

9. Take risks. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Give yourself permission to fail. If you wait until everything’s in place, you’ll never get anywhere. Have a clear understanding with your boss that not everything you do may be 100% successful, but as long as you’re advancing your program, it’s worth doing. (you can drive your car off that cliff, but once you do, you really limit your options; fear of risk can be paralyzing, but at some point you gotta let go of the what-ifs)

10. Network like crazy. Opportunities present themselves in the oddest of places. Tell your story widely. If you don’t, nobody will know what you’re doing. (have an elevator statement about your project, a spiel that you can give in the space of an elevator ride; and also, find places to tell your story)

11. Seek advice. Ask experts, get opinions, and you’ll begin to see consensus. Money spent on the right consultants can be money very well spent. You can also get a lot of advice for free. (call in experts; attend as many training opportunities as possible)

12. Fast-paced is better. This works for KY, anyway. Not talking frenzied here, but an aggressive pace with high expectations creates a self-perpetuating high-energy atmosphere. Likewise, a sluggish atmosphere self-perpetuates and bogs you down. (has melded MM’s group together and created an entrepreneurial environment)

13. Learn from failures. Pay attention, and try not to make mistakes more than once. In the long term failures can be as important as successes. (MM’s group is just not meant to scan state math tests. it’s a long story)

14. Leverage successes. Turn one success into another. Building a program is an iterative process; sometimes the steps are big, and other times they’re small. (they got really good at turning one success into another)

15. Celebrate success. Personal thanks can mean a lot to people. Thank them individually, in public, in a group. Market your group’s successes. (they’ve had celebratory dinners, written for the library newsletters, acknowledged individuals publicly, looked for ways to leverage staff’s successes into opportunities for them individually)

16. Money means a lot but it’s not everything. There are other ways to build infrastructure: space, equipment, goodwill, percentage of individuals’ time. (all of these things can be made a commitment on the part of the university when you’re applying for grants, and that might help not only with the work but with getting the grants in the first place)

17. Not everything you do will be meaningful, but make sure something is. “If you build it, they will come” does not always work. What will your resource help people do? Have an identified outcome for everything you do.

Matthew Beacom, Yale University Library. “After AAACR2 [Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules]: Content standards for resource description and access.” He’s all about cataloguing cultural objects.

AACR == great example of international agreement regarding digital standards. What surprises MB is that the agreement has survived for this long, and has been amended/improved too.

AACR (created in 1978) IS THE LAW. But it was created by its own community of practice, and is in continuous development. (As all rulesets should be. -vz)

What is a content standard? MB and his community use it thus: it’s a bit lik the rules of the road for driving. Highways, town roads, cars, companies that make all those things exist, but if you didn’t know which side of the road to drive on, but we wouldn’t have the [social structure of] the transportation system. Same with information standards.

Why a new standard? Short answer: the digital revolution. Before, users had to position themselves in a physical environment to use resources; and they had an institutional environment that helped them to use those resources. (You don’t walk into a library and expect to purchase a book on your way out, clearance sales notwithstanding.) Nowadays we bring resources to ourselves much more than before.

RDA (Resource Description and Access) is the new standard in development.

RDA will be: a new standard designed for the digital (as opposed to card-catalog) environment, developed as a web-based product, suitable for describing digital and analog artifacts. It’ll also be a multinational content standard, developed for use in English language environments (but can also be used by other-language communities). It’ll be independent of the format used to communicate information.

Distinctions between libraries, archives, museums etc. are breaking down, and their interrelationships are changing in nature as well. They’re not going to turn into one another, but the clarity of distinctions has changed, and the potential for collaboration has increased.

It’ll support FRBR [Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records] user tasks (!!! – yay!), such as find, identify, select, obtain. It’ll enable users of library catalogs, etc. to find and use resources appropriate to their information needs.

Who develops and supports RDA? A buncha acronyms; see RDA link above and also this list. People from Australia, Canada, the US and England make up the Joint Steering Committee.

AACR2 has two parts: description and access. RDA (draft arrangement) is description, relationships, and access point control. As part of revision, description and relationships are now grouped into Part A, and access point control is Part B. (vz: I’m not sure what access point control is.)

Timeline: looking at first release of RDA in mid-2008, but there might be a delay of 6 months to a year. Meanwhile there’s a lot of work as pieces of RDA get drafted and commented on.

Continuity vs. change: “Why didn’t you just throw out AACR2 and start over?” Well, they wanted to maintain some continuity, and keep the best of what they had. Also: compatibility with existing records is essential! And also, maintaining international agreements is important.

Stressed: RDA will be a content standard, not a display standard. It will contain new and refined data elements (with respect to AACR2) but retain relationships between elements.

Revenue for AACR2 goes into a fund that goes back into making it better, and then what’s not used goes to copyright owners. This is a self-supporting operation.

Helen Agüera is in Program Development with the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Mark Sweeney is in Preservation Planning at the US Library of Congress (LC). The full title of their joint presentation is: “National Digital Newspaper Program: Enhancing Access to America’s Newspapers.”

Agüera first. NEH programs: preservation & access; scholarly research; education; and public programs.

US Newspaper Program (USNP): started in 1980s; grants to do inventory & catalog all newspaper holdings within a state, and do selection microfilming. This is a partnership between NEH and LC. Its accomplishments: over 140K newspaper titles, 70 million pages of newsprint in microfilm. Every state is included (to varying degrees?). NEH funding totaling over $54 million was necessary to complete this program.

New program to provide enhanced access to newspapers by digitizing certain titles already preserved in microfilm. There’s no single library that has a complete newspaper collection, so this has to be a distributed effort in order to create a geographically representative collection. This is again a partnership between NEH and LC. LC will develop and maintain American Chronicle to make digitized papers freely accessible. This is a We the People project.

NDNP features: 1836-1922 (public domain only). Complements other dig. resources for earlier historical period. Begins chron. coverage with early 20th century and expans to earlier decades to achieve broad geogr. representation. Repurposes USNP bibliographic information for users to locate newspapers in analog formats (microfilm and print). (Interesting! So this is not an effort to eliminate paper. That’s great.)

Development phase began in May 2005: six projects digitizing a min. of 100K pages (each!) published in CA, FL, KY, NY, UT and VA from 1900 to 1910. LC contributes titles from its collection, aggregates all information, and creates a preservation framework. Prototype launched in September 2006 and the test bed results are [being?] evaluated by all partners.

No one knows what the optimal way to preserve this digital data will be. The optimal way to deal with that is to proceed in phases, and evaluate often. (Hooray for project management. We need more of that in the acad. humanities.)

Future directions: they’re planning to make awards to state projects with partners that have access to negative microfilm and digital infrastructure. (Collaboration is encouraged!) Successful projects will have an advisory board assisting in selecting titles. Titles should reflect political, economic, cultural history of the state, and have a significant chronological span (some continuity). Special consideration given to “orphan” (unavailable in digital form, papers no longer published, no recognized owner) titles. NEH awards will cover the costs of selection, digitization, and delivery of information to LC.

Mark Sweeney now, on preservation planning and [first] user interface.

Preservation is crucial for access. Their guiding principles:

- aggregate, serve, and preserve; do so consistently with missions and philosophies of NEH and LC (open/perpetual access to public; preservation of the assets that NDNP builds;

- demonstrate good use of taxpayer money);

- phased develpment (develop incrementally, keep door open for new options)

What’s open mean to them: freely accessible; available to use and re-use; persistent identification to support citation; open technical formats; interoperability and modular architecture; open-source software. (YAY.)

The only thing that is certain is change. Change in technologies available; change in user expectations; change in preservation models.

How do we plan for the future? Content is more important than today’s system. Design “system” to be expandable and interoperable with other systems; explicitly incorporate a dev’t phase.

Practical concerns: out-of-the-box solutions have preservation challenges, so they’re doing a lot of from-scratch development with an eye to making it easy for future generations to modify it. They’re building on LC’s expertise and experience today with metadata formats. They expect to learn from their awardees.

They’re aiming to interact with different archival and data needs, and have tools to ingest, manage and distribute the data.

They distinguish between information object and data object. Info. object: original newspaper or microfilm. Data object is the digital surrogate (interesting use of the word -vz): TIFF, JP2, PDF, OCR‘d text, structural metadata etc. Their archival master format is TIFF; their production master format is JPEG 2000. PDF is the derivative (end-user-oriented?) format.

More information about NDNP (including a lot of information on its technical specs) can be found on its website.

The prototype interface beta is available in the LC newspaper reading library. It’s behind a firewall, but from what I understand they expect to release it into the wild by end of January or beginning of February 2007.

Q&A. Mark mentioned that their OCR (which they show you upon request! that’s cool) is uncorrected/unproofread. I wonder if they use it in searching, and if so, how they account for inaccuracies? Mark says: currently it’s not a requirement that the participants correct the OCR, although some correct headlines and important stuff like that. The assumption is that significant words are going to appear multiple times; so if you bomb on recognizing the first couple of occurrences, there’d still be a good chance of it being recognized. They’ve thought of asking the reader community to help with proofreading, but that’s not part of the current development phase. That’s fair enough: the enterprise is huge, this is a beginning phase, and they’re already doing a marvelous job.

Mary Molinaro from Univ. of KY: with OCR, they’re finding the need to strike the balance between good and good-enough. It comes down to the quality of the microfilm, but the OCR technology is actually really good, and is good enough. From their perspective, it wouldn’t be worth it to go back and correct it all. Newspapers are very challenging digitization subjects.

Mark: newspapers are great because they’re so interesting to so many people. This newspaper repository is the first true digital repository that LC has built. On several different levels, this program is a prototype for other such programs, with different digitized objects.

Other questions are about the interface prototype, so I won’t reproduce them since I can’t show you the prototype itself. :) If you’re at one of the institutions developing the initial phase of this program, you’ll be able to see it around mid-October.

This is the fourth annual Digital Institute. It’s remarkably relaxed. Sorry for lack of attributions in some places below: I can’t see everyone’s nameplate from where I’m sitting.

August A. Imholtz, Jr. is the Vice President of the Readex Documents Division, and an engaging speaker. This (along with all of the other talks) is moderated by Meg Meiman of American University. I should mention that this is primarily a librarians’ meeting; I feel quite out of my element and at the same time insanely intrigued.

In her opening remarks, Meg is quoting David Seaman (sic?): “we need the mutant book.” The digital book is (should be) more than a paper book, as regards functionality.

Relic == something you create and have no expectation that someone wil look at it. Record == intended to be used in the years to come. This is what Seaman Andy Mink understands primary and secondary sources to be, respectively.

Imholtz up now. He’ll be talking about the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski‘s “What the Past is For.” First, two short quotations (reproduced as accurately as I was able to given my typing speed):

3rd century BC: “It is the same thing that can be thought and can be. So, what is not and cannot be, cannot be thought. The past cannot and cannot be, and therefore it’s a delusion that we can have such a concept as the past.”

1950: Elizabeth Enscone (sic?): “If the truth of statements about the past depends on present criteria, then, as present criteria may change, the truth of the statements about the past can change. But as the past cannot change… the truth of the statements about the past must lie in the past.”

In 2003, Kolakowski delivered a lecture at the Library of Congress, titled “What the Past is For.” A transcript of this acceptance speech for the first Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities can be found here.

We open with a reading of large chunks of this speech, which I’ll leave you to read yourselves (it’s not that long). Here’s the last couple of paragraphs, though, which I’ve a feeling will inform the rest of the talk:

The upshot of my remarks is modest and banal: although the legacy of myth is certainly an important and fertile source in human culture, we must defend and support traditional research methods, elaborated over centuries, to establish the factual course of history and separate it from fantasies, however nourishing those fantasies might be. The doctrine that there are no facts, only interpretations, should be rejected as obscurantist. And we must preserve our traditional belief that the history of mankind, the history of things that really happened, woven of innumerable unique accidents, is the history of each of us, human subjects; whereas the belief in historical laws is a figment of the imagination. Historical knowledge is crucial to each of us: to schoolchildren and students, to young and old. We must absorb history as our own, with all its horrors and monstrosities, as well as its beauty and splendor, its cruelties and persecutions as well as all the magnificent works of the human mind and hand; we must do this if we are to know our proper place in the universe, to know who we are and how we should act.

One might ask what is the point of repeating these banalities. The answer is that it is important to keep on repeating them, again and again, because these are banalities we often find it convenient to forget; and if we forget them, and they fall into oblivion, we will be condemning our culture, that is to say ourselves, to ultimate and irrevocable ruin.

AI would argue that the past and history are different things, and that there is no history. Herodotus, the first person to use the word in the West, said that history is really research (?), a summary. There is no past, only reconstructions of it. There is no history, only our interpretations of it. There are as many histories as interpreters of history. We create huge digital databanks to recreate history itself. (I’m not sure how much I agree with that. There’s a lot of interpretation that goes into the building of digital resources.)

Remmel Nunn’s wife is writing a children’s book on the concept of time. (Whoa. Brave woman.) One of the most interesting things in K’s thesis, according to RN, is that he’s saying you cannot find laws inside the study of history like you can, say, in thermodynamics. The point of what companies like Readex do is to take snapshots of history.

AI: The closest we can come to finding the truth value of historical statements (“Caesar crossed the Rubicon”) still amounts to belief, or faith. The point isn’t that he crossed the river; the point is, what does it mean that he crossed the river? We choose those among the various records of history (instantiations of memory) that we trust most.

Is K. justified in his assertion that we have to avoid the danger of calling everything an interpretation? How do we respond to him?

AI thinks he doesn’t prove his case. AI thinks interpretations are the only things that exist. This scares people because it moves towards undermining our ideas about Western morality.

Mary (lastname?): Agreed, there are only interpretations. We have to look at historical narratives and ask ourselves what isn’t there.

Suping Lu: “We may not get the absolute historical facts, but we always try to go to sources as primary as possible – contemporary, for example. Synthesis and analysis of those will get us to the relative truth.” Example of the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937: he actually discarded both Japanese and Chinese sources, but found the American and British (and to some degree German) first-hand accounts closer to the truth. (Americans and British at that point weren’t involved in a war, and so were neutral observers.)

How do you counter, for example, Holocaust deniers’ argument? AI says the way to do so is nonnarrative texts: images?, concentration camp cells, levels of chemical residue – things measurable in a way that doesn’t depend on narratology. This is still interpretation, but only in the sense that all language is interpretation.

AI: primary sources are relative. We delude ourselves in giving ultimate authority to primary sources (for ex., the US Constitution). Another is the case of the 1934 Ukraine famine. Question: was it a famine, or did Stalin do it? Photographs of trucks bearing grain: were they going to Ukraine, or leaving it? First-person accounts neutralized each other, and didn’t solve the question. An analysis of petrol records, however, found that the trucks were going in, not out.

Concern (Patricia ??): library collections are becoming more and more homogenized – we’re all here partly because we’re trying to capture uniqueness.

Digital resources are certainly not the Whole Picture either, they’re also snapshots. Frex: American newspapers archive does not contain all of the American newspapers, and it’s hard to know what has been lost.

In Readex bibliographic records, they indicate the political affiliation of every document’s author, because the documents have a political dimension and interpretation starts from the knowledge of where the author was coming from.

We got onto the subject of metadata, and I just asked a question to be more replied to than answered, over the next two days: what are the subjectivities in your metadata? With this I hope to bring to the fore – again – the largely unstated assumptions inherent in metadata. It’s no more objective than library categorization systems (such as the Library of Congress classification, for example).

[can't see name] The promise of digitization is much larger exposure of whatever it is that we’re digitizing. There’s a promise of more evidence than ever before available to more people than ever before, but also a threat of homogenization of that evidence. (vz: one way to counteract that threat is to have diff., maybe competing?, sets of metadata.)

Suping Lu: our main task is preservation. We can get closer to historical truths through preservation. Amen to that.

Break time! My track record of documenting events is that this documenting drops off precipitously after the first session; but I’ll try to do otherwise. This is one amazing buncha people.

…to get me blogging again. I hope.

Much has happened on the personal front. For one, I’m back to the PhD gig, writing my dissertation this year. Been kinda re-evaluating this whole blogging thing, but for now I’ll just try to blog the 2006 Readex Digital Institute in scenic (whooboy, is it scenic! seriously) Chester, Vermont.