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.
