Archeiophobia digitalis: My Fear of Archives in the Digital Age
For a long time I resisted the temptation to blog. Behind all of the ordinary reasons one might shun blogging, from privacy to time pressures, lurked a basic fear of the internet revolution. I am afraid for the historian of the future who will have to wade through googolplexes of personal blogs to reconstruct the history of our era.
Blogs! So many, so different, and yet all so eerily familiar with their endless recycling of current affairs and pop culture lore. It is yet another Eliotic wilderness of mirrors.
Let's assume that all of these blogs will wind up in a digital archive as grist for dissertations. How will historians cope with the abundance of material? Will they write books on picayune phenomena that produced a massive amount of documentation - The Charlie Sheen Affair - or will they prefer more digested material, such as the contemporary histories of journalists such as Bob Woodward? Or will historians of the digital age use digital tools, statistical sampling and network mapping, to transform the torrent of personal trivia into usable data?
These concerns have fueled a certain disgust in me at the explosion of "content," as techies refer to the user-input in sites like Facebook, Blogger, or Twitter. But in the end, I realize that historians will act as they have always acted: they will read enough to make persuasive arguments; they will dip into sampling or mapping as necessary; and they will find a kaleidoscope of uses for blogs as for other sources.
More Eliot:
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors,
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities."
What spurred me to start blogging, however, was not an intellectual epiphany about the resilience of historians in the face of mammoth quantities of information, but my departure (PhD in hand!) from Stanford University. I miss my old intellectual community even as I am very excited to join a new one at the University of Chicago. The CMEMS blogs promise to transfer an existing but transient community from the arcades of Stanford University to the web - and in so doing, may achieve a greater degree of permanence and solidity for the community.
Tomorrow I begin teaching my first course as a fully-fledged historian: Euro Civ at the University of Chicago. This blog will reflect on my experiences as a first time teacher as well as my thoughts (much in mind lately) on the development of European civilization. And it will serve something as my ghost at Stanford, lingering among the eucalyptus and live oak after I have departed.
~Corey Tazzara
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Information Overload, A Long Story.
A ghost with a very strong voice, and a sharp intellect, Corey: you will certainly feel very much present as we read you here, and dialogue across space and time.
I had never given too much thought to the historian of the future (mea culpa), but experienced a similar feeling of vertigo as the archives of the past get digitized and the sheer amount of texts and documents we do have reveals itself to be astronomical. Granted, as a mostly literary scholar, the habit of close, minute readings and re-readings makes you imagine years and years of parsing the millions of texts now online. It seems to me that history is already using archives as statistical data rather than going for the Woodward of the day, and that method can only be facilitated in theory by the digitization of the past.
As you announced that you would report on your first year of teaching at University of Chicago, I was reminded of the many excellent micro-histories of teachers of the 19th or 20th century that relied on teachers notebooks, diaries, letters, documents not akin to the blogs that teachers now post online.
Which made me think that what will be vertiginous when considering the future of history is that there is a digital trace of almost all our actions, historians will be able (if not willing) to connect each teacher's blog with their financial information, travel reservation, auto insurance policies, music tastes and date and time of when a song is played, purchasing habits on Amazon, and (by a weird miser en abyme) their online searches as ... historians!
Information overload is not new--see the work of Ann Blair and many others on the topic. The hierarchization of different bits of information might be what differentiate each age. Montaigne does not seem to mind that he does not know much of the intimate character of Plutarch or Socrates, but he does share that he enjoys watermelon and gives self-help trick of how to combat kidney stones. And if we could, would not we want to friend him on Facebook to read his everyday ranting and musing?
Thanks for your thoughtful
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Cecile - and sorry for my slow reply - I'm still learning about how to balance teaching, research, and other professional duties. I guess learning that may be a lifelong endeavor . . .
The shout-out to the work of Ann Blair and others on information overload is spot-on. It's funny, too, because the way I ultimately decided to cope with my own information overload while writing my dissertation was to make commonplace books out of my database of letters and memoranda. I found that electronic databasing was great at organizing material for retrieval, but was not helpful when I actually needed to write a chapter. So I took my cue from the humanists of yore . . .
Such an interesting thought...
Imagine, the historian of the future...
While one side of thought might lead itself toward the optomistic outlook of the wealth of information this person might have on their hands, the logical person would consider the fact that the vast majority of this information is, well, bogus.
Consider my personal blog, about me, Robbie Williams. In a historical sense, it's useless - unless this person is seeking to discover a deep intrinsic outlook upon the world through the eyes of a mid-twenty year old living in Midwest, United States.
Overall, i love the thought provoking nature of this blog! I'll continue reading :)