Fashion and Serfdom: Humanities Edition

This is about the digital humanities:

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture. -Kurt Andersen, You Say You Want a Devolution?

Andersen here is positing that we are seeking cultural comfort by recycling the past and rarely create anything new, as a reflex against the onslaught of our times. That’s fine, but less than charitable. Even with the example of “why are we still wearing t-shirts and blue jeans?” The real answer is that for staples, it’s more important that they be functional, physically and symbolically. Andersen glosses over the idea that when things work well, you don’t need to improve them.  Given that, any push for “improvement” really becomes a waste of time, effort, and money. In the wake of the passing of Steve Jobs, it became clear that innovation was overrated. It has been widely demonstrated that Jobs took existing ideas and made them marketable, and by way of Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology: What It is and How It Evolves, this isn’t any great surprise. The drive of “innovation” as used in most discussions is often a thin veil for “marketability.” Jobs wasn’t interested in innovation to make the world better, his innovation was leverage to get people to buy products. The great strides in innovation Andersen sees in information technology are in fact, more of the same old he sees in cultural products. In buying technology’s marketing, Andersen judges the slow movement of cultural production too harshly.

As the baby-boomers who brought about this ice age finally shuffle off, maybe America and the rich world are on the verge of a cascade of the wildly new and insanely great. Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper. -Kurt Andersen, You Say You Want a Devolution?

Andersen has a speed issue. He expects rapid evolution that technology has promised, and he will now extend that negativity into the future, labeling all coming generations as not being revolutionary enough, even while he stagnates in a “decline of western civilization” narrative, which really reached its maximum potency in Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. This is an old tune, and I won’t work harder to discredit it, but really, Andersen limits himself by worrying too much about western-centric, dead-rich-white-guy culture via Steve Jobs, and is trapped in the same cycle as everyone else. The terms of evolution and revolution have been hijacked by marketing, and they now force the expectation that things will move at that speed, and with this also comes the cultural blindness that keeps many people locked and repeating.  What Andersen sees, and falls prey to (we all do), is serfdom to time-scales dictated by marketing and technology, not by judging things in their own time. This problem is now a problem for the humanities, and we’re pretty ornery about it. Matthew Reisz entitled his critique of the digital humanities serfdom in recognition that the technology is driving research, and not the other way around. He quotes an unnamed scholar:  

“I felt that digitizing had become an end in itself, that too much of the limited research funding available in the humanities was going into it, and that consequently people whose aim was to get funding were being given a perverse incentive to limit themselves to what often seemed like a very mechanical and low-level form of research. Meanwhile, there was less money available to fund researchers wanting to investigate a substantive question or develop an original idea.”

The problem echoes Andersen’s complaint: because of technology, people are unimaginatively digitizing away without really pushing for “originality,” but fails to recognize, as Reisz does, that the “mechanical” exposes problems with the technology, bringing up issues to be worked out before “more original” work can be done. Again, the hype and speed has eclipsed the reality of progress. A second complaint registered also highlights the myopic vision that digital humanities have wrought:

The danger for (Tamson) Pietsch (lecturer in imperial and colonial history at Brunel University) is that “what gets digitized drives scholarship. I’m sure since its release there have been a disproportionate number of articles using material from The Times‘ digital archive.” It is also safe to assume that poorer countries, like poorer universities, are going to be slower to digitize their archives, with all the potential for distortion that introduces.

As the cliché goes, the winners write the history books, and in the world of the digital humanities, this is still the case. Pietsch recognizes the blind spots that the digital humanities can create, because they are the same blind spots that have always existed. The intervention of the digital frustrates the problem, as the unnamed scholar illustrates: there is too much concern for the technology,  hyper-focusing attention on itself as opposed to the broader issues at play. The condition of our serfdom is the myopic vision of not seeing the larger world. Scholars are obsessing over the lack of innovation in blue jeans and t-shirts, while Tamson Pietsch is rocking it old school chipping away at a huge problem. That’s real innovation, unless you’re Andersen and just waiting around for the end.

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Not Worried About Circulation

 

The shocking truth about print books: 49% of our stacks has never circulated since 1996. #academiclibraries #printbooks

 

This tweet came through the other day, and frankly it didn’t bother me the way it used to. It leans on a little bit by Raganathan’s first law, which is “Books are for use.” If they’re not being used, then why keep them? I like to make the arguement that we can’t always anticipate how things will be used by others. Consider Mendelssohn’s “rediscovery” of Bach. Books are not just for current use, but they easily translate into future use.

There is some precedent for this; the logical methods of observation and refinement at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution enabled the creation and improvement of the microscope and the telescope. In turn, these tools both grew and shrank our sense of the world, enhancing the idea of hierarchies. Much social and scientific organization followed that path and destroyed its predecessors. We build the tool to change things, and then the tool changes us. -Quentin Hardy, How the Internet is Destroying Everything

This is the logic that leads most folks into a postmodern tailspin, where everything eats itself. It’s a fun place to be, and the revolutionary excitment is great, but it leaves you with a hangover. Hardy leaves his editorial with this thought on David Weinberger’s illustration of the internet as dragon eating-its-tail: “Instead of giving us of a new and better way of seeing the world, the Internet is a tool that embodies how we have wanted to see the world for some time. We have built it according to our new ideas about the world, and it gained a power that is destroying pre-existing structures.” Which is all that and then some, but:

Though of course, when a Harvard researcher values something because it affords a more accurate picture of reality, the end of hierarchy and a quest for ultimate understanding seems a long way off. -Quentin Hardy, How the Internet is Destroying Everything

 It’s pithy, but it stings because it is true. The internet relies on massive underlying power structures, they are just in different hands that those who made books, although there’s some overlap, clearly. A Harvard researcher is part of a big support system, that elevates his status and gives him or her a part in an institution where he can create something not only with broad impact, but lasting impact. Same for a New York Times writer. What shouldn’t be bought is the easy bill of sale for something that actively destroys lasting value in order to create current value, because frankly, Weinberger isn’t making that trade either.

So I am not worried about the end of books as material objects—in archives and private collections, at least. I think they will always be needed and valued. The changes that most college libraries are undergoing have created an era of unparalleled opportunity for collectors and teachers, like me, and who can foresee what the outcome of this reshuffling of printed materials will be? I look forward to the apocalypse as much as any romantic, but if we are witnessing new forms of creative destruction, I think we are also seeing a counterbalancing, reflexive trend toward the creative preservation of the past using both traditional and digital means. -William Pannapacker, We’re Still in Love with Books

There’s a lot of shifts coming up, and yes, it’ll be nice to have more shelf space, but libraries also need to protect the culture of learning over time, not just its resources. So yes to creative destruction, yes to weeding more, yes to being more criticial about the books we take in, but think about your core values as opposed to the values that are sold to you, because often, you’re paying a price. Value is more than money, and it’s our job to build value over time. That includes not just current use, but future use.

 

 

 

Pinterest and The Core of Librarianship

This is an extended analogy:

 

Sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Instapaper, Snip.it, Clipboard, and Curisma, among others, all allow their users to decide what aspects of the web (text, media, etc.) are worth saving and sharing, instead of browsing the web from Google, or even Facebook for that matter. Because many of these networks have asymmetric follow/follower models, and because users can “tune” whom they are following, users’ feeds could increase in relevance as items are retweeted or repinned.  -Semil Shah, The Rise of Pinterest and the Shift from Search to Discovery

The implication of “search” is that there’s a huge volume of stuff, through which you sift. It’s a bad model for the educational aims of libraries.  For most of library history, libraries were not based on “searching” for materials. Libraries were and are assembled at great expense and effort, by human beings, so that there can be a place where community can form around an evolving body of knowledge.

Discovery, as Shah uses it above, emphasizes the role of human agency, both in shaping a body of knowledge itself, and in being able to select what voices one pays attention to. In order to meet the lofty goal of being communities of discovery and education, libraries, like Pinterest, need to emphasize  curation and discovery over “search.” When you’re searching, you look for a hypothetically known thing, when you’re discovering, you learn about something that you didn’t know before. It’s something algorithmic search design does poorly, because they rely on known patterns matching what’s out there. If you really want to discover something, you need to involve other people. Pinterest, like libraries, puts the people first, and the algorithm second. That being said, a body of knowledge will always reflect its creators, so see below: