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This is the rough text of a short talk I am scheduled to deliver at a symposium on ‘Future Directions in Book History’ at Cambridge on the 24th of November 2011.
I am on the programme as talking briefly about the ‘OldBailey Online and other resources’ (by which I assume is meant London Lives, Connected Histories, and Locating London’s Past, and the other websites I have helped to create over the last ten or twelve years). But I am afraid I have no interest whatsoever in discussing the Old Bailey or the other websites. The hard intellectual work that went in to their creation was done between 1999 and 2010, and for the most part they have found an audience and a user base and will have their own impact, without me having to discuss them any further. We know how to do this stuff, and anyone can read the technical literature, and I very much encourage you to do so.
Instead, I want to talk about how the evolution of the forms of delivery and analysis of text inherent in the creation of the online, problematizes and historicises the notion of the book as an object, and as a technology; and in the process problematizes the discipline of history itself as we practise it in the digital present.
The project of putting billions of words of keyword searchable stuff out there is now nearing completion. We are within sight of that moment when all printed text produced between 1455 and 1923 (when the Disney Corporation has determined that the needs of modern corporate capitalism trumped the Enlightenment ideal), will be available online for you to search and read. The vast majority of that text is currently configured to pretend to be made up of ‘books’ and other print artefacts, But, of course, it is not. At some level it is just text – the difference between one book and the next a single line of metadata. The hard leather covers that used to divide one group of words from another are gone; and every time you choose to sit comfortably in your office reading a screen, instead of going to a library or an archive, while kidding yourself that you are still reading a ‘book’, you are in fact participating in a charade. We are swimming in deracinated, Google-ised, Wikipedia-ised text.
In other words, and let’s face it: the book as a technology for packaging and delivery, storing and finding text is now redundant. The underpinning mechanics that determined its shape and form are as antiquated as moveable type. And in the process of moving beyond the book, we have also abandoned the whole post-enlightenment infrastructure of libraries and card catalogues (or even OPACS), of concordances, and indexes and tables of contents. They are all built around the book, and the book is dead.
If this all sounds rather doom laden and apocalyptic – and no doubt we could argue about the rosy future and romantic appeal of the hard copy book – it shouldn’t. At least as far as the ‘history of the book’ is concerned these developments have been entirely positive
First, it has allowed us to begin to escape the intellectual shackles that the book as a form of delivery, imposed upon us. If we can escape the self-delusion that we are reading ‘books’, the development of the infinite archive, and the creation of a new technology of distribution, actually allows us to move beyond the linear and episodic structures the book demands, to something different and more complex. It also allows us to more effectively view the book as an historical artefact and now redundant form of controlling technology. The ‘book’ is newly available for analysis.
The absence of books makes their study more important, more innovative, and more interesting. It also makes their study much more relevant to the present – a present in which we are confronted by a new, but equally controlling and limiting technology for transmitting ideas. By mentally escaping the ‘book’ as a normal form and format, we can see it more clearly for what it was. And to this extent, the death of the book is a fantastic and liberating thing – the fascism of the format is beaten.
At the same time, I think we are confronted by a profound intellectual challenge that addresses the very nature of the historical discipline. This transition from the ‘book’, to something new, fundamentally undercuts what we do more generally as ‘historians’. When you start to unpick the nature of the historical discipline, it is tied up with the technologies of the printed page and the book in ways that are powerful and determining. Our footnotes, our post-Rankean cross referencing and practises of textual analysis are embedded within the technology of the book, and its library.
Equally, our technology of authority – all the visual and textual clues that separate a CUP monograph from the irresponsible musings of a know-nothing prose merchant – are slipping away. While our professional identity – the titles, positions and honorifics – built again on the supposedly secure foundations of book publishing – is ever less compelling. So the question then becomes, is history – particularly in its post-Rankean, professional and academic form – dead? Are we losing that beautiful disciplinary character that allows us to think beyond the surface, and makes possible complex analyses that transcend mere cleverness?
And on the face of it, the answer is yes – the renewed role of the popular block buster, and an every growing and insecure emphasis on readership over scholarship, would suggest that it is. In Britain we shy away from the metrics that would demonstrate ‘impact’ primarily because we fear that we may not have any.
Collectively we have put our heads in the sands, and our arses in the air, and seemingly invited the world to take a shot. A single and self-evident instance that evidences a deeper malaise is our current failure to bother citing what we read. We read online journal articles, but cite the hard copy edition; we do keywords searches, while pretending to undertake immersive reading. We search ‘Google Books’, and pretend we are not.
But even more importantly, we ignore the critical impact of digitisation on our intellectual praxis. Only 48% of the significant words in the Burney collection ofeighteenth-century newspapers are correctly transcribed as a result of poor OCR. This makes the other 52% completely un-findable. And of course, from the perspective of the relationship between scholarship and sources, it is always the same 52%. My colleague Bill Turkel, describes this as the Las Vegas effect – all bright lights, and an invitation to instant scholarly riches, but with no indication of the odds, and no exit signs. We use the Burney collection regardless – not even bothering to apply the kind of critical approach that historians have built their professional authority upon. This is roulette dressed up as scholarship.
In other words, we have abandoned the rigour of traditional scholarship. Provenance, edition, transcription, editorial practise, readership, authorship, reception – the things we query issues in relation to books, are left unexplored in relation to the online text we actually read.
And as importantly, the way we promulgate our ‘history’ has not kept up either. I want television programmes with footnotes, and graphs with underlying spreadsheets and sliders. Yes, I want narrative and analysis, structure, point and purpose. I want to continue to be able to engage in the grand conversation that is history; but it cannot continue to be produced as a ragged and impotent ghost of a fifteenth century technology; and if we don’t do something about it, we might as well all go off and figure out how to write titillating tales of eighteenth-century sex scandals, because at least they sell.
The book had a wonderful 1200 odd year history, which is certainly worth exploring. Its form self-evidently controlled and informed significant aspects of cultural and intellectual change in the West (and through the impositions of Empire, the rest of the world as well); but if, as historians, we are to avoid going the way of the book, we need to separate out what we think history is designed to achieve, and to create a scholarly technology that delivers it.
In a rather intemperate attack on the work of Jane Jacobs, published in 1962, Louis Mumford observed that:
‘… minds unduly fascinated by computers carefully confine themselves to asking only the kind of question that computers can answer and are completely negligent of the human contents or the human results.’
Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line “Mother Jacobs Home Remedies”,” The New Yorker, December 1, 1962, p. 148
I am afraid that in the last couple of decades, historians who are unduly fascinated by books, have restricted themselves to asking only the kind of questions books can answer. Fifty years is a long time in computer science. It is about time we found out if a critical and self-consciously scholarly engagement with computers might not now allow us to more effectively address the ‘human contents’ of the past.
Responses to Academic History Writing and its Disconnects at historyonics.blogspot.com
ESanders, October 23, 2011
- Whilst I agree that to some extent digitised resources are drawing people away from using traditional resources, I feel that there are two arguments against the points you made. Firstly, I feel that anything to sate the appetites of the general public and history is ultimately a good thing. It encourages a more broad narrative.
Also, it is possible for digital resources and traditional literature to be used concomitantly. As a student used to the archives as well as the eighteenth-century collections online, I recognise that each resource brings its own uses and evokes differing emotions. Whilst the digital resources allow fast searches and easy open access, nothing can beat finding a primary source in its original form. Perhaps these two media complement research when used together rather than being seen as stultifying.
Tim Hitchcock, October 23, 2011
- The issue is not that these different forms of evidence and research experience militate against writing good history; but that we do not have a system to critically engage with the online, in the way that we do for hard copy books and archives. I know how to cite a medieval manuscript (wherever it is); but I don’t know how to cite (and replicate) a Google search.
inconspicuous, October 23, 2011
- Might screen grabs work as citations for Google searches? Doesn’t deal with replication issues…
Laura Stevens, October 23, 2011
- Tim, I liked your piece, but I don’t feel ready yet to bury the book. One reason is that I’m not yet satisfied with how electronic interfaces allow me to read books actively: i.e., mark them up, write marginalia, insert post-it notes. It may be that I just haven’t transitioned yet to the new media, but I also don’t feel that the new media yet gives me the opportunities I need to interact in a more dialogic form with what I’m reading. I wanted to ask if you really think that you can electronic forms of reading really is where it needs to be right now.
Also, loved the comments on the Burney collection. What’s the solution?
Adam Crymble, October 23, 2011
- Laura, try writing marginalia in a British Library book. These online resources are borrowed from a repository and have the same practical restrictions as library books.
If you need a tool that can help you take notes, I’d suggest Zotero.
Tim Hitchcock, October 24, 2011
- Dear Laura – I agree with you about the current crop of book simulators. They are rather stupid, and don’t let me have the kind of dialogic relationship with text that I want. Why shouldn’t my ‘reader’ know what I am working on, and privilege that subject in the text (perhaps emboldening passages it thinks are relevant). Why shouldn’t I be able to create a hierarchy of notation, that reflects how I read and re-use text? Why shouldn’t each note I make be embedded within a map of what I have been reading on that day, or week, or for that project? I want all the things a book can deliver, and I want a shed load more. But, one way or another, the evolution of e-texts throws in to ever sharper relief the limitations of the book as a technology.
John Levin, October 24, 2011
- “In Britain we shy away from the metrics that would demonstrate ‘impact’ primarily because we fear that we may not have any.”
Is this really so? Isn’t the problem that the REF & RAE measure impact through a narrow selection of metrics, and a set that is heavily weighted towards ‘old school’ scholarship, discounting much of the digital?
And doesn’t ‘impact’ have an ideological aspect, favouring the established publishing system and usefulness for government and business?
I’ve heard ‘public engagement’ counterposed to it as a different way, wider in medium and audience, of thinking about these matters.
Tim Hitchcock, October 24, 2011
- Dear John, There are all sorts of problems with ‘impact’ – both methodological, and idealogical, but no one ever spent a dull life of lonely scholarship because they believed it had no impact. The only real question is how you want to describe the sort of ‘impact’ you think is important, and then what metrics you want to use to measure it. I believe academic history is important as a basis for an informed national political discussion – so let’s find ways of measuring this (or whatever aspect of history writing you think we should value). Unfortunately, what most academics who oppose impact are currently doing, is claiming to be above the necessity of actually examining and justifying what is important about what they contribute.
You use the term “fascism of format” applied to the book, while you still harp Disney’s control of copyright. Given the unprecedented corporate control of human knowledge that web-based delivery systems have enabled (I’m thinking of publishers/google/amazon), I wonder if the term fascism is far too strong to describe the codex.
I’d like to see more citations that support the digital humanities efforts to excavate the “human” in our historical record? There are a number, but their absence is pretty apparent.
You speak a lot for “we” in the third to last paragraph, but I’d like to see support for your assertions. To that end, Ann Blair’s “Too Much To Know” addresses the fact that deep reading, for a long time has always been somewhat of a myth.
Dear Joe, Thanks for your response. I am just beginning to figure out how this system of comment and response is meant to work, but in looking again at the post in light of your comments, there is clearly a fair amount to do. I suspect I need to revise what was a rather informal blog post (the text of a short, ranty talk), in to something that holds together properly and feels more academic for want of a better word.
On the fascism of the format – I take the point about the corporate/commercial character of the online (something that DH doesn’t effectively engage with); although hard copy book and journal publishing is almost equally enmired. I am very much enjoying the current Elsevier discussions. On the other hand, I still rather like the phrase and image, and continue to want to actively point up the deep and controlling nature of book structures in a way that shocks at least a little bit. To the extent that ‘fascism’ fully implies a series of rigid taxonomies and boundaries, I still think it does the job.
I will follow up on Ann Blair’s work (which I don’t know), and also seek to incorporate a greater network of reference to that of people like Stephen Ramsay and Dan Cohen (though with the exception of Dan, there are few enough historians in this area by comparison to literary critics).
The ‘we’s, et al, reflect the audience it was originally written for – about 20 people, at least half of whom I know, and all of whom are part of a small country academic community of the sort you only get in small countries, and smaller sub-disciplines. I will have to think through that element, as in some ways I rather like the idea of being able to address a wider community of historians from within. But in any case – thanks for raising it.
The beginning of this piece had me thinking a lot about the transition from the material object of the book (as container) into something that is more fluid when turned into code and made searchable online. Thus, I agree with one of the main points of this piece, that we may not care in the future whether what we read is called an ebook, blog post or journal article, etc. (and especially so with born-digital works).
The question is whether this change and loss of emphasis on the container will fundamentally change the work of the historian. In thinking about online tools for searching through many formats of text, we are faced with a change in the methods by which historians might perform research, but will scholarship itself be fundamentally altered? Is this a shift from paper to screen, or much more than that? I liked this sentence, and would like to hear more about how historians “have restricted themselves to asking only the kind of questions books can answer.”
It seems that the book—with its lengthy history—holds a special, almost untouchable place for all of us, historians or otherwise. I wonder if you could tease out a bit more about what it is about the book that historians cling to, and what we might lose through the death of the book? I’m also wondering whether there conversations like these about the death of the journal when electronic article databases were introduced?
“And in the process of moving beyond the book, we have also abandoned the whole post-enlightenment infrastructure of libraries and card catalogues (or even OPACS), of concordances, and indexes and tables of contents.”
I agree that libraries and information hierarchies are changing right now. But we will continue to need systems of organization beyond keyword searching as we move into digital landscapes—your point about the scans of newspapers in the Burney collection points out our continued need for careful metadata about the texts that we hope to continue to use. Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book “Planned Obsolescence” has some great sections about the importance of metadata that might be helpful here.
“We read online journal articles, but cite the hard copy edition; we do keywords searches, while pretending to undertake immersive reading. We search ‘Google Books’, and pretend we are not.”
I’m wondering if you are arguing that these tools hurt the process or the product of historical scholarship. Are you arguing these practices are lazy and detrimental to scholarship? Or part of the future of doing digital research, after the death of the book, and we should acknowledge them?
Perhaps after this death, “historians of the book” become those who, instead of studying paper bound in particular ways, become those who focus on informational tools. Thus, just as scholars continue to study the book as “tool, text and metaphor”* today, in the future historians might study the search engines and databases we use to search through different texts (and as Joe points out, the social and political impact of these tools and who creates and owns them). Despite the fact that we don’t yet know how to cite or refer to these sources, I think those systems will come—just as they did for the book.
*following Rafael C. Alvarado’s piece, “The Digital Humanities Situation”: http://transducer.ontoligent.com/?p=717
I like how this piece articulates both the opportunities and challenges opened up by the transition from print to electronic in historical scholarship. Although I think it’s a bit premature to declare the death of the book (after all, the book is still a primary index of academic productivity, and print sales still outstrip digital), we can certainly see the print book’s decline. But I would like a more detailed analysis of the limitations of the print form and the possibilities opened up by digital. While there have been some experiments with new digital forms of historical scholarship (e.g.the ACLS History E-Book’s born-digital publications), it doesn’t seem like they have achieved much traction yet. Are we after something like what Robert Darnton envisioned in 1999 (www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1999/mar/18/the-new-age-of-the-book/): a pyramid with different levels of depth and complexity, from from a top layer with a summary of the argument to a bottom layer with editors’ comments and readers’ reports? Are we heading towards what Kevin Kelly described as the “universal library” (www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html)? If the accuracy of digitization is so low, what can scholars do? What is the relationship between archive and argument? How do authority and rigor work in the digital environment? You make a great point that history needs to figure out what it is “designed to achieve”–what would you say? How do we “design” (a word I like because it suggests intention and creativity) historical scholarship in the digital environment? Or does that question need to be explored through a larger conversation across the community? This piece stirred up a number of questions for me, which is a testament to its effectiveness–it is timely and provocative. But I do think it can be fleshed out more. Perhaps, too, as this piece makes the transition from talk transcript to digital publication, it can demonstrate some of the possibilities of the digital, e.g. hyperlinking, commentary and conversation, visualization, etc.