The Read: Blair, Duguid, Goeing, Grafton, Information: A Historical Companion
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
This is a strong area of intellectual interest for me and as soon as I saw it I decided I should have it.
Is it what I thought it was?
Actually, it’s better. I thought it was going to be a collection of primary documents from the history of information with a few commentaries, or maybe that plus some annotated versions of various classic or key works from scholars about information. It’s not: it’s a two-part collection of original synthesizing essays on key aspects of information and its history. There are some concepts that are missing or maybe receive more limited treatment than I’d prefer, but it’s essentially like a single volume edition of a bunch of those short MIT Press books.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It’s actually a meaningful work of reference with a lot of continuing life to it. Even where I have criticisms, they’re more interesting and generative criticisms than carping about how a classic older work was annotated or abbreviated or being bored by the usual “conference volume introduction” that tries to pretend that every essay in the volume is exactly what the editors wanted. I’d be happy to use these essays in a course but also to consult them myself regularly.
Quotes
I’m still digging through the book—I haven’t read it cover to cover yet and probably won’t for some time (it’s 831 pages of analysis!) Especially striking quotes will probably keep coming to view as I keep coming back to it and working through each topical essay carefully.
“As Nunberg pointed out, the fact that in 2009 Google was still displaying ads for gardening supplies to readers of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass could not have particularly pleased ad buyers at Home Depot. Regardless, this was the situation.”
“The advent of double-entry bookkeeping, a method that endures to this day, in medieval Tuscany transformed accounting into the central tool for managing financial information.”
“It may be tempting to describe this historical time period as ‘the age of algorithms,’ much as previous generations coined ‘the machine age,’ ‘the computer age,’ ‘the information age,’ and similar catchphrases to mark earlier technological and cultural turning points. Yet, to do so would be to overlook one critical fact: algorithms are nothing new.”
“Algorithms may be programs for solving problems, but they are better imagined, in the abstract, as sociotechnical assemblages—temporally and culturally unique entanglements of people and technology that are nonetheless historically freighted.”
“The authority of a piece of intelligence rested on one’s trust in the reliability of its source, in the same way that the value of a note of hand rested on the credit and reputation of the person who signed it, whereas the authority of information is folded into the form of the communication itself.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
This seemed like a good book to discuss today because I’m attending a conference here at Swarthmore on disinformation today and tomorrow and one of the big questions that it is on my mind is how to distinguish disinformation from information, considering that at least historically and contemporaneously, not all of what we would call information is necessarily truthful or accurate in and of itself. (Your mother wasn’t practicing disinformation if she told you that you’d catch a cold if you went out without a coat, but she wasn’t right, either.) This book is only helpful with those kinds of root-level definitional questions in a diffuse way: over many analyses of particular aspects of information, some emergent definitions become clear. But this is maybe for the best—you can certainly tell that historians are major drivers in how the book approaches its subject matter. Geoffrey Nunberg does have an essay that theorizes information to some extent but it’s buried deep in the middle of the book—and it offers maybe the only really clear explanation of why the entire book foregrounds print culture, literacy and European history as the central defining focal point for “information”.
The initial essay by Grafton on premodern approaches to information is good but at least to me a bit frustrating, perhaps because of the definitional problem; e.g., it settles on cases where written information effectively defines what we can or could know about the premodern era and on trade routes and intercultural contact zones where there was a tangible practical need to create and record information. And yet non-literature societies have information about themselves that isn’t just for some external party—as an Africanist, I feel very sensitive to the fact that we live in a world where information about has been an instrumental tool created by colonial rulers but also where the ideologies of those rulers also often dictated that the information they were creating was false in many respects. There’s an ethnographic or anthropological way of thinking about information in this regard that I think belongs in an analysis of the premodern context. To some extent the rest of the historical essays (all in “Part I”) retain this incredibly strong bias towards literate societies in a way that isn’t really theorized or noted, and it isn’t until Chapter 8 in this first part that there’s much discussion of the association between Europe, information and empire, though Chapter 6 also touches on it.
In terms of the history, one interesting move is to historicize “Search” as a distinctive era or period in the history of information and to treat it autonomously in a single chapter rather than to kick “search” into the second section of topical essays. But as many of the historical chapters do, this chapter goes back and brings previous cases and moments into view (in this case, for example, the Encyclopedie). This chapter did integrate a lot of things for me that I hadn’t previously had a coherent overview of, compared to some of the earlier historical chapters, where I feel I knew the story pretty well already.
The essays in Part II are topic based (the first is “Accounting”) and they’re more fun and interesting, at least to me, than the historical chapters, where I am more prepared to be feisty or demanding about what is in and outside the frame of those chapters. The distinctive material and sociopolitical form of particular information regimes and techniques is where the action is really at, I think—the point at which the way information is recorded, worked and used ends up having a highly particular character that reshapes wider social formations and institutions without that necessarily being an intended or predicted outcome early on. These chapters are also about the right length, or so it seems to me.
There are a few that I don’t quite get as topics— “archaeological decipherment”, for example, where I don’t see how this is conceptually distinct from various readings of landscape, environment, bodies (e.g. material surfaces) or various readings of human-made objects (art, commodities, etc.) I’m not familiar with the author (Haun Saussy) but the essay (which is short) seems invested in some kind of argument or attitudinal posture that I haven’t come across before. On the other hand, there are some short essays in Part II that call my attention to topics that I absolutely accept are relevant to “information” that I hadn’t thought of before— “bells”, for example. There’s a few missing (I think) that kind of baffle me—where’s calendars, for example?
There are also some topical essays whose inclusion seems debatable—I don’t quite get why “intelligence testing” is a separate topic under the general heading of “information”. I get why many forms of representing individuals as data through some form of mediating test, form, metric or measure is information, but that point ought to fold intelligence testing in as an example rather than a distinct topic of its own.
The “Bells” chapter, on the other hand, is yet another place where the Eurocentrism of the book feels painfully unnecessary or hard to justify—if you’re going to talk about bells-as-information, it shouldn’t be that hard to commission an essay on drums, on smoke signals, on lighting or fires, etc. as forms of remote or distance signalling. I get why the historical chapters align quickly on literacy (which then allows some consistent referencing of China, India and the Middle East in some of the thematic chapters) but the thematic or topical chapters are exactly the place to work on some broader global attention to other forms and paradigms for storing and transmitting information. There’s at least a chapter on khipus, thank god, but as is often the case, the inclusion of one non-Western example in a big book that otherwise pointedly ignores them just underscores the exclusion. What about Mesoamerican codicils? On oral traditions/orature (come on, even Socrates thought that writing was both a big deal and a problem in the history of human information systems)? Why does the chapter on teaching not even try to talk about the premodern history of religious teaching in South Asia? (The Chinese imperial examination system gets a couple of sentences.) Why horoscopes and not divination (slightly mentioned under forecasting, but only in passing)?