(Hello fellow NUDHL-ers. I came across an article and wanted to share it with all of you. I’m interested to know what everyone makes of it. I’m cross-posting to the HASTAC website as well. Happy Thanksgiving!)
President of the AHA and American environmental historian William Cronon recently published an intriguing piece in the November issue of Perspectives on History. In “Recollecting My Library . . . and My Self,” Cronon ponders what is lost in the transition from material text to digital text. His own interests in senses of place and the nature of storytelling really shape this piece, and I found it a very compelling claim about the potential pitfalls of our embrace of the digital. I thought it would be worth sharing, to see what others make of this.
He points out a few dangers that the “digital revolution” poses to “building personal libraries.” As others have pointed out before him, the ease of retrieving information has fundamentally transformed the research process. Cronon also points out that the digital turn imperils a source’s context, comparing the ease of computer searching with a return to the Roman scroll. He discusses his own difficulties in locating a piece of information that he’s already collected in a digital storehouse vs. a material library. I think Cronon is signaling toward important problems here, and I wonder how other researchers (not just historians) are grappling with these same challenges in their use of the digital. Cronon somberly points out that digital evidence gathering is forcing a change in how historians conceive of themselves through their research processes:
“This lifelong process of creating a scholarly self by means of an intellectual and emotional journey whose way-stations are marked by passionately remembered texts — many of them so dear to us that we keep them close to us for our entire lives — is being transformed in the fragmented world of search and scroll that has become our dominant metaphor for knowledge itself.”
If this transformation (which reads to me, in this account, as something woefully lost) is inevitable, as Cronon claims, what are we to do about it? He points out that what is at stake in this transformation is not just a form of practice but a sense of identity. So how are digital researchers to maintain their “memory palaces,” as Cronon calls them? How are we to construct these palaces at all? If the materiality of the research process is being lost, is it also being replaced? Is there a materiality to the digitized research process? Is the memory palace still there, but in a different form? Can we still construct a scholarly sense of self when the trek to the archive is not a journey to a foreign country, but the act of opening a laptop? Can we maintain a sense of context through the iPad?
I’m eager to hear what others have to say about this transformation.
Emily, thanks for posting (this piece really appeals to my interest in book history and the materiality of the text).
Not without some hesitation, my answer to your question is “no.” Where Cronon sees fragmentation and the dismemberment of a scholarly identity, I see a messy and knotty jumble of editorial, textual, and communicatory instabilities that are simultaneously baffling, ironic, and intriguing, and which demand serious scholarly attention rather than dismissal. This shouldn’t be an either-or issue between e-book and material book. In a way we actually are fortunate in that we don’t have to choose; we have options. Moreover, the e-book has strangely strengthened our relationship with the material book in unforeseeable ways. I run the risk of being too optimistic here, but Cronon doesn’t really present any solutions, and that might be a problem.
I recognize, though, that my thoughts are deeply related to my bibliographic and textual interests – possibly a disciplinary response, then. Are there discipline-specific responses to this change in scholarly communication? Maybe; I don’t know.
ASK
Nice post Emily. I’ve been thinking a lot about Cronon’s essay since you pointed me toward it. I think it’s strange on a few counts.
First, Cronon seems to misinterpret aspects of Benjamin’s famous essay. He’s right that Benjamin argues for the assembly of books (or any kind of collection) as a way to struggle with the fundamental chaos and entropy of the universe. But he misses so many of the funny jokes in Benjamin’s piece. For instance, that Benjamin admits he has never read, nor will ever read, most of his books! This is a very different from Cronon’s own description of his relationship to his book collection. Benjamin’s piece in fact has far more in it that is intriguing for the digital humanities and digital history (more of this in a post I am working on for http://www.issuesindigitalhistory.net).
Second, Cronon virtually ignores the emerging practices of data curation in all their glorious possibilities and troubling implications. Everything from using Zotero to amass a curated, annotated file system of research to the ways in which we now form our very subjectivities through carefully (or sometimes carelessly!) assembling materials onto our Facebook and Tumblr pages seems to me to create a middle ground for interpretive “memory palace” construction between the epic scale of Google searches and the microscopic levels of individual bookshelves in scholarly studies.
Moreover, Cronon seems to ignore *what* a Google search is, which is really the running of an algorithm that selects and creates hierarchies of information in ways that may, in the end, be not that different from older networks of scholarly communication, book publishing lists, bookstores, and the like (though the differences are important and worthy of further scrutiny). Maybe Cronon logs on to Google and just sees the informational equivalent of the meatpacking yards in Nature’s Metropolis!
All that said, it is a good essay, a righteous essay, an important starting point (one would expect no less from such a wonderful scholar as Cronon) for grappling with the nature of historical scholarship in the digital age. Thanks for steering me toward the piece!
All best,
Michael