Wood and Memory

 The post that follows is personal.  It is in the tradition of memoir-like and self-revealing blogging; and I am posting it here because this blog started off as a hybrid that was intended to encompass both my professional and private personae.  In the last eighteen months or so it has rather evolved in to a more professional beast, with digital history and policy overwhelming more personal topics.  But this transition was not intended.  In other words, if you are looking for a nice post on 'Big Data', or the politics of Open Access, please look away now.



Wood and Memory

I did not know my uncle very well.  Richard Pozzini ('Dicky') was my mother's much younger brother, and I only knew him for a couple of years when I was ten and eleven, and he was in his late twenties.  At the age of 28, in the late 1960s  he killed himself.   As a child, my brother and sisters and I were protected from the full impact of his death, and it was seldom spoken of.  A couple of years later, Virgil and Gina, Dicky's mother and father, my grandparents, moved into a small apartment above a garage attached to my parent's house in San Francisco, and for the next eight or nine years, I lived in and out of their home.  I never heard my grandfather, Virgil (Nonno), mention Dicky in all those years, nor did Dicky's mother, Gina (Nonni), then, or in the thirty years to her death in 2001, ever voluntarily discuss him without being prompted.  Nor has my mother, Dicky's older sister, talked much about him - few fond memories of a shared childhood.  He was always present, in carved objects and panels, in the models he made as a child, but mainly in the silence he left behind.  

Gina, Florence, Virgil and Richard 'Dicky' Pozzini. c.1949.

But I remember Dicky, and I want to record my memories of him, and just take some time to think about him, and to do something to memorialise a wonderful and creative life that nevertheless ended in despair.

Dicky did many things - he was a farmer, and a cyclist, a photographer, a student of Italian literature, a member of the Peace Corp in Brazil and an artist; but my memories of him are as a student of nature and a maker of things.

A series of a bird sculptures made around 1968 or 69.

He grew up on the smallholding his parents Virgil and Gina bought in the early 1930s, as immigrants trying to recapture the rural lifestyle they had left behind in Northern Italy: fourteen acres of grapes and walnut trees in El Campo, Woodbridge, just outside Lodi in the Central Valley of California.  The area is now famous for its wine, but then it felt like the dry, hot factory floor of California agriculture.  Dicky's parents made a hard scrabble living combining wine making and market gardening with whatever work came to their very skillful hands.  In my memory they seemed to be experimenting with a new crop, a new strategy to make money every year.  Virgil made all their furniture, and Gina made all their clothes.  Dinner was as likely to feature song birds or hare, as meat from a butcher. And while there was always food on the table, it never felt like there was a lot of money in the bank. 

The 'Ranch' was really just a classic California subdivision, with a small bungalow, a tank house, a windmill (which had been replaced by an electric pump by the 1960s), a well and a few out-buildings.  And it was never big enough to support them as an exclusively agricultural concern.  Gina went to work in the fruit (processing peaches and cherries through the hot nights of summer) and Virgil made furniture and fitted kitchens for his better-off neighbours in the workshop.

Dicky grew up driving tractors, and working in the shop, helping with the wine; fishing and hunting the river trout and small birds of the neighbourhood; and just getting on with all the gathering and processing that a small holding required.  It was a life of making and repairing, processing and planning for the next season; and it required huge imagination as well as simple hard work.  One of my earliest memories of Dicky is helping him make sausages in the tank house kitchen (reserved for processing large batches of food).  While I was allowed to turn the handle, he stood over the meat grinder expertly tying off each link as the meat filled the casing.  But it was not all work.  He also took us on adventures to the river, and taught us how to make whistles from a a bit of reed.  He was the first person I ever saw use a cast-net for river fishing. 

But more than anything, from an early age he was a wonderful craftsman.  My brother still has the perfect miniature model cars Dicky made as a child (reflecting designs from the 1910s and 1920s), and my parents have the carvings of birds, and of a bunch of grapes and a rooster that he made.  The panels always hung on the wall in my grandparents' living room.

El Campo was anything but an easy life.  Virgil was a disappointed man who had spent twenty years living in all-male quarters in mining towns, and lodging houses - a victim of that largely male diaspora suffered by the Irish, Italians and Poles in the first decades of the last century.  He was given to alcohol  and socialising; and drank a fair portion of the wine he made.  He always hankered after a return to Italy, but following his marriage in 1929, he never went back.  He could be violent to his wife and children, and has always been held up by my mother as the canker at the heart of that particular knotty world.  She herself was largely protected from him by her own mother, but as a boy Dicky was expected to tough it out.  But, Dicky also had good friends, and a varied life at the heart of a small community.  His childhood certainly did not leave him fearful, or unambitious, frightened of the world, or unable to make friends.

After high school, Dicky went to Italy cycling through the North - to visit relatives, and I suspect, just to get out of rural America.  By all accounts the trip was a hard one - with little money and less support -  but it must have been enough to spark a desire to study Italian literature, which he did for a couple of years at San Francisco State.   I don't know how long this lasted, though he never finished the degree.  And soon enough, he was off to Brazil with the Peace Corp, and a couple of years later, following a short stay back at the Ranch, returned to Brazil to help set up an agricultural co-operative in the rain forest.

The co-operative eventually failed, and Dicky found himself back in San Francisco in his late twenties, and in need of a living.  With three or four false starts behind him, I suspect returning the US was very hard.  In that particular world, there was not much sympathy for failure. 

I remember driving up to Lodi with him in what must have been one of his first visits to see his parents after returning for good from South America.  We drove the eighty miles or so in the most dilapidated pick-up you can imagine - there was no key, and Dicky had to hot wire it every time we stopped.  Virgil and Gina had given up the Ranch the year before and had moved in to a small house in Lodi; and the afternoon was punctuated with Virgil and Dicky arguing, while Gina and I listened from the kitchen.   I will always remember Virgil saying, 'If I thought you were going to return, we would never have sold the Ranch'.

Dicky and me (aged 10) around 1967 or 68.

                    

I doubt Dicky could ever have gone back to El Campo, but it seemed a powerful accusation to me at the age of nine or ten, still shocked by the loss of a much loved childhood haunt.

Dicky did not talk to me about the argument, and we drove back to San Francisco pretty much in silence (I was a kid).  And in the next month or so, Dicky went about setting up a wood working shop on Valencia Street, and tried to figure out how to make a living.

For the next year or so he was a frequent visitor to my parents house, and a regular presence in our lives.  I remember visiting Muir Woods with him once, and being allowed to use his Rolex camera for a few close ups of plants and insects.  At weekends there were the craft fairs where he sold the small pieces he was making by then.  It was San Francisco in 1968 and 1969, so all the work was psychedelic, loud and colourful.  As kids we were encouraged to make 'God's Eyes' and scented candles. 

I don't remember how long this lasted - probably not more than eighteen months.  My parents heard of Dicky's suicide late on a Sunday night, on our return from a long weekend trip to somewhere I don't remember. He had shot himself.

From here my memories are about how not to deal with a death like Dicky's.  The silence, the mismanaged attempts to protect children from hard adult emotions.  The awkward attempts to explain the truth; and to work through the guilt that wracked my parents' and grandparents' lives for years. 

But that tragedy and experience is not the point of this blog.  Instead, I just wanted to remember a person, Dicky Pozzini.  He was a craftsman and an artist, a socialist, and a generous soul.  Lives are made of people and experience, and Dicky is one of the people who has shaped my life, and whom I  simply want to remember.

These days I am doing as much woodworking as time allows; making stuff, because making stuff is important.  And every time I cut in to a piece of black walnut, with its evocative smell so familiar from my childhood, or let my gouge reveal the curve of bowl on the lathe, I think of Dicky.

Two fish sculptures made by my son, Nick and I in 2011.  The walnut was laid down to cure by Dicky Pozzini in 1968.

Stuff and Dead People

In recent years I find myself using the terms Stuff and Dead People in talks and titles more and more.  And as a historian I find myself conceptualising my work as being about Stuff inherited from Dead People.  Both expressions just sound right.  But it occurs to me that while I have a relatively clear sense of what I am intending to convey when I use these terms, their meanings might not be entirely apparent to others.  For this reason I thought I would have a stab at providing a couple of definitions, and a brief explanation of why I find these terms so useful

In my usage Stuff encompasses all the different varieties of artefact that can be used in practising history.  The term is in some respects an attempt avoid saying that our object of study is text or image, the manmade landscape or a piece of furniture, or indeed even data in its broadest form.  Instead, the use of Stuff is intended to signify that my practise as a historian actively seeks to make use of all of these things.  In terms of an epistemology, it is an attempt to distance myself from the categories of knowing that I (we) have inherited.  Stuff denies the taxonomies of knowing that define a museum object as being different to a pamphlet; a hedgerow different to a  teapot.  In part this usage reflects a profound disillusion with the narrow practise of textual comparison that lies at the heart of the Rankean tradition of historical analysis; but it is also a recognition that new technologies allow us to encompass new types of evidence in new ways.  When all Stuff is data it can be interrogated across boundaries that seemed natural and unbreachable just a few decades ago (between a hedgerow and a teapot). And while data itself is also a form of Stuff, and the transition from varieties of stuff to data is itself a process of creating a new taxonomy, there remains a rather wonderful transition involved.  There is an opportunity to rethink the meanings of Stuff, and without a new vocabulary it is all that much more difficult to do so.

In other words, Stuff is a simple rejection of post-enlightenment categorisation.

In some respects Dead People serves a similar function.  The use of Dead People avoids the traps of both identity and social modelling; while at the same time giving some shape to the object of historical study (human culture in the past).  Ironically some Dead People are still alive.  Henry Kissinger is apparently still breathing, but is nevertheless a figure of substantial historical analysis.  In my view he is undeniably Dead People.  At the same time, because cultural history seems to take longer to turn journalism in to books, Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson may be dead, but they are not yet Dead People.

The term Dead People implies a refusal to describe the people of past as men or women, workers or citizens, artists or authors.  And in doing so, like Stuff, is used to signal that I do not find the traditional categories and boundaries that comprise social science very helpful.

Stuff we inherit from Dead People is my object of study as a historian. 

One could convey these ideas using other words.  The results might be a bit long winded, but could certainly point up my intention.  At the same time, the use of these terms serve a slightly wider function.  They form an attempt to de-centre the language of historical and social science authority that underpins the professional claims of academic historians as a whole.  By refusing to use the categories and languages of authority we inherited, I am self-consciously rejecting the systems that underpin the professional academic practise of history. 

It is perhaps a ridiculous comparison, but I like to think of the use of these terms as akin to the transition in thinking brought about by the evolution of labelling in quantum theory between the proposal of the eight-fold-way in the 1950s and the November Revolution of 1974.  Like most people of my generation and education, I was raised in an Einsteinian universe in which unusual phenomenon were described in the most secure of scientific jargon - we believed in the physics because it was expressed in the language of authority.  But in the 1970s, in particular, a whole new language of strangeness and charm was broadcast to a popular audience.  As a teenager schooled in an older tradition, this challenged me to rethink.  By using everyday words to describe complex phenomena I was forced to interrogate what I believed more closely than I would otherwise have done.  I don't understand quantum, but suspect I understand Einsteinian physics better as a result!   I use the terms Stuff and Dead People in the hope that their use will challenge listeners to question the labels and phenomena they think I am talking about.
    
    




 

Hearing the Dead - Ten years of the Old Bailey Online

The Old Bailey Homepage, 2003

The Old Bailey Online has now been around for a decade - and we are celebrating.  But it also seems a good moment to take stock of what went right and what went wrong and just reflect for a moment on fifteen years of project work.

My most vivid memories are of the team of people involved.  They were amazing, and I feel hugely privileged to have worked with them all; most especially with Bob Shoemaker, who has been a constant collaborator and friend for over three decades, through at least five projects and two books.  But also a whole crew of people who came together to make something good happen.  Just in relation to the period before the initial launch in 2003, there was Jamie McLaughlin and Simon Tanner, Geoffrey Laycock, Louise Henson, John Black,  Edwina Newman, Kay O'Flaherty, and Gwen Smithson. What they produced was ground breaking, and that was a simple result of their hard work and good sense. Since then a dozen more people have been involved - most importantly Sharon Howard. 

I suppose the real  question is: if we had to do it over again, what would we have done differently?  Speaking for myself, rather than for the project, I can't think of all that much I would change.  Perhaps we could have chosen better software to begin with, and been generally more technically saavy, and worried less about IP.  But these seem small things from this distance.   I guess I regret the six months of my time, and several thousand pounds of project money spent licensing the images we used for the background pages on the site.  The experience demonstrated to me that the copyright system in online images is broken, but it seems a hard lesson won at a relatively high cost!

I also regret over egging some of the early discussion about the project.  The whole 'new history from below' narrative which we developed in thinking about the site simply raised the ire of a group of historians offended by the hubris; or who felt their own expertise was somehow threatened.  I hold my hands up to the charge of hubris (though I still stand by the need for a 'new' history from below).  Digitisation and the Internet, and Digital Humanities more broadly does lend itself to hyperbole, and I am far from immune to its attractions.  But mainly it was unnecessary, as the site has effected the wider historical agenda and the kinds of history people write with no need for any one to lead the way or yell about it.

And what we got right - however fortuitously - seems to me to outweigh these issues.  Looking back on the decisions we made in the late 1990s, the choice of a double-entry rekeyed text, in combination with XML tagging turned out to be perfect, even if it was through luck rather than expertise (though Michael Pidd's experience and initial steer helped!).  We also got the timing right. Because it was 2003, because we started the project in 1998/9, the launch received a lot of news coverage, and generated what seemed at the time a ridiculous amount of usage - without us having to pursue the kinds of detailed 'impact' plans the funding councils now demand. 

But mainly, I like to think what we got right was our decision and commitment to digitise the most compelling source of social history I know; of history from below.  I am continuously moved by the fact that lots of people now read eighteenth-century trials who would never preoviously have thought to seek them out.  Professional historians have always known what powerful voices the Proceedings contain, but putting them online in a form that is easy to use and free has meant that millions of people who would not otherwise have been minded to read this stuff, have done.  They have used what they found in the Proceedings in novels and on television, in endless undergraduate dissertations and in more books than I want to read; and I take neither credit nor blame for their work.  But, I believe that the decision to make freely available a source that prior to 2003 could only be read by a small and privileged group of academics, was an unproblematic good thing. 

Bob Shoemaker (right) and Tim Hitchcock, 2003.  Clock the monitor!

Most people forget just how elitist and exclusive academic libraries could be (and still can); how hard it was to get access to microfilm, special collections and rare books.  Unless you had been vetted (largely for class and race) by some great institution, you were simply out of luck. I like to think the Old Bailey Online undermines that exclusivity just a bit.  I also like to think that in combination with London Lives the site has helped to make a corner of social history I love, and have committed my life to studying, a little more secure from the infinite condescension of the present.

In the next ten years I very much hope that the Proceedings will form the basis of a growing body of more technically sophisticated analyses, using all the techniques of datamining, corpus linguistics and information science, all made easier by the API.  But most importantly, I hope that people continue to hear the voices of anger and pain it contains; and that for just a second they let their imaginations take them to that brutal theatre of judgement where working people were forced to negotiate with power.

OA in the UK

Between the Finch Report in the UK, and more direct moves towards a comprehensive Open Access policy for government funded research in the US, it seems we are confronted by an important moment in the evolution of the ecology of scholarship within which academic history writing is produced and published.     

A recent one-day colloquium sponsored by the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society was called precisely to bring together major institutional players (Scholarly Societies, Journals, and Publishers) for a conversation about the best ways forward (the Tweet stream is here).  The general feeling seems to be that while every well-meaning historian is keen to promote Open Access (a show of hands at the conference confirmed this), the Gold Route, whereby authors and institutions are asked to shoulder the cost of peer review and publishing, is just not workable in the humanities.   

There is also the beginnings of what many feel is an apparent solution to the problem.  Both the past and present presidents of the Royal Historical Society, and some 21 editors of major humanities journals, signed a letter proposing the imposition of an increased embargo period on the articles in their journals - essentially suggesting they be allowed to have three years in which to make money on their publications before being forced to make them available through Open Access.   They also proposed maintaining a two-track system to ensure that overseas and non-academic authors are excluded from the government led requirement for Open Access.

To me this feels like Saint Augustine's plaint: "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet." (Confessions 8:17).

Let me be clear, though.  I understand completely the anxieties motivating these institutions and commentators.  A narrowly defined Gold Route process of the sort privileged by the Finch Report is not workable in the humanities.  The 'author pays' model is predicated on the direct funding of research by government, and on the assumption that the consumers of research outputs are the same as the producers.  In the case of history this is not true. 

 The vast majority of historical research and publication is not funded by project grants; and while a higher proportion is funded through the Universities, and through QR, there is still a large body of excellent work that is undertaken by independent scholars, or as part of a self-funded PhD, or by staff in institutions which do not receive QR funding or participate in the REF.  And similarly, all historians seek to reach a wider audience than most scientists, and imagine their work in the light of a successful 'trade monograph'; which itself forms a recognised academic achievement. 

In other words, I largely agree with the diagnosis that the main thrust of the Finch Report is unworkable.  Though, of course, the Report does not restrict academics to the single route to Open Access, and makes it clear that other types of OA (Green Route) are entirely consistent with the objective of making publicly funded research available to the public.  Following on from this, I also believe the RCUK policy to cover the new costs entailed through grants is also largely unworkable, and if poorly executed in pursuit of a narrow Gold Route form of publication will create issues of fair access, with institutional meddling in academic decision making and serious problems for post-graduates and early career academics. 

What is missing in all this is any positive model of Open Access publishing that takes seriously the fundamental interests and values of history as a discipline, as opposed to the interests of the collection of institutions and journals that purport to speak for it.  For myself I have a clear sense of what I would like Open Access in history (and more broadly in the academy) to look like in ten years' time; and it would have the following characteristics:

•   It would be built on the deposit of articles and research data (including notes) in institutional repositories, linked to APIs that allow their content to be re-'published', mashed up and re-used (with acknowledgment).
•  The route to 'publication' would include the initial deposit of research materials, followed by the posting of a 'rough draft' for comment and revision, leading to a post-publication peer review system.  The author would then be allowed to specify at what revision the 'article' is complete, with perhaps a six month norm for revisions.  See for instance the History Working Papers Project.
•  Metrics for downloads, re-use and citations for the now online article will be used to generate a measure of scholarly importance.  These metrics can include the kind of complex systems for assessing 'authority' (i.e. whose post peer review assessments are worth most) implicit in the Altmetrics movement.
•  'Journals' will be made up of adopted 'articles' that fit their theme and which are moulded to a particular house style in the open peer review process.  In this ecology of scholarship journals will take on a new intellectual role in shaping debate and argument, and in defining academic communities, and will have a 'promoting' role rather than a 'publishing' role.
•  Academic monographs will be seen as a simple extension of article publication - i.e. either in the form of long articles, or perhaps as a collection of pieces created as 'articles'.
•  Genuine 'Trade History' will continue to be sold in the generic forms of biography and narrative etc., but the underlying academic historical content will be available in institutional repositories, while the revisions and adaptions for a popular audience are dealt with separately.
•  The co-archiving of secondary writing and notes and research materials will allow for the creation of an increasingly vertically integrated form of writing, in which source material and commentary are connected.
•  The costs of maintaining, curating and archiving the system will be borne by the Universities, with savings from the journal and book purchasing costs.   A separate tNA or British Library repository will support and archive the work of otherwise unaffiliated scholars.

Getting to this point is not straightforward.  But the universities are fully empowered to use the RCUK funding to beef up their repositories, rather than paying journal fees.   The repositories could also take a first step towards a more rigorous ecology of scholarship by archiving and making available the underlying research data we all endlessly collect (and jealously guard as the capital of an ego driven system of professional advancement). 

At the moment most public debate and effort seems to be devoted to preserving the current business model that underpins the public/private partnership that lies at the heart of academic publishing. The journals worry that their main income stream (allowing them to provide studentships etc) will be eliminated; while the publishers worry that their privileged position between subsidised creators of content and subsidised buyers of content will be squeezed.  Both these anxieties are justified.  

 But, we need to ask ourselves whether we really want to use the roundabout and expensive route of generating income from University Library budgets via the publication of materials produced by academic staff, to take money from the providers of education - the Universities - in order to give it to the journals and scholarly societies, in order to allow them, to in turn purchase education from the Universities.  It is ridiculous.

As for the academic presses, they have spent thirty years squeezing the 'added value' from their operation.  In-house copy-editing and proof reading for the most part went ages ago.  And many presses now demand what amounts to 'camera ready' copy.  If the presses do not want to serve their traditional role in an ecology of scholarship (sifting and polishing its products), then it is not clear what their profits are based on.  At the moment, the greatest input on the part of the presses lies in advertising and licensing content, policing its re-use and in producing hard copy versions of books and articles that are largely unwanted (ask any librarian).  A thoroughgoing Open Access model eliminates the need for selling, licensing, and policing, while time will take care of the romantic attachment to wood pulp.

Current debate seems most fully motivated by a reactionary and defensive fear that a change in the nature of academic publication will unravel the systems of authority and organisational finance that used to deliver public debate.  But, if we have faith in the importance of the academy and of scholarship, then we need to continually re-invent the process.  Open Access provides a perfect opportunity to reconnect with the founding principles of the academy.

Drills and holes

I have just spent a couple of days at the annual conference of the NFAIS (National Federation of Advanced Information Services) in Philadelphia.  I was giving a brief paper at the request of the good people at the British Library about developments in text mining in the Humanities, and I was happy to be invited and to participate.

But it was only when I had sat through a day or two of presentations that I realised just how out of place I was, and how irrelevant my comments were.  It turns out the NFAIS is the trade organisation for all the companies (and some libraries) that have been building a commercial operation for a hundred years by placing themselves between information and those who need it.  Thompson-Reuters were heavily represented, as was Cengage/Gale, several medical abstracting services, and a host of companies providing data to particular sectors of the economy such as the building trades and architects.   And they were all presenting their well articulated models of data gathering and manipulation designed to deliver a pablum of stuff to the desktops of America's commercial movers, shakers and capitalists.  Interestingly, the people who weren't there, were Google, Facebook, Twitter, the Creative Commons or representatives of the Open Access movement.  Neither new model capitalists, nor Open Access evangelists were present.  And while there was a strand of discussion focussed on research and academic library services, this was a small corner of an essentially old style commercial ecology.  Nor were the real innovations in data modelling and analysis coming out of CS on display.  A constant sub-theme of the conference seemed to be a tetchy criticism of Google for having done a half-arsed job of inter-mediating between data and users, while the Twitter stream for this event was almost non-existent.  It was clear that these data professionals were having their conversation somewhere else - though I never did find out where. 

There was a lot of talk about Altmetrics as a way of adding value to the data people already had, prior to selling it to the managers of research and education.  And the theme of the event appeared to be a call to extend a hundred year old business model to ensure that these companies were delivering precisely the data that people needed (rather than what they thought they wanted), in a form that allowed them to use that data without thinking.  The controlling metaphor was - people buy a drill, because they really want a hole.

I was bemused by this.  I don't want a hole.  I want a drill, a hammer, a saw and a workshop to make stuff in.  And I certainly don't want anyone else to second guess what it is I am making (perhaps wonky, but original).

And then it occurred to me where my disconnect came from.  The NFAIS and the companies they represent derive from a long and largely American tradition of late Enlightenment data processing.  Their origins lie in Union Catalogues and abstracting services via microfilm; in creating a pre-digested, post-Enlightenment world of understood data, that could be packaged and catalogued and sold as yard after yard of uniform reference volumes. NFAIS used to stand for the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services. I have always put the American obsession with this kind of thing down to its inability to get over the European Enlightenment long after the rest of us got bored.

My overwhelming impression was that all these companies were anxious to widen the gap between data and its users, to ensure that they continued to have a role and an income - tapping the stream between the two for annual profit.  Some of the work was reasonably sophisticated (though most of it felt more 'relational database' than anything more innovative), and it was clear that many saw the way forward as providing faster access to real-time data in a form that would become normalised in a business context (or well funded, close to market STEM).  

In retrospect, and after having heard the presentations which came after my own, what I really should have said more forcefully, is get out of the way, this is boring, and it misses the point entirely.  We are rapidly approaching the stage when the devil's contract between private companies and the public sector, which has governed data delivery in both the humanities and STEM for the last fifteen years on line (and a hundred years off-line) is going to break down.  Open Access, for example, is just a wedge issue for a wider re-thinking of how research and data, and its users will interact.  And the fact that both the British and American governments were there first, is an indication that this particular community is not paying sufficient attention.

I am not overly exercised by the profiteering of these companies (if people want to sell their souls for a health plan and a cheap suit, that is OK by me).  Nor do I really want to castigate them for their place in an information food chain.  Companies like Cengage/Gale have coralled a useful amount of money for data processing.  I am just struck by the lack of serious engagement with the real changes in the fundamental relationship between the production and consumption of data that the last fifteen years has wrought.  More than anything else, my three days in Phili has brought home to me that I simply don't inhabit the same data universe that I did fifteen years ago. 

A Five Minute Rant for the Consortium of European Research Libraries

I have been asked to participate in a panel at the annual CERL conference - and to speak for no more than five minutes or so.  Initially, I was just going to wing it, but then, in writing up a couple notes, five minutes worth of text found its way on to the screen.  In the spirit of never wasting a grammatical sentence, the text is below.  I probably wont follow it at the conference, but it reflects what I wanted to say.

CERL - British Library, 31 October 2012:

We all know just how transformative the digitisation of the inherited print archive has been.  Between Google Books, ECCO, EEBO, Project Gutenberg, the Burney Collection, the British Library's 19^th century newspapers, the Parliamentary Papers, the Old Bailey Online, and on and on, something new has been created.  And it is a testament to twenty years of seriously hard graft.  But, it is one of the great ironies of the minute that the most revolutionary technical change in the history of the human ordering of information since writing - the creation of the infinite archive, with all its disruptive possibilities - has resulted in a markedly conservative and indeed reactionary model of human culture.

For both technical and legal reasons, in the rush to the on line, we have given to the oldest of Western canons a new hyper-availability, and a new authority.  With the exception of the genealogical sites, which themselves reflect the Western bias of their source materials and audience, the most common sort of historical web resource is dedicated to posting the musings of some elite, dead, white, western male - some scientist, or man of letters; or more unusually, some equally elite, dead white woman of letters.  And for legal reasons as much as anything else, it is now much easier to consult the oldest forms of humanities scholarship instead of the more recent and fully engaged varieties.  It is easier to access work from the 1890s, imbued with all the contemporary relevance of the long dead, than it is to use that of the 1990s.  

Without serious intent and political will - a determination to digitise the more difficult forms of the non-canonical, the non-Western, the non-elite and the quotidian - the materials that capture the lives and thoughts of the least powerful in society - we will have inadvertently turned a major area of scholarship, in to a fossilised irrelevance.

And this is all the more important because just at the same moment that we have allowed our cultural inheritance to be sieved and posted in a narrowly canonical form; the siren voices of the information scientists: the Googlers, coders and Culturomics wranglers, have discovered in that body of digitised material, a new object of study.  All digital texts is now data, that date is now available for new forms of analysis, and that data is made up of the stuff we chose to digitise.   All of which embeds a subtle biase towards a particular subset of the human experience.  Using measures derived from Ngrams, and topic modelling, natural language processing, and TF-IDF similarity measures; scientists are beginning to use this text/data as the basis for a new search for mathematically identifiable patterns.  And in the process, the information scientists are beginning to carve out what is being presented as 'natural' patterns of change, that turn the products of human culture into a simple facet of a natural, and scientifically intelligible world.  The only problem with this is that the analysts undertaking this work are not overly worried by the nature of the data they are using.  For most, the sheer volume of text makes its selective character irrelevant.

But if we are not careful, we will see the creation of a new 'naturalisation' of human thought based on the narrowest sample of the oldest of dead white males.  And to this particular audience I just want to suggest that we need to be much more critical about what it is that we digitise; what we allow to represent the cultures libraries and collections stand in for; and that we need to engage more comprehensively and intelligently with the simple fact that we are in the middle of a selective recreation of inherited culture.