Reflection on Archives & Manuscripts

I nearly didn’t take this class. I needed one more course to finish out my degree and I was originally planning on taking something that would directly relate to my current job. At the last minute however I decided that this was also my last chance to have any kind of archival experience - it’s possible I could end up in archives some day, but it’s never been on my career path. I am very glad that I decided to go this route and learn something a little “off track” to round out my schooling.

I was surprised by how separate yet entwined archives are from libraries, and how clearly I identify myself as a librarian, not an archivist. It’s such a similar job - you are organizing typically paper-based materials into a coherent order, then teaching people how to fill out a form to retrieve data from those materials (I was at a presentation recently where the speaker - a librarian - said librarianship was fundamentally teaching people how to fill out forms. I’m still stinging at how true that is: you search catalogs and databases using forms, fill out patron accounts and request forms, etc. But I digress). Our views on privacy are the same.

We fundamentally both believe that people should have access to the materials, but our path to get to that access differs quite a lot. In my work, we account for attrition. Books are lost or misplaced, our patrons occasionally pay a fee for them (we usually waive it) and we replace the items (or not - often getting another copy is more trouble than it would be worth to our library). In contrast, the archivist needs to be much more cautious with their materials, as even putting everything back but out of order could alter the historical record.

In some ways, archives are more like a makers space than a library, a place to get the tools to build something rather than a location to get things that have already been built. Original documents are the raw material that the research needs to interpret to create their own scholarly work. In contrast, almost everything that I work with as a librarian is “pre-interpreted.” There’s still a great deal of new knowledge that can be created from books, but it’s different from the type of knowledge that can be created from archival collections.

It’s odd reflecting on a semester of schooling that has taken place during a pandemic. I wonder what different things I would have gotten from this course otherwise. A few things jump out to me. Digitization seems more pressing now. It’s not just a convenience, it’s the only way that people can safely use most collections. But having had the convenience, I doubt that people will want to go back after we return to the status quo, especially as it ties into global research. I think it’s so cool that we have ways of doing research with people internationally, whether that’s through completely digitizing a collection, or sitting on Zoom with a researcher while the archivist turns the page for them.

The past year has also heightened people’s understanding of the need for greater racial diversity in archives. I’ve really appreciated that there’s an underlying agreement that Black Lives Matter and diversity matters throughout discussions and assignments. There’s still so far to go, but the awakening is satisfying. The intractable problem keeps coming up for me however. It’s one thing to diversify our collections - this is good, ethical, and needed. But it’s a much harder thing to diversify our profession, and doing so is going to require white archivists to do some hard internal work to ensure they aren’t being a barrier.

My knowledge of archival practice has already helped my career. I’m on the committee to hire a new faculty member who will be our public services supervisor in our special collections and archives (we call them SCARC - Special Collections and Archives Research Center - here at OSU). This class has given me a better understanding of what is done day-to-day in the archives, which means I can better design questions for our interviews and hopefully make a stronger hire. I’m also very excited for when I can begin to collaborate with SCARC. My boss has long said she is interested in collaborations happening between our departments, and now that I understand their work a little better, I feel more equipped to suggest ideas and get them into reality. The pandemic “helped” us to complete some work together. I needed tasks my many student workers could do remotely, SCARC had a backlog of oral histories that needed their transcripts matched up. We even had one of our star student workers help with writing the biographical background for a collection - now that I’ve completed the finding aid assignments, I’m even more wowed by her work.

Our discussion boards had some great ideas for new directions this class could take. I think I could have taken a whole class on finding aids very happily. That was a perfect assignment, it was easily one of the most hands-on projects I’ve done over the course of my degree.

I would love to learn more about the process of digitizing a collection in its entirety. A ‘start-to-finish’ course would be helpful, beginning with learning how to determine what collection should be digitized, creating a project proposal, developing a methodology, and ensuring the materials stay findable. Between this class, a class I took on metadata, and my own work experience helping develop a procedure for digitizing our course reserves, I feel like I have many of the pieces together, but not an overarching understanding of the process. I also think this would give us the chance to talk more about the needs of different materials, as audio/visual materials and photographs have specific needs.

Overall, this class has been fascinating, and I’ve learned a lot. It’s been more closely tied to my job than I anticipated. Who knows, maybe in my career, someday I’ll be an archivist.

Ethical Questions in the Archives

In this blog post, I am examining the following ethical dilemma:

In working on the arrangement and description of a collection, you come across a piece of information that is of a highly-sensitive nature and could change the perception of a major (still living) political figure. What should you do?

 

Before I begin discussing my thought process, I want to give a structure for this hypothetical situation. The legal considerations are from a United States viewpoint and involve U.S. citizens only. Other countries have privacy and copyright laws that could lead to a different outcome (see, for example, the GDPR). I’m also assuming that we’re working within “normal” constraints - this isn’t a politician with mafia ties who will put a hit out on my family if these documents are made public.

According to the Society of American Archivists (2020), “Archivists should promote and provide the widest possible accessibility of materials, while respecting legal and ethical access restrictions including public statutes, cultural protections, donor contracts, and privacy requirements” (“Access and Use”). Although the SAA expands on privacy concerns in archives,it does not give a cut-and-dry answer to this scenario. Rather, it discusses different aspects of privacy that should be kept in mind when coming to a decision, such as the fact that both “legal and cultural dimensions” exist to the question (“Privacy”). There is specific guidance as to what an archive should do with a privacy decision - decisions should be made transparently and documented.

Although there are no definitive guides for how to handle a scenario such as this, there are many case studies available in the literature. The SAA includes in their list one that regards the decision to publicly archive letters which revealed an affair between President Warren G. Harding and Carrie Fulton Phillips. Although this scenario is different in that Harding was deceased when the letters were made public, it highlights the extreme financial, professional and legal risks one can take when publicizing sensitive documents (Pyatt, 2015). LeClere (2019) discusses how archives must make different decisions based on whether or not materials are digitized, “craft[ing] boundaries and policies around online access [...] which ranged from mildly cautious to fiercely open” (p. 122).

There are legal ramifications to making private documents public. However, because the documents are related to a public official, privacy considerations are different than they would be for a private citizen. In the United States, public figures are considered to have relinquished their right to privacy - many court cases, including Supreme Court rulings, have weighed the right to free speech and free media as more important than public officials’ privacy (Yanisky-Ravid and Lahav, 2017, p. 993). From a risk management perspective, having a documented privacy policy which is applied to all archival materials can help an archives’ legal case in the situation where they are sued. In fact, treating similar collections differently on the basis of one’s political (or other) status could potentially open up the archives to more risk.
 

In the absence of a donor agreement or privacy policy that contradicts this, my action would be to continue to arrange and describe the collection. Underlying all my decisions is the idea that archivists should “err on the side of access” (Lawrimore, 2021, para. 9). The archivist should not be in a position of judging the content of materials - truly anything could be embarrassing in some circumstances. In addition, when you consider that archivists tend to work on the collection, not item, level, it’s only by chance this information was discovered.

This decision is specific to this scenario. There are other, very similar circumstances where suppressing the information would be the ethical response, particularly if the documents in question were about a private citizen. For example, Chenier (2015) gives the example of archiving oral histories that out living people: “For example, while it might be okay to be gay today, tomorrow might bring new problems and challenges, as demonstrated by Russian historians of sexuality who are currently having to transition into new areas of research” (p. 138). In addition, consent may have been freely given at the time of the document’s creation or archiving, but may change as technology develops, such as in when digitizing pre-internet archives (Chenier, 2015; LeClere, 2019).

There are other factors that could come into play, and I have several questions I would want answered before I would make a decision. These questions include the following:

• Is there a donor agreement with guidance for how these documents should be treated? For example, are these materials donated with the expectation they will be available for in-person research only and not online? Does it require an embargo, where the documents are made available to researchers only for a specified time before being made available to the general public?
• Do these documents have specific legal protections? For example, are they protected by FERPA or HIPAA? Conversely, does the archives in question have a legal requirement to make documents public and discoverable?
• What is the nature of the document? Did the donor have legal ownership of the material? Although the decision may end up being the same in each situation, the archivist may want to consider treating private, explicit letters differently than a copy of a forgotten speech.
• Does the archives have a written privacy policy? This policy would ideally contain instructions on how to manage these situations, including how to document ones’ decision-making process. It would also include a take-down policy, stating who can request that information is restricted and why, as well as identifying who responds to those requests.
• What discoverability will these items have? Are they freely searchable and findable online, or do readers need to ask permission for access?
• What is the archives’ acceptable level of risk? Historically has this archives been more or less conservative in their interpretation of privacy regulations?

In conclusion, although my decision in this scenario is that the materials should still be described, in the end, “it depends.” Although ease of access is prioritized, there are other ramifications in terms of legal risk and ethical needs. Scenarios such as this are why the SAA does not have an overarching privacy policy, but rather a set of guidelines which archivists should consider as they make ethical decisions for their collections.

References

1. Chenier, E. (2015, May). “Privacy anxieties: Ethics versus activism in archiving lesbian oral history online.” Radical History Review, (122), 129-141. doi:10.1215/01636545-2849576
2. Lawrimore, E. (2021). “Unit 6-C: Privacy Issues.”
3. LeClere, E. (2019). The ethics of building digital archives of the recent past: A thematic analysis of archivists’ decision-making in digitization work. (Publication No. 27671752). [Doctoral Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
4. Pyatt, T. D. (2015). The Harding Affair letters: How one archivist took every measure possible to ensure their preservation. Retrieved from https://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/HardingAffairLetters_CEPC-CaseStudy5.pdf.
   
5. Society of American Archivists. (2020). “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.” Retrieved from https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics.
6. Yanisky-Ravid, S., & Lahav, B. Z. (2017). Public interest vs. private lives - affording public figures privacy in the digital era: the three principle filtering model. University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, 19(4), 975-1014. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1633&context=jcl
   

The 1996 Mount Everest Climbing Disaster

 Link to timeline: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eUyU9lGKLlfhpvyxnS2-8CGxaxml_Q73rjE3J6nC6p4/edit#gid=0

In this timeline, I attempt to tell the story of the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster. Although the time frame was very short (May 10-11, 1996) it is quite complex. All 26 people involved had their own harrowing story to share, and sometimes even disagreed on what happened. From the very beginning I had to select timeline points that gave the gist of the story without losing critical information. For this reason although I tried to give a sense as to what happened to everyone in the expedition, I primarily focused on the story of Rob Hall and Beck Weathers - even the deaths of other climbers, Doug Hansen, Andy Harris, and Yasuko Namba had to be told in relation to Hall and Weathers.

I was first introduced to this story through Ed Viesturs' book No Shortcuts to the Top and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. To verify the timeline, I relied heavily on PBS's hour-by-hour Frontline website, "Storm Over Everest" and Jon Krakauer's radioed reports, as well as Wikipedia, articles in Medium, and news reports from the aftermath. I also researched the science of the storm, which made it into the timeline, and the science of human physiology during oxygen deprivation, which didn't. Please see my full list of resources below.

I had 3 main challenges with this project. The first was keeping the timeline to a manageable length. I had to gloss over many important factors - Anatoli Boukreev's early descent is a major controversy which I didn't dive into, and I didn't even mention the deaths of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police - Subedar Tsewang Samanla, Lance Naik Dorje Morup, and Head Constable Tsewang Paljor. This leads to my second difficulty, deciding whose stories to prioritize. Unfortunately the Indo-Tibetan expedition is reported as a "background" event to the disaster, meaning there simply wasn't enough information for me to coherently bring it into the storyline. However, their stories are important and equally tragic, as fully half of their expedition team died.

Finally, my third challenge was the need to carefully use passive voice to tell parts of the story, specifically as surrounds the controversy relating to the fixed ropes. If I had actively stated "Sherpas did not set fixed ropes, and this caused the deaths of 8 climbers" it would have been technically true but would also have glossed over the equivalent truth, "Western climbers were fighting over who was responsible to pay for the ropes." Hence my phrasing, "Fixed ropes were not placed."

References

1996 Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition to Mount Everest. (2021, April 14). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Indo-Tibetan_Border_Police_expedition_to_Mount_Everest

1996 Mount Everest disaster. (2021, April 13). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Mount_Everest_disaster

Alderman, J., and K. Arnold. (1996, September). The descent, step by step. Outside Magazine. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20160404180321/http://www.outsideonline.com/1845086/descent-step-step

AP. (1996, May 14). Climber radioed his wife before dying on Everest -- He assured her but knew there was no rescue. Seattle Times, https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19960514&slug=2329189

Daniels, P. (2020, January 23). 1996 Mount Everest Disaster: Death on Top of the World. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/1996-mount-everest-disaster-4043349

Davies, B. (2020 April 29). The True Story of Everest 1996: One of Mountaineering's Worst Tragedies. Wired for Adventure. https://www.wiredforadventure.com/tragedies-on-the-mountain-everest-1996/

Frontline. (2008, May 13). Storm Over Everest: the Hour-by-Hour Unfolding Disaster. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/everest/stories/unfolding.html

Hogan, J. (2004, May 29-Jun 4). The day the sky fell on Everest. New Scientist 182(2449): 15. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224492-200-the-day-the-sky-fell-on-everest/

Kangshung face. (2021, March 16). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangshung_Face

Kluger, J. (2001, June 24). Mountain without mercy. Time. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,136713,00.html

Krakauer, J. (2016, May 24). When you reach the summit of Everest, you are only halfway there. Medium. https://medium.com/galleys/into-thin-air-e5a2756a87c1

Minot, S. (2017, February 7). The Ill-fated 1996 Everest Expedition: 20 years on. SkyAboveUs. https://skyaboveus.com/climbing-hiking/The-Ill-fated-1996-Everest-Expedition-20-years-on

Ridley, J. (2015, September 17). Socialite vilified after Everest catastrophe breaks silence. New York Post. https://nypost.com/2015/09/17/socialite-everest-climber-speaks-out-im-no-villain/

Archives in Plain Words

What do Archivists Do?

An archivist’s job is to make archives accessible for use. Some archivists say they “collect, preserve, and describe” (Thompson, 2019). But collect what, and why? Preserve how? And what even does ‘describe’ mean? The Society of American Archivists says that archivists are “responsible for records of enduring value” (2020) which is about as useful as saying rocket engineers are responsible for making heavy things go up. It’s technically true, but it doesn’t get you very far. Here’s the inside scoop.

You can break down the role of archivists into three big pots: selection, preservation, and description. I’ll explain these more in detail, but none of this will make sense if you don’t know what an archive is. Archives (and it's usually written with the "s") are the collection of things related to the life and work of a person or group, stored for the sake of historical significance and future researchers. “Things” is intentionally vague here, because it can include almost anything - scrapbooks, patents, photographs, animal skins, fossils, emails, videos….Some archives are set up to maintain the records created by their own organization. For example, the university I work at has an internal archive which contains things related to university business, like meeting minutes and memos. Other archives collect things created by external groups based on a specific subject. For example, Vanderbilt University includes in their archives a collection of materials related to the history of playing cards, which includes manuscripts and books about the history as well as historic playing card sets (Vanderbilt University, n.d.). 

 

"Everybody's gotta have a little place for their stuff. That's all life is about. Trying to find a place for your stuff." — George Carlin, who has his own archives now at the National Comedy Center (Blair, 2016)

My own archival collection would include things like my paper journals, my gardening sketches and notes, letters and short stories I’ve written, and knitting patterns I’ve designed. These would be a “record of my life’s work” - the things, unique and banal, that make up my life. But the biggest part of Sagan’s Collection would be online - emails, schoolwork, photos and videos, Facebook and Instagram posts, this blog. None of these things have ever been a “physical” item, but would be included in my archives all the same. Once you start to inventory things, the list of what could go in an archives gets huge!

This is why the first job of an archivist is to select what comes into the archives. This is one of those statements that sounds much easier than it actually is. The archivist has to evaluate if a collection is “worthy” of being archived for the use of future generations, but also if the collection should be archived at their particular institution. Let’s go back to Sagan’s Collection. It’s pretty unlikely that the Archives at University of Hawai’i would want it. They have a limited amount of space, and even though I want my descendents to have a nice tropical destination to view my stuff, I’ve never even been to Hawai’i and I don’t have a connection with the university. However, imagine there’s an archives being set up that focuses on collections related to Portlanders who survived the 2020 Pandemic. My archives would fit much better with their mission, and the Portland archivists would be more likely to select it than the Hawai’ian archivists.

These are some pretty basic examples of selection. Keep in mind that life is rarely simple. Space is always limited, even for digital collections. Processing time is also limited - I’ll tell you more in a moment about preparing archival collections, but keep in mind here that even the task of moving materials into the archives takes time (and money, since your archivists most likely don’t work for free). Archivists have to balance the amount of work it would take to get the collection ready with how important that collection will be to history and to researchers in the future. Is the Sagan Collection the only representation we have of pandemic life, or is it one of hundreds? Does it contain materials that might be useful, historically speaking? Does the collection physically fit in the archives? Context matters, and deeply.

Lucky me! The archivist at the Portland COVID Archives has selected Sagan’s Collection for inclusion. The next step will be to ensure the collection can be safely kept in the archives. Preservation starts before the items even arrive at the archives. Items need to be carefully moved to keep them from being damaged, but also to keep them in their original configuration. It’s like an archaeological dig - it makes more sense if you don’t jumble the bones together. In the archives world, collections are kept in the same organizational pattern as the person who made it decided. That means if I organized my gardening notes by season, the archivist isn’t going to re-organize them by plant species.

Pears get treated one way to preserve them, paper preservation needs something entirely different. Preservation can get particularly complex in the archives world. Books alone can be made from multiple materials - paper, leather, thread and glue - and each material might need a special preservation technique. Digital items need still other preservation methods, including preserving the technology needed to actually use them. And you know how you’d never mistake canned pears for fresh? Preservation techniques can certainly extend the life of something, but sometimes only by irrevocably changing it. Archivists need to understand the ramifications of what they are doing in order to maintain the integrity of the collection.

In addition to preservation work for the items in the collection, archives rooms are often built specifically to better preserve the items within. This can include temperature and climate-controlled housing, storage in acid-free boxes, and even special fire extinguishers that don’t use water to put out fire. Preservation is also why archives are typically much less publicly accessible than libraries and museums - access needs to be carefully controlled so things aren’t stolen, lost, or damaged by spilled canned pears.

 

“What’s in the box?”

But access is still vitally important for archives. That’s why the third important job of an archivist is description. It’s not enough to box up materials and shove them in a warehouse. Archivists need to communicate what their archives include. Labeling boxes, creating detailed guides to the collection, inventorying, and teaching researchers how to find things are all part of the job of making archives more accessible.

Description is especially important because many collections aren’t, and may never be, digitized. Unlike an e-book which can at least be searched for keywords, in many archives collections the only thing a researcher will have to go on is the commentary the archivist has written. There are tools an archivist can use to make this process easier such as standardized ways of writing collection guides or technical languages to highlight the most useful components of the collection. These descriptions need to be complete enough to be useful to the researcher, without being so exhaustive the archivist can never finish the job.

Because in the end, finishing the job isn’t as important as having archives that can be used. Archives are a vitally important piece of our culture. Why are archives important? Why is memory important? Humans are social, and we thrive on stories. Every archive has a piece of human knowledge in it. Piece by piece, archives put together the story of humanity, not just for us, but for the future. We can’t save everything, but what we can save has the potential to edify and inspire us.

References

Blair, E. (2016). “George Carlin's 'Stuff' gets a new home at National Comedy Center.” https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/11/477520580/george-carlins-stuff-gets-a-new-home-at-national-comedy-center

Vanderbilt University. (n.d.). “Collection Development Policy.” https://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/specialcollections/policies/collectiondevelopment.php 

Image Credits:

George Carlin by Bonnie. “George Carlin at one of his last performances in 2008”, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_carlin_headshot_2008.jpg

"What's in the Box" gif by Tenor.com

Scope and Content Note & Container List

Scope and Content Note

This collection, dated 1944-1946, includes Eric T. (“Ted”) Carlson’s personal correspondence, transcripts, army orders, identification paperwork, news clippings and passes. The majority of correspondence is between Carlson and his parents. Additional documents relate to Carlson’s scientific work in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Monsanto Chemical Company, and his education at the Iowa State College.

Series 1: Correspondence. This series ranges from 1944-1946 and includes correspondence between Carlson and his parents and friends. It is organized alphabetically by correspondent name, then by date. A prominent subseries includes correspondence with Carlson’s parents.

Series 2: Academic paperwork. This series includes Carlson’s course schedules, transcripts, letters of commendations, and official inquiries with Wesleyan University, the Iowa State College, and Cornell University.

Series 3: U.S. Army documentation. This series includes official U.S. Army documentation including draft paperwork, transfer and training orders, identification cards, and correspondence regarding Carlson’s promotions and discharge. Much of the documentation includes paperwork related to Carlson’s scientific work in the Army Corps of Engineers and the Monsanto Chemical Company.

Container List

• The first folder would contain Ted Carlson’s personal correspondence. This would be organized into subfolders:
• Subfolder 1: correspondence between Ted Carlson and his parents. This folder would be organized chronologically based on the date written on the letter.
• Subfolder 2: all other personal correspondence. It would be organized alphabetically by the last name of Carlson’s correspondent, then chronologically.
• The second folder includes academic paperwork. This includes official correspondence to and from the colleges, transcripts and course schedules. This folder is arranged chronologically.
• The third folder includes official U.S. Army documentation, including draft documents, transfer orders, training paperwork and discharge orders. This would be organized chronologically from the date the paperwork was issued.

Abstract & Biographical Note

This is the abstract and biographical note for the Module #2 Assignment for INFO-256 with Erin Lawrimore.

Abstract:

This collection includes Eric T. (“Ted”) Carlson’s correspondence and private papers from 1944-1946. The personal letters discuss Carlson’s opinions on the World War 2 efforts and U.S. Army reserves corps life, as well as references to popular films and pastimes. Other materials include documentation of his army assignments and Carlson’s school records.

Biographical Note:

Eric T. (“Ted”) Carlson was an army scientist who participated in the World War 2 chemical research. After graduating from Wesleyan University with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, Ted Carlson was drafted as a private into the United States Army in August 1944 at Fort Snelling, MN. He was then transferred to the Enlisted Reserve Corps where he worked at the Chrysler Corporation in Detroit, MI as a Laboratory Engineer. In October 1945 Carlson was called to active duty at Fort Sheriden, Illinois, received basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and finally was assigned to the Monsanto Chemical Company in Dayton, Ohio.

Carlson was discharged from the army on April 7, 1946, continuing his work at Monsanto as a Research Assistant Chemist. During this time he was the co-editor of the Dayton Scientist, a publication where he promoted the demilitarization of nuclear power. Carlson was accepted to Cornell University in 1946 under the G.I. Bill and moved to New York at the end of that year.

Book Review #6: The Information by James Gleick

 Note: This was originally written as a class project. Normally I take these down because yuck, who wants their homework online. But I thought this wasn't terrible so I'm saving it for posterity here.

James Gleick’s The Information is a broad scale “history of everything” book, similar to J. M. Hecht’s Doubt: a history or Y. N. Harari’s Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. Gleick traces the history of our understanding of information, from pre-history to modern times. In my first drafts of this review, I found myself wanting to share too much about everything I learned. Hopefully I’ve whittled it down enough to give you a taste of what he explores, to whet your appetite to read the book yourself. Although I enjoyed the book, I have some critiques, as well as some thoughts about our relationship with information in general.

Alphabet Soup (pre-history to the 1800s)

The Information is subtitled “a history, a theory, a flood”, and the book is structured in roughly these three parts. He begins with the development of the alphabet, differences between orality and written language, and the conceptual framework that arises from the act of transmitting spoken words to written. This early sea change in thought means “information has been detached from any person, detached from the speaker’s experience. Now it lives in the words, little life support modules” (p.39). Eventually people began to standardize these ‘life support modules,’ and thus the dictionary was born – although, he notes, “the word dictionary was not in it” (p. 57).

Enter Babbage (1800s – early 1900s)

Charles Babbage’s calculating machine is the first major turning point in the book. Inventions appear at a rapid pace, and what historically was only categorized (via dictionaries, etc) is beginning to be theorized about. Information became more tangible, with specific effects on the world.

Part of Babbage’s Difference Engine, a forerunner to the computer. Public domain.

“As [Babbage] looked to the future, he saw a special role for one truth above all: ‘the maxim, that knowledge is power.’ He understood that literally. Knowledge ‘is itself the generator of physical force,’ he declared. Science gave the world steam, and soon, he suspected, would turn to the less tangible power of electricity: ‘Already it has nearly chained the ethereal fluid.’” (p. 124).

Just as an understanding of forces and motion led to the theory of physics, the development of alphabets, to writing, to various methods of communication, coalesced to a theory of information. The increasing speed of information transmission had widespread ramifications, including the standardization of time, and new attempts to manage the amount of messages being sent. Codes come to the forefront, not just in the actual transmission via Morse code as a way to secure the public messages. A new concept, encoding, became familiar. As Gleick writes,

“The Morse scheme took the alphabet as a starting point and leveraged it, by substitution, replacing signs with new signs. It was a meta-alphabet, an alphabet once removed. This process—the transferring of meaning from one symbolic level to another—already had a place in mathematics. Now it became a familiar part of the human toolkit” (p. 152).

Characteristica universalis (1900s and onwards)

Claude Shannon and information theory are nearly synonymous. His theory, based on his work with cryptography and symbolic logic, consisted of four key points: “uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy” (p. 219). In essence, Shannon asked, what does information help you know, and what are the barriers to this? His further work on communication, defined as “reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point” (p. 221), was broad, covering all of human and non-human behaviors. Computers could be interpreted using communication theory.

A schematic of Claude Shannon’s theory of information. Public domain.

In the aftermath of World War II, numerous fields outside computer science and cryptanalysis were reinterpreted in the light of information theory. This happened in the aftermath of innovations from during and directly after World War II: Computers entered the public domain, Von Neumann created game theory, Alan Turing created his Turing test. Psychology entered a new era as behavioral psychology fell out of fashion – “[The behaviorists’] refusal to consider mental states became a cage, and psychologists still wanted to understand what the mind was. Information theory gave them a way in” (p. 258). Here and in other fields, information theory became ubiquitous.

Rosalind Franklin at her microscope. Photo by Jenifer Glynn. CCA-SA.

Perhaps no scientific enterprise was harder hit than biology. With the discovery of the structure of DNA (shamefully, Gleick fails to mention Rosalind Franklin’s crucial contribution), the very conception of how life functions could be interpreted according to the theory of information – transferring information via genes, mutations, and how entropy affects DNA. Gleick writes, “Where then, is any particular gene—say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? . . . The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits” (p. 309).

“Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us—not anymore” (p. 323).

The final iteration, before Gleick considers some of today’s ramifications of information theory, is quantum information theory, where quantum mechanics is revealed to have information theory at its base. “Why does nature appear quantized?” Gleick asks. “Because information is quantized. The bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle” (p. 357). Quantum effects could be used for information processing – “Quantum error correction, quantum teleportation, and quantum computers followed shortly behind” (p. 363).

Aftermath (today)

Information, quantum or not, is everywhere, and it is overwhelming. “The persistence of information, the difficulty of forgetting, so characteristic of our time, accretes confusion” (p. 373). This is not a new problem – H.G. Wells in his 1937 essay “World Brain” attempts to solve the influx of information through the creation of a world encyclopedia. Wells wrote,

“Few people as yet, outside the world of expert librarians and museum curators and so forth, know how manageable well-ordered facts can be made, however multitudinous, and how swiftly and completely even the rarest visions and the most recondite matters can be recalled, once they have been put in place in a well-ordered scheme of reference and reproduction” (para. 5).

Few people today, other than information professionals, understand this. The Information is a critical text to learn more about how we came to think the way we do about information. By understanding our past, we can better grasp our next steps into the future. Today’s flood of information is more approachable because we now know it is grounded in tenets put forward by early theorizers. We are not alone in being overwhelmed by the quantity of data – Gleick even references a viral message that was distributed in 1933 — and we have new strategies we can use.

Some methods of data management would have been unbelievable even a century ago. Crowdsourcing has given us Wikipedia, which compiles information, evolving and self-correcting until its value surpasses standard encyclopedias. Compare this to an early form of crowdsourcing, writing the Oxford English Dictionary, where individuals mailed data about definitions to the editor until the floorboards of the office needed to be replaced (for more information, see Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman). All this for a dictionary–imagine the attempt to manually create an encyclopedia the size of Wikipedia via the mail.

Despite the breadth of Gleick’s book, there are glaring oversights. I briefly mentioned Rosalind Franklin’s absence above; this is only one example of his tendency to ignore the role of women. Ada Lovelace is the only woman to have her theories somewhat developed; Margaret Mead is mentioned in passing, and the rest of the women are mentioned only as the wives of the key players.

His book is entirely western-centric. The only exception to this rule is in his first chapter, which uses the African drums to introduce ways of thinking of information transmission. In some ways this is due to how westernized information theory is – expanding the scope to include eastern schools of thought on skepticism and the nature of information might have been too broad for one book. I recommend Doubt: a history as a counterpoint.

The Information is written as a progression of ideas leading to a higher endpoint, and I think there was an opportunity here to critically think about why some schools of thought might not agree with the concepts of information theory, and how different perspectives might interact with it. Pankl and Coleman’s (2010) definition of positivism is a good starting point for critiquing this style of history-writing: “Positivism is the belief and practice that valid knowledge is objective, empirical, and static” (p. 4). Although their article is written in the context of librarians’ interactions with students in the research cycle, it gave me a lot of food for thought regarding how Gleick reported his own research. While seeming exhaustive, Gleick’s worldview left out a great deal of the story.

In a similar fashion, Gleick fails to examine the contextuality of information. As a brief example, Buckland (1991) provides examples of things that used to be considered information that are no longer (“ducking” women to determine if they are a witch) and things that would not be considered information in the Claude Shannon sense (antelopes). In essence, Buckland argues, “We conclude that we are unable to say confidently of anything that it could not be information” (“When is Information Not Information?”). Paradoxically, Gleick’s book expanded my mind about how to treat information (by discussing Shannon’s information theory and its ramifications) while also remaining too narrow in focus.

The Information is an excellent starting point, but it is only a starting point. I hope that whether the person reading this is an information professional or a layperson, they use this as a framework to reconsider how they interact with the information in their world. Perhaps there will soon be a follow-up to address the gaps in this book and expand the concept beyond a male, western-centric scope.

 References

Buckland, M. (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society of Information Science 42(5). Retrieved from http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/thing.html

Gleick, J. (2011). The information: A history, a theory, a flood. New York: Pantheon Books.

Pankl, E., & Coleman, J. (2010). ‘There’s nothing on my topic!’ Using the theories of Oscar Wilde and Henry Giroux to develop critical pedagogy for library instruction. In M. Accardi, E. Drabinski, & A. Kumbier (Eds.), Critical library instruction: theories and methods (pp.

Wells, H. G. (1937). The idea of a permanent world encyclopedia. ischool Berkeley. Retrieved from https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html