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.
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
“Archivists . . . need to be intersectional and inclusive.”
I had the good fortune to recently interview Courtney Gillie, Library Information Specialist at University of Missouri (MU or "Mizzou") in Columbia, Missouri. It’s always exciting to meet colleagues across the country, especially when I get to learn more about a side of library science that I don’t work on in my day-to-day. Courtney’s gregarious interview was truly fun and I hope our professional paths cross in the future.
Courtney came to the archival profession in a roundabout way. Their academic career began in engineering, but they ultimately got their bachelor’s degree in English literature at Columbia College. Through their schooling, they began to learn about the ethics and mission of libraries, as well as the specific needs of archives, and realized how closely this aligned with their own values and passion. They got their Master’s in Library and Information Science from University of Missouri, and took enough classes to qualify to test to be Certified Archivist. Today they are working in the Special Collections & Rare Books section of the University of Missouri Library Archives.
MU's Library facade
I saw a lot of parallels between the University of Missouri Library and my own institution (Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon). Both are land grant universities serving 20 to 30,000 undergraduates and several thousand graduate and post-graduate students. Both are university towns, which get busy during term but much quieter during breaks (“You can actually find parking!”). We both work within departments in the library, which report to department heads who then report to the associate university librarian (and from there to the university librarian, provost, and above). And we both have a teaching hospital on campus, although MU’s treats humans and OSU’s is a veterinary hospital.
MU’s land grant status has a much greater impact on Courtney’s day-to-day work compared to mine, as the archives’ mission is to act as an institutional repository for university business, such as papers authored by MU affiliates. The archive also collects materials related to state history. A unique collection Courtney has worked on is a collection of documents related to campus political movements. They recently hosted an exhibit on the demands made by students during the 1960s, which unfortunately look incredibly similar to the racial needs today.
MU's West Entrance
The University Archives has 11 employees, of whom half are full time, in addition to a bevy of student workers. It is divided into Digital Services, Archives, and Courtney's immediate department, Special Collections. Courtney’s work includes processing archival materials, cataloging, and assisting with their social media campaigns in collaboration with their colleagues. Sometimes processing the materials can be very physical - taking steps to preserve the materials, avoiding acidic paper and removing rusty staples and even straight pins. They particularly enjoy this part of the job and how the hands-on work blends with the ethos of the archival profession.
Courtney shared some of their projects with me separately from our interview. One of these, a scrapbook of Christian College and Kemper Military School memorabilia, included items such as photographs of the school’s production of Rebecca, corsages from the spring formal, and the “5 cent a vote” fundraising competition for ugliest man. All of these items needed to be preserved in specific ways, cataloged to be findable, photographed and digitized with appropriate accessibility information. They worked with OCLC headings and completed the metadata information within ArchivesSpace in order to create finding aids to be hosted on the archives’ website (example here).
Typically, their patrons are student researchers, mostly at the graduate or postgraduate level. Occasionally they are able to support community members, who are often students at other universities needing their expanded archives. In general these patrons know the item they need, in which case Courtney assists them with finding and using the material. They also teach classes to undergraduate students, particularly introducing history, social studies, or Black studies majors to the materials in their collection.
The pandemic has greatly affected their work, especially the need for a lockdown, although they are quick to assure me they think the pandemic response is vital. However, “archives are a very physical product,” they told me. “You don’t get that personal connection as well...when you’re at a distance from the material.” They have come up with creative ways to combat this issue, such as video conferencing with students while they turn the pages of the document. Otherwise you’ll miss the details that make working with original documents so valuable - like a note saying “This meeting is so boring!” in the margins of someone’s meeting notes, or finding a surprising connection between seemingly unrelated topics. They miss the spontaneity and potential of this part of the research process.
Speakers Circle Entrance
“We have a duty to make sure white supremacy isn’t enshrined in the archives”
Another challenge they face is the stagnation of the profession. It’s a constant push to educate people about the needs for access and accessibility of archives. “We have a duty to make sure white supremacy isn’t enshrined in the archives,” she tells me, as well as to ensure anyone, no matter their physical ability, can access the materials. They read a lot of ‘Library Twitter’, as well as zines, articles, and conference presentations on the topic, in order to learn more. Their own niche - and here their face lit up they answered - was to push to digital archives to improve access and accessibility.
What’s the future of archives? The future of archives is in many ways, not in archives. “We need to be intersectional and inclusive,” she says. Archivists need to go beyond simple descriptions of what materials consist of and include the context of those materials as well. It’s not enough to describe when a picture was taken, one must also ask what is the context? What was the racial dynamic at play here? That intersectionality can only enhance the daily work of assisting students and professors do research, providing images for publications, and consulting about copyright. Otherwise, “archivists can get tunnel vision,” Courtney says.
Courtney’s passion for the intersection between racial justice, accessibility, and the archival profession was clear from our interview. From engineering school to the archives, their pathway may not have been as direct as many librarians. However, they seem to have found their niche in the library world.
Image credits: MU Library's facade, credit to Chris Yunker, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons | Other images courtesy Special Collections Staff, Ellis Library, "Speakers Circle Entrance"
Rosalind Franklin at her microscope. Photo by Jenifer Glynn. CCA-SA.
