Abundance (Prelude to Distant Reading)

Matt Price

Recap

  • "Public sphere" at a turning point
  • Transformation by automated agents and encoded text

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.

Plan for the day

  • Problems of Abundance
  • Distant Reading: a method for textual overload?
  • Discussion: how do you respond to information abundance?
  • post-class period ONLY for students who failed the tests, or did not receive a mark

History in the age of scarcity

The members of prehistoric societies did not think they lived in prehistoric times. They merely lacked a good preservation medium. (Auerbach, quoted in Rosenzweig)

  • lots was going on, lots of continuity, lots we will never know b/c oral preservation is terrible at outliving a cultural tradition

Scarcity

  • Historically, very little recorded
  • Even less preserved
  • historian's task was to locate rare sources in faraway places

Implications

  • History skewed to those whose records appeared worth saving
  • record always fragmentary
    • Historian free to fill in gaps
  • BUT: often possible to read large percentage of relevant sources

Age of Abundance

Tentative efforts are afoot to preserve our digital cultural heritage. If they succeed, historians will face a second, profound challenge–what would it be like to write history when faced by an essentially complete historical record? (Rosenzweig)

  • much more recorded than in the past
  • vastly more preserved, at least for now
  • increasing percentage of historical works as well

Mechanical Speech

  • auto-preservation
  • but by and for whom?
  • Google, FB, and Twitter are preserving lots of data. As are Tesla and Samsung. But who will get to see it? How does a historian compete? (cf. COVID tracking data)

Can we tell stories? Can we do research?

  • no longer possible to read everything!
    • who will read it for us? How will we be experts? Can we automate our reading?
  • Narrative form ill-suited to massive quantities of data
    • can we develop new types of narratives?
  • Big questions may be answerable!
    • What used to be pure speculation, can perhaps now be made more concrete and compelling
      • How does role of religion in public discourse change over time?
      • how do railroads impact social and economic development?
      • others?

What Big Data Means for Old Documents

digitization does provide scale (or quantity) but does so at the price of rich, largely manual encoding. Visualization, customization, personalization, and similar analytical services increasingly familiar to us depend upon born-digital objects in which a great deal of structural and semantic knowledge has been encoded. The information captured on page images is, by contrast, implicit and often not directly accessible to the machines that will be always their first, often their only, and arguably their most important readers. (CILR)

Problems of Preservation

  • physical media
  • software turnover & bitrot
  • capturing dynamic/interactive media

Abundance: Summary

  • "Abundance" offers many challenges
    • preservation
    • interpretation
    • access
  • Does history itself need to be reformed?
    • What relation to sources?
    • What kinds of arguments?
    • What narrative forms?

Introduction to The Reading Problem: No Clothes, No Body

It's not that the emperor has no clothes(that would be fine); it's that no one knows what the emperor looks like. (Ramsey 2010)

"It's one thing to worry that your canon isn't sufficiently inclusive, or broad, or representative. It's another thing when your canon has no better chance of being these thngs than a random selection. When we get up into the 14-million book range, books that are known by more than 2 living people are already "popular"