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Ruminations: Of Encyclopedias and the End of a World
From: The New York Public Library
| By:
Richard W. Bulliet |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
How will the digital age change the encyclopedia? Will bookstore browsing and finite data collections be considered obsolete in a world with smart Web browsers and data havens? Will the encyclopedia go the way of cuneiform writing? Richard Bulliet (right), a Columbia University professor of history, a scholar of human-animal relations, and an editor and consultant for several encyclopedias, ruminates on the collection and presentation of knowledge--past, present and future.
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 n 1951, A.S. Leese published a small, pathetic memoir entitled Out of Step: Events in the Life of an Anti-Jewish Camel Doctor. Leese had gained recognition (within an admittedly quite small circle) for his earlier work A Treatise on the One Humped Camel in Health and Disease, which was based on his experience as a veterinarian in the British army in India. Returning from India and observing the broader expanse of human affairs, he decided that an international Jewish conspiracy was at the core of all world problems and that English anti-Semites deserved a more outspoken leader than Oswald Mosely. Accordingly, he founded the Imperial Fascist League and went on to spend the war years in a British internment camp. |
 From my particular standpoint as a one-time specialist (and, for want of competition, still an authority) in the history of camel-saddle design, I have often reflected upon a lesson of Leese's career that I saw borne out, in lesser degree, in the lives of certain other camel specialists I learned about in my research: Do not put too much trust in camel scholars when they stray into areas of important human concern. The reader is thus forewarned that my ruminations on the future of encyclopedias in an era of worldwide computer networking are but opinions, and as opinions they are affected, perhaps tainted (though not, I hope, rendered dangerously idiotic), by my past experience as camel specialist, historian, novelist and encyclopedist. |
The recrudescence of an adolescent yen to know everything, the more obscure the better, tempted me into becoming an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Asian History, chief history consultant for the fifth edition of The Columbia Encyclopedia and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East. The experience has taught me a lot about what encyclopedias are and what they are not, and it has prompted my curiosity as to whether they can or should survive into the age of universal computer networking. My reflections on this subject fall under three headings: continuity, serendipity and authority. |
Continuity
Twenty-five hundred years ago in Mesopotamia, unremembered scribes pondered among themselves how anyone could prefer making funny-shaped alphabetic scratches on rough parchment or papyrus to delicately poking the tip of a triangular stylus into a well-prepared tablet of clay. A few generations later, the last person who knew the art of cuneiform writing passed away, and the surviving tablets gathered dust, accumulating to many feet in depth, until they were unearthed and laboriously deciphered in recent times. Again, some fifteenth-century European scribes may have recognized that the chunk of the printing press was destined to drown out the scritch-scritch of their quills, but they could not have imagined that printed books would someday so definitively determine what was worth knowing that whole libraries of manuscripts would lie for centuries unread, save by antiquarians looking for something to edit and print. |
The twentieth century has witnessed equivalent disjunctions. When the Turkish Republic banned the Arabic alphabet and ordained that henceforward Turkish would be written in Latin characters, it cut its citizens off from those parts of their literary heritage that were not selected for transliteration and republication. One unexpected ramification of this change was the appearance in the late 1930s of an entirely unprecedented array of Turkish personal names. Prior to the alphabet change, Turks bore names that usually derived from Arabic and Persian. Since the Arabic script has no capital letters, unusual proper nouns are difficult to recognize. Many of today's Turkish names therefore look nonsensical in Arabic script but seem distinctive and euphonious in Latin. |
Changes in the code by which language is symbolically and visually rendered cause profound cultural disjunctions and produce unanticipated consequences. Exploring the full implications of this dictum for the transition from typeface to digital coding I will leave to the cyberpunk visionaries. My concern is solely with encyclopedias. |
Much, if not most, of what was coded in one way before a symbolic disjunction does not cross the divide. It took more than two millennia for Gilgamesh to make it from cuneiform to alphabetic writing. Manuscript collections around the world still house tens of thousands of volumes that scholars have not found interesting enough (or easy enough) to edit. Modern Turks have little access to the religious writings of their ancestors, because their secular republic has not provided a favorable climate for transliterating and publishing them. By contrast, Arabs and Persians retain much more access to their religious past because of their retention of the Arabic script. |
Encyclopedia editors seek to preserve lore that is at risk of being forgotten. They visualize users who somehow run across names like Jaroslav Vrchlicky, or Angkor Thom, or Lautaro and want to know more. Since print space is always limited, they make choices, prolonging the mortal memory of some while consigning others to oblivion. Edition follows edition; the winnowing proceeds. Old entries tremble like marcescent leaves before the autumnal breeze, waiting to see which will fall. Candidates for inclusion--will David Letterman make it? will Pat Buchanan?--wait like dormant buds. In general, it's a harmless process. There are always the older editions to go to for things that were dropped. |
In a time of symbolic disjunction, however, editorial choice becomes weightier. Will print editions of encyclopedias continue through the twenty-first century? Or will the most recent editions, already digitized in the editorial process, simply be made available online? An online computer can be updated every month, every week. And there is no reason to delete anything, because memory space is limitless: ever more information at your fingertips at negligible increment in cost. |
With an online format, however, can a publisher afford undertaking a thorough and retrospective new edition? In print, you can't get the new stuff in the new edition without paying for the old stuff reprinted from the old edition. Old news underwrites new news. Updates in electronic format are inherently cheaper, which implies that the financial incentive to reappraise the content of the old news may disappear. |
Under these circumstances, the decisions made by the current generation of encyclopedia editors as to what to include, or excise, from the preferred core of human knowledge may never be revisited, except to add bits on. But at the same time, their determinations regarding the content of encyclopedias may become more and more important as bridges across the disjunction represented by the transition from printing press to microchip. For the fifth edition of The Columbia Encyclopedia I recommended deletion of all biographical entries of women who are cited solely for their beauty. If the electronic age had come upon us before the reawakening of feminism, legendary beauty might have made it across the great divide, never to be deleted. Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? |
Serendipity
I turn now to serendipity, the handmaiden of historiography. Computer sophisticates assure me that programs capable of browsing the Net for succulent items of interest to me personally are around the corner. Daunted by the prospect of a TV Guide 500 pages (let's say five megabytes) long? Chilled by the thought of negotiating the infinite-lane traffic on the information superhighway? Get a browsing program capable of learning. Tell it you're interested in camels. When it discovers that from the first 2,000 camel references it gleans from networked databases you chose to peruse only those on saddle design and put a black mark against those dealing with trypanosomiasis, it fine-tunes future selections and assiduously protects you from descriptions of nasty fly-borne infections. It also discerns from your behavior which electronic mail you regard as junk and insulates you against alumni solicitations. |
But will you be able to program your little browser to feed you occasional unexpected nuggets of information, like the congressional voting record of "Pig Iron" Kelly or James Churchward's decipherment of the Greek alphabet as a secret history of the lost continent of Mu? Random recoveries from the great data dump of the future are not the same as serendipity. Serendipity is neither random nor the product of rational reflection. It arises from the interaction between the two. When you browse a shelf of books, you take one down because it is small and curious-looking, another because you think you recognize the author's name and yet another because it might have an entry on camels in its index. There's always a glimmer of a reason. |
An archaeologist friend told me that at every point in his career he felt he was six inches away from the find that would make him world famous. But he never found it. He observed, however, that a few archaeologists somehow managed to find it over and over again. Having a mind that makes creative connections between disparate bits of data is a prerequisite for serendipitous enlightenment, but another prerequisite is having the data arrayed so that you can pick and choose as the inkling moves you. A filled bookcase, a cabinet of curios, even an 11-pound, one-volume encyclopedia--can surfing channels or browsing the Net really substitute? Do you really believe you can find the unfound when the data before you have already been scanned, keyworded and Netcast? |
Authority
Now, what of authority? The monkish game players in Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi are the boring forefathers of the laid-back hackers who inhabit the Sprawl in William Gibson's cyberpunk future. Both excel in navigating oceans of information by means of symbolic analogs: glass beads for Hesse, three-dimensional virtual-reality icons for Gibson. Hesse's data, the compendia of his Age of the Digest (read Encyclopedia), can't protect themselves from manipulation. Gibson's can. The cranially plugged-in hacker who tries to penetrate the ice surrounding the most valuable data caches risks being turned into a vegetable by electronic feedback. Bruce Sterling in Islands in the Net conjures the image of data so valuable that whole countries subsist as data havens, repositories of illegally obtained data. |
Such visions of the future see data as value. Yet today's reality is often data as trivia. Specialized encyclopedias proliferate. Faced with a library market that increasingly regards real scholarship as something to be delivered overnight on interlibrary loan, publishers cling to the belief that reference books will survive library budget cuts. Compilations predicated on every conceivable affinity base are keeping publishers in business, at least for the nonce. In the long run, is it not inevitable that these encyclopedic gleanings from the library of the past, already in electronic database form, will all be uploaded onto one of the trucks-only lanes of the information superhighway? |
I contemplate watching a movie on the tube. Won't I be able to check out electronically how many nude scenes it has, what body parts are exposed and how many stars the exposure rates? Won't I be able to call up the biography and credits of each of the actors? Of the director? Of the stunt performers? Of the dolly grip? Of the caterer? I read on the hourly news pricis that the Sultan of Brunei has bought General Motors. Won't I be able to call up his biography and photograph? A sample of gamelan music from his homeland? The name of his country's registered lobbyists? The lobbyists' previous tenure of public office? Other holders of that office back to the establishment of the republic? Distinguishing value from trivia will be a colossal challenge in the infinite data dump of the future--less a question of zeroing in on the shimmering, menacing ice protecting megacorporate secrets (or corporate megasecrets) than of tediously sifting near-barren sands for the glister of gold. |
But this is not so different from what happens in the academic world today. Hundreds of thousands of biographical notices of Muslim scholars and local dignitaries are preserved in hundreds of edited and unedited manuscripts compiled over the past dozen centuries of Islamic history. As one of a handful of specialists in this type of historical source (as well as, of course, in camel saddles), I plow through big chunks of material trying to extract information or construct generalizations worth conveying to a broader audience. If I did this work on computer instead of on pre-electronic Royal-McBee keysort cards, I might post my raw data on an Internet forum, there to be accessed by a handful of Arabic-reading medievalists, or by anyone else in a fit of whimsy or masochism. Without my, or someone else's, interpretation, however, its presence on the Net would have the same value as a Styrofoam cup in a sanitary landfill. |
General encyclopedias, and to a diminishing degree specialized encyclopedias, are distillations of authority. More than 120 carefully chosen scholars selected topics and reviewed articles for the fifth edition of The Columbia Encyclopedia. Their charge was to select articles from the previous edition for replacement, updating or deletion, and to identify new articles to be written. People consulting the volume can find this out by reading the front matter, but they probably won't bother. They will more likely accept on faith that what they find in it is authoritative: if it's there, it's important; if 150 words are devoted to it, they include the most important things sayable in 150 words. |
Will this presumption of authority survive the transition to electronic form? For a while, yes. The mantle of authority will not slip easily from the shoulders of a word as venerable as "encyclopedia." But if the reconfiguration of the information market precludes future print editions, and online versions are simply updated rather than periodically purged and reconceived, authority will surely diminish. Users will initially search larger data sources rather than numerous data sources. Why check to see if Madonna is in The Columbia Encyclopedia (yes, there she is, between Madoera and Madonna lily), or call up a specialized encyclopedia of rock stars, if there's a mega-encyclopedia online that contains 50,000,000 entries instead of 50,000? This user preference for more will eventually erode the notion of authority. |
As more data get amalgamated into vaster online databases, of course, they can be arranged in hierarchies according to importance. But underwriting the imposition of a hierarchical, as opposed to an inclusional, authority structure may not be feasible financially in an electronic culture. Who will undertake to assemble 120 scholars and pay them to review an entire encyclopedia if the expense cannot be defrayed by sales of a new edition that entirely supersedes the old? Per-use fees from an enormous number of users might conceivably generate sufficient revenue, but with constant updating of the existing online version, how would the new edition conceive and manifest its claims to superiority and thus attract users from its still-extant previous edition? |
Predictions and predilections
Despite my apprehensions, I am inclined to think, as a practical matter, that books and encyclopedias will survive the next century and that people will look back on ruminations like mine and wonder how the future could have been misread so completely, just as we now look back on would-be prophets who foresaw mass use of private helicopters and wonder how they could have failed to consider the insurmountable problems of air traffic control and landing space. I hope I'm wrong, however. As much as I like to browse through shelves of books and serendipitously uncover rarities and oddities, and as much as I dread the thought of transiting an infinite data dump with no more authoritative guide than an online help program, the cataclysmic cultural discontinuity that would surely accompany a universal shift from print shop to cyberspace exerts a sort of invigorating attraction. |
To make reference to one of today's most creative cultural arenas--regrettably known only to frequenters of comic-book stores--Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's graphic novella Signal to Noise hinges on a conception of death as a transition from ordered information--signal--to randomness--noise. It tells and illustrates the story of a movie director with terminal cancer rehearsing in his head the final screenplay he will never film. A group of villagers at the turn of the first Christian millennium trek to a snowy mountaintop to await the coming of the Lord. He doesn't come. They leave. But their anticipation of the end of time and assumption into eternal life, like the director's anticipation of death and the merging of his signal with the noise of the universe, charges their lives with meaning, irrespective of ultimate consequences. In William Gibson's Virtual Light, a mid-twenty-first-century character takes a half dozen odds and ends of twentieth-century detritus to a flea market to raise a little cash. One is a book, the Columbia Literary History of the United States. It's the only one that doesn't sell. Exciting, or what? |
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