It’s one of Murphy’s laws (and one of Murphy’s laws of war) — if you do something to achieve a particular result, you’ll get other results, some of which won’t be good. The Clarence Darrow character says it in “Inherit the Wind” (about Darwinism, but let’s not go there): Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “Alright, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance.” “Madam, you may vote, but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder-puff or your petticoat.” “Mr., you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”
Googling the Victorians makes that concept relevant to the modern age. Who hasn’t tried researching something in expensive databases, given up, thrown the search into Google in desperation and gotten a right answer? And/or a whole LOT of wrong ones? Not to mention that two people doing supposedly the same search can reach different results — have you ever asked someone else to do a search for something you couldn’t find and it came right up for them (so frustrating!). But if Google is amazing, practical(thank you Google spell check and “did you mean”), and often useful, it seems clear that we risk becoming overdependent. Well, if those expense databases don’t do any better than Google for strange things, why should I use them, or pay for them, for other things? But that narrows our world to “what Google knows” — and that has to be a bad thing. One source for ANY work is a bad thing, no how many sources are subsumed into that one source. The world narrows and our ideas narrow. I particularly liked the warning that the “time is near upon us when whatever is not online will simple cease to exist as far as anyone but specialists is concerned, a condition I have come to think of as the offline penumbra.” (13) I think that’s a really great view of things — both the warning and the idea that “offline” becomes an amorphous thing that’s hard to define and harder to care about it (unless you’re the one being screened out or need information out there that’s only on paper).
I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of the Peter Norvig lecture other than baffled. I had a lot of math in college — even probability — but that was a long time ago. Not sure that he couldn’t have done a little better job explaining what he was demonstrating, but in any event, what I DID take away from the lecture is just because you have a zillion pieces of data doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an idea of what they mean. I have no doubt that what Google is doing is revolutionary and critically important — but I’d rather here someone CRITIQUE Google’s method than master what Google does. Are we sure that “how Google works” is the best way? I’m trusting Google — and the open market, heaven bless it — to do right by all of its information and therefore by me. If there’s an error in the code or the process or whatever we call it, how long will it take to uncover, especially if it’s the more obscure areas that some of us live in? I think I heard him explain how they translate — a method done with much ambiguity by people and professionals with lots of experience — do I want to rely on computers to do something that requires discretion? Computers are good tools, but they don’t live in the gray. Can you imagine if a algorithm mis-translated an important word in Hebrew or Arabic or something else where subtleties matter a great deal and the differences in wording are really important, even for just a little while?
I thought the ACLS report was pretty thorough, but I did think it was amusing that “copyright” issues were given the same level of importance as the “conservative culture of scholarship.” (20-21) In some ways, the academic culture will change with time as the next generation — more comfortable with technology and digital research — becomes ascendant in “the academy.” Copyright, however, is marching consistently the other way — as we discussed, the period where materials will be unavailable for relatively-recent materials produced is growing longer and longer over time. So while the “young guns” will be more ready to integrate technology and history, the “old hands” in Congress will still be working to keep them from “everything.” Maybe it works the same in both cases — will there be “young guns” in Congress (eventually) who know enough about both sides of the debate to strike a better balance? Or is the turnover in the academy just a lot faster — it’ll take multiple “generations” of historians suffering before the next “generation” of congressmen find a better way to protect Mickey Mouse without depriving us of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Maybe if we just get the congressmen to read the report . . . nah.)
I also liked the idea in the ACLS report that one of the primary goals of the cyber-infrastructure would be to facilitate collaboration. I think that’s one of the great advantages of the web — it brings people who could never afford to come visit each other together and problems can be broken down by lots of people working on them simultaneously — in fact, around the clock. We’ve seen examples of that in class and more in the newspapers. I also like the idea of experimentation — let people try things and like any concepts in a free market, the things that work will fall out and replace the things that don’t.
Overall, though, I found these readings a little less coherent than last week but all of them were interesting, even if Norvig was, er, a little dry. =)
