(no subject)

[rymenhild]

We who are medievalists learn that knowledge is impermanent. Manuscripts get lost or misplaced or torn apart to make binding for later manuscripts. Parchment smears and ink fades. Politically dangerous documents get hidden or destroyed. Books are flammable. Libraries can burn. MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv (the Beowulf manuscript) was damaged in the 1731 Cotton library fire, and we are lucky that it survives at all. The Rupertsberg manuscript of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias, priceless because of its spectacular, unconventional illuminations and its possible connection to Hildegard herself, survived for about 750 years before it vanished in 1945 Dresden. (Fortunately, two copies, one a black-and-white photographic version and one a hand-drawn color copy, were made in the twentieth century.)

There is no way even to guess how much literary evidence has disappeared over the centuries. As scholars, we become accustomed to the fact that some of the documents we would most have liked to study are gone. We get used to the holes in our knowledge. We train ourselves to ask questions that dodge the unpleasant gaps in the historical record. We try not to care.

A summer's worth of photographs of mine only exist now because I gave a copy away to a friend. I deleted the pictures from my camera after I copied them on to my hard drive. My hard drive is no more. Digitized data is more fragile than paper or parchment; it can vanish in months or years rather than centuries. Librarians today are still learning how to preserve computerized documents. Huge quantities of knowledge will cease to exist in the world before the librarians know how to make their information last.

I expect this essay will disappear. In a day you will only be able to find it by setting your friendspage to ?skip=40. In a month it will be available in the memories of my journal and nowhere else. In a year, or five, or ten, LiveJournal will be gone altogether. These things happen.

A professor said today that she had been studying in a research library in New Orleans a few months ago. It's quite possible that my professor's notes are all that remain of the documents she was reading. She doesn't know yet.

Knowledge is impermanent. I know that very well.

It still hurts me to be reminded.

Comments

[saskia139.livejournal.com]

Greetings. You appeared today on my friends-of-friends view, and I have friended you on the strength of this poignant entry and because of the several important interests we share, including the Matter of Britain, Julian of Norwich, and things medieval in general. You look like my kinda writer.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Nice to meet you! You look interesting too, and I've friended you back. :)

[gramarye1971]

I've been reading Nicholas Basbanes A Splendour of Letters, and one of the sections of the book that affected me most was when he talked about the efforts that had been made to restore the libraries that had been destroyed by the warring factions in Bosnia. Professors and research students all over the world pooled photocopies of book pages, notes made in the library, all sorts of scraps of information so that a record could be made of what was in the libraries before they were razed to the ground...and thereby a list of books to donate or reprint could be found.

But so much of the material and the knowledge and the care that was put into making the books was completely destroyed, and can never be recovered ever. And that leaves a hollow ache in my chest.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that beautiful story. I'll have to find the book and read more about the Bosnian libraries.

I share the hollow ache with you, of course.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

And yet, we still have Sappho's poems, and even discovered new fragments recently.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

The fact that some of them survive, and one has been recently recovered, is amazing.

That said, we only have a tiny fraction of Sappho's body of work. It would be beyond fantastic to be able to read the full corpus.

[drmor.livejournal.com]

A professor said today that she had been studying in a research library in New Orleans a few months ago. It's quite possible that my professor's notes are all that remain of the documents she was reading. She doesn't know yet.

I think that's the best thing I've read about the flood.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

For some reason, the loss of documents struck me more than all the losses of life and property.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

Maybe because knowledge is, aside from DNA and crumbly stone columns, the main thing we can to contribute to the people who will live so far in the future that our personal lives, no matter how eventful, will be totally irrelevant (unless someone composes a nice myth about us).

Re: Reply to your comment...

[drmor.livejournal.com]

Me too. My guess is we're so used to tragedies (not
even "now", but throughout the whole course of human history) that it
takes something really unusual to pierce dense layers of our
psychological protection. The irrecoverable loss of knowledge is an
obvious candidate.

[elfsdh.livejournal.com]

The survivability of today's books and digital documents is a really a big concern, even without wars and natural disasters. Most of our books are published on cheap, acidic paper that decomposes relatively quickly. All that's likely to be found of them in as little as a century could be unreadable dust. Digital documents are even worse, because they have no physical form, and there isn't even one way to interpret their contents. Just getting at the data presumes that:
- the object and the data on it are still physically intact
- there's working hardware that can read it. (Try finding the hardware to read something as recent as a 5 1/4" floppy disk)
- knowledge of how the data is stored
- Specific software that can read the formatted document. This is especially true of older binary formats (like WordPerfect, Word, WordStar, etc.)

So, for digital data, someone has to decide that they want to keep it, and go through all the trouble of converting it to newer formats, or else it's gone forever, even if a technological society still exists.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's frightening to think that it's harder to access an eighteen-year-old document on a 5 1/4" drive than a thousand-year-old document on parchment.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

This is so weird to read, both because it's so painfully true, and because I spent part of yesterday gaping at astonishingly pristine-looking books that I would have marked as having no chance of coming through the centuries intact, much less ending up in my school's collection (along with, of all things, a White House fireplace that the Truman White House had to get rid of to make way for a new door). I think what gets me most is the sheer randomness of it all -- against the odds, some things DO survive, and future generations spend late hours building disciplines around them and treating them like relics, but it's anyone's guess what those survivors will be, and how representative or worthy they will be.

The other thing that struck me was the professor's statement that these days books like those we were looking at (mostly acquired in the sixties) are almost impossible to find on the market, because the Japanese have started buying up any old books they can find, regardless of subject. He said this annoyed him immensely -- after all, what do Japanese collectors need antique European legal texts for, compared to Western legal scholars? -- until he went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and spent a while in their massive collections of Japanese prints and samurai swords. There is something simultaneously fractious and inspiring about the fact that everyone claims a right to so much art and scholarship merely as citizens of the world, and this may be knowledge's best chance in the long run. Louisiana may flood and Dresden may be firebombed, but some of whatever they have will be represented somewhere else in the world, thanks to some major or minor institution whose curator decided they needed a piece of that aspect of the world's heritage. This may not save the originals, but it may save much of the knowledge.

Interestingly, one of the oldest books I was looking at yesterday was a precise copy of an older Roman law book book in the Laurentian Library in Florence, one of two hundred made under the Medicis, in case anything happened to the original. Only a few of the copies are still around, though the knowledge they contain has since permeated much of the world. The original - having survived a series of wars and other turmoil - is still there.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, one of the oldest books I was looking at yesterday was a precise copy of an older Roman law book book in the Laurentian Library in Florence, one of two hundred made under the Medicis, in case anything happened to the original. Only a few of the copies are still around, though the knowledge they contain has since permeated much of the world. The original - having survived a series of wars and other turmoil - is still there.

You're completely right. One never does really know what will survive.

Personally, I'm fascinated by what texts societies believe are necessary enough to make that many backup copies of them. Some of the texts that medievalists in English literature consider most important -- Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight come immediately to mind -- survive in exactly one manuscript. Many of the texts we tend to ignore -- sermons, saints' lives, histories and the like -- exist in many, many copies. From this we learn that our modern priorities in studying literature are completely different from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century priorities.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Though plenty of things proliferate that no one attaches much importance to, as well. Plenty of people care about the Magna Carta, but you'd be way more likely (all paper quality being equal) to end up with a copy of a Harlequin romance. No one thinks that the romance is more important, but it makes better casual reading in the mind of most people.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

You make me feel much better (in a small, selfish little way) about the several binders full of email I have printed and sitting at the bottom of my memorabilia box at home. The rest since then (huge files worth of it) is on my computer or on disk or MIA. Admittedly, this is not terribly significant stuff, but there it is. Perhaps at some point I will print out my LJ stuff. Would be smart, no?

As it is, if any of my email buddies become famous, I could publish a very interesting set of their letters, of sorts...

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Hey, those emails are important. Nineteenth-century historians publish letter editions all the time. Late twentieth-century historians won't be able to publish letter editions very often, simply because letters sent via email are much less likely to survive. Keep printing your email!

[emidala.livejournal.com]

you speak of the doom of humanity¹ with great wisdom. I am adding this entry to my memories in hope of finding more wisdom in it if I one day wake up and feel that I have forgotten what being in the humanities is all about. thank you.


_______________
¹ that is what my philosophy teacher in high school used to say: "the doom of humanity is our inclination towards destruction, and our diligent, almost manic, devotion to forgetfulness."

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm glad this entry is meaningful to you.

[obopolsk.livejournal.com]

I know you're having computer problems, so I'm not sure if you'll see this message, but...

any chance you could send me the name and/or e-mail address of the prof you have who's been doing research in New Orleans? I'm working on a Crimson story about the effects of the hurricane on higher ed, and in addition to everything about where the students and profs will go now, i thought effects on academic research might make an interesting section of the article...

thanks!

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

You're in luck; I'm in the computer lab at this moment. I just emailed you.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Also, in the middle of this huge academics_anon post on academic responses to Katrina is a link to a letter from the University of Washington that might be relevant:

We are also working through University Libraries with colleagues at Tulane and its neighboring institutions on plans to preserve their library holdings. Without electricity and adequate climate control, library holdings may be at risk, and our librarians and others around the country are working to address this issue.

[cupenny.livejournal.com]

*reading back through entries as well*

Given how fragile our paper is- at least that we use for the most part, and also electronics-

There must be some way of making hardcopies of things (books, plays, documents, so on) that would survive for longer. Somehow. ....

which is what I'm going to be thinking about for the rest of the night, as it is Too Late o'clock again.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

The paper we use regularly today, and have used for the last... hundred or hundred fifty years, I think? ... is high in acid and likely to decompose severely over time. I have a friend, a librarian, who thinks that part of the solution is putting acid-free, archival-quality paper in regular use. I agree with her to a certain extent. I've looked at six-hundred-year-old paper books which are still legible. They would have been little more than mushy wood pulp if they had been made from high-acid paper.

That said, any kind of paper is vulnerable to decomposition, bookworms, mildew, grease, fingerprints, water and fire, and any kind of book could just be lost. The only thing that seems to help is making more copies. A certain number of paper copies of anything will naturally get lost or destroyed. The higher the number of extant copies of a text, the higher the chances that some variant or variants of that text will survive.

Yes, we do have to make hardcopies, though. Paper is a much, much more reliable storage system than the electronic systems we have now.

(Why can I write this much, this clearly, on a vaguely intellectual topic, when I can barely assemble ten sentences for the research paper due Thursday?)