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Books & Culture, July/August 2007

RUMORS OF GLORY
Overloaded
The
"information flood" has a longer history than we
suppose.
By Alan Jacobs | posted 08/13/07

James O'Donnell, in his thoughtful book
Avatars of the Word (1998)—there's a supplementary website
here—argues that until fairly recently the role of the
university professor was to be "the supreme local authority"
on his or her subject. But then university libraries started
getting larger, and the most learned professors started
writing more books, books with which those libraries could be
stocked. (Whether the increasing numbers of books or the
libraries' cravings for them came first, I cannot say.) In
England especially the late 19th century saw the creation of
vast reference projects—the two most famous of them being the
Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of National
Biography—which would do much to make great erudition
available throughout the English-speaking world.

Later came additional technologies that were
especially important for newer academic libraries, many of
which were in North America: microfilm and microfiche allowed
such schools to provide their patrons with old newspapers,
magazines, and books that they never could have found paper
copies of. More recently came scanning and digitizing: the
magnificent high-resolution images of old and rare books from
Octavo, for instance; the vast accumulation of plain-text
files of public-domain texts from Project Gutenberg;
specialized collections of books in various formats, like the
Christian Classics Ethereal Library; and so on. Add to this
the increasingly wide online availability of the best
scholarly articles—though at a price—from Project Muse and
JSTOR, and it becomes increasingly difficult to think of the
professor, supreme local authority though he or she may be, as
the best possible authority.

In this context, O'Donnell thinks, who needs
professors to provide information? Rather, "the real roles of
the professor in an information-rich world will be … to
advise, guide, and encourage students wading through the deep
waters of the information flood." And O'Donnell is moved to
think in this way largely because, as a scholar of the late
classical world, he has worked primarily on thinkers whose
problem was a scarcity of information, not an overabundance.
Much of O'Donnell's work has been on Augustine, a man who, as
O'Donnell's rival biographer Peter Brown has noted, was
"steeped too long in too few books." And his first book was
about Cassiodorus—you can get the full text of the book on
O'Donnell's homepage—a man who devoted the latter part of his
life to collecting what we would think of as a very small
monastic library and teaching monks how to use it.

So for O'Donnell the contrast between the
current scene and the world of his own scholarly expertise
could scarcely be greater. But there are other scholars who
remind us that we are not the first to wrestle with the
problem of "information overload"—and there may be lessons for
us in how some of our predecessors dealt with this issue.
Perhaps the most interesting of those scholars is Ann Blair of
Harvard, who is working on what promises to be a fascinating
book about information overload in the 16th century—the early
days of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation.
(You can find a copy of a preliminary article on the subject
here: scroll about halfway down or search for the name
"Blair.")

Blair shows that many scholars, starting in
the 16th century and continuing for another hundred and fifty
years or so, were—how shall I put it?—freaked out by the
sudden onslaught of texts. In the 17th century one French
scholar cried out, "We have reason to fear that the multitude
of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will
make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as
that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman
Empire." That is, "unless we try to prevent this danger by
separating those books which we must throw out or leave in
oblivion from those which one should save and within the
latter between what is useful and what is not."

Blair shows that such alarm was quite common,
and indeed can be found in various periods going back to the
high Middle Ages. For instance, in the 13th century we hear
from Vincent of Beauvais: "Since the multitude of books, the
shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory do not allow
all things which are written to be equally retained in the
mind, I decided to reduce in one volume in a compendium and in
summary order some flowers selected according to my talents
from all the authors I was able to read." A kind of Culture's
Greatest Hits. But after the invention of the printing press
books had multiplied so greatly that a project like Vincent's
would have been self-evidently absurd.

So what did those poor deluged people do?
Well, they adopted several strategies. First, they practiced
various ways of marking important passages in books: with
special symbols, with slips of paper, and so on. Then they
came up with various ways of organizing books: there were now
so many that figuring out how to arrange them became quite a
puzzle, so the learned began debates on this subject that
would culminate in the creation of the great Dewey Decimal
Classification.

But there was also the most fundamental
question of all: how to read. One of the most widely quoted
sentences of Sir Francis Bacon—it comes from his essay "Of
Studies"—concerns the reading of books: "Some books are to be
tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and
digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts;
others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read
wholly, and with diligence and attention." This is usually
taken as a wise or sententious general comment about the
worthiness of various texts, but Ann Blair shows that Bacon
was making a very practical recommendation to people who were
overwhelmed by the availability of books and couldn't imagine
how they were going to read them all. Bacon tells such worried
folks that they can't read them all, and so should develop
strategies of discernment that enable them to make wise
decisions about how to invest their time.

Blair also points out that certain
enterprising scholars recognized that this information
overload created a market for reference works and books that
claimed to summarize important texts—We read the books so you
don't have to!—or promised to teach techniques for the rapid
assimilation of knowledge. But serious scholars like Meric
Casaubon—son of the famous Isaac Casaubon—denounced the search
for "a shorter way" to learning, insisting that "the best
method to learning … is indefatigable (soe farr as the bodie
will beare) industrie, and assiduitie, in reading good
authors, such as have had the approbation of all learned
ages." No shortcuts!

The correspondences to the present day are
pretty obvious—Casaubon might be a professor today warning
students against Wikipedia—but perhaps the application of
lessons is not so easy. The scholars of the 16th and
seventeenth centuries were resourceful indeed as they
struggled to cope with the influx of books, pamphlets,
broadsides, and so on; but their strategies are tailored to
the particular technology of the book, and may not be directly
applicable to our current problem of managing not just a
torrent of books, but a far greater torrent of digital
texts.

We are probably at the beginning of our
attempts to manage our own information overload. For instance,
though many people today—doctors and other scientists in
particular—do much of their reading in PDF files, PDF readers
that allow annotation are quite new and highly imperfect. And
the habit of tagging digital data, while growing, is also
still new. Tags are incredibly useful: services like the free
del.icio.us, for instance, allow you to keep your browser
bookmarks online, tag them, share them with other people, and
see bookmarks that others have tagged similarly. Another
web-based service, Stikkit—also free, at least at the
moment—provides a free-form repository for almost any kind of
data and encourages you tag that data for retrieval later.

Those of us who use Macs—I'm sure there are
Windows equivalents—now can choose from among several
applications that collect data in a range of formats and
feature tagging or something similar: Steven Johnson has
written a vigorous commendation of DevonThink, a fine
application, though I prefer the more streamlined Yojimbo.
Frankly, I don't know what I would do without Yojimbo: I keep
my whole brain in it, and relate everything to everything else
with tags. And modern operating systems are increasingly
building in tagging functions at the system-wide level.

Tagging is coming to replace the "folder"
metaphor that has dominated personal computing for twenty
years because, while a file can only be in one folder, the
same file can be given as many tags as its owner wants, and so
can be seen in relation to several different sets of other
files. It's a great advance in organizing information. But
it's just one step towards coping with a flow of data that can
only get bigger. James O'Donnell is absolutely correct when he
says that the role of the teacher will be, increasingly, to
manage this flow and teach others to manage it—that is, to
teach the kind of discernment that Bacon counsels, so that we
and our students will better understand what is but to be
tasted, and what by contrast should be read wholly, with
diligence and attention. But surely this is not just a task
for educators and their pupils. In Bacon's time, and in Meric
Casaubon's, literacy was still rare, and those who had to cope
with books were few. Now information overload is everyone's
problem.

Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College
in Illinois; his Bad to the Bone: an Exemplary History of
Original Sin (HarperOne) will appear in Spring 2008. His
Tumblelog is here.

Copyright © 2007 Books & Culture. Click
for reprint information.

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