Blair 2010

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Ann M. Blair. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale UP, 2010. Print.

Introduction

  • 1 We describe ourselves as living in an information age as if this were something completely new. In fact, many of our current ways of thinking about and handling information descend from patterns of thought and practices that extend back for centuries.
  • focus archive: exemplary general reference books in Latin that were in print 1500-1700
  • The term 'information' has a long history, attested in English from the C14 in the sense of "instruction" and from the C15 in the current sense of "knowledge concerning some particular fact."
  • 2 I use the term "information" in a nontechnical way, as distinct from data (which requires further processing before it can be meaningful) and from knowledge (which implies an individual knower).
  • 3 The perception and complaints about "information overload" are not unique to our period. Ancient, medieval, and EM authors and authors working in non-Western contexts articulated similar concerns, notably about the overabundance of books and the frailty of human resources for mastering them (such as memory and time).
  • Early compilations involved various combinations of four crucial operations: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing, which I think of as the four S's of text management.
    • also roughly analogous to Michael Buckland's operations of an organization/selection system
  • 5...many of the features of the printed reference book, such as alphabetical ordering and indexing and consultation-friendly layouts were adapted from medieval manuscript practices. What was distinctinve to the Renaissance [6] was the large scale of accumulation of textual excerpts both in personal collections of manuscript notes and in printed compilations.
  • 6 [talking about the "newly invigorated info-lust" of Renaissance humanist scholars] ...Printing and the availability of paper alone do not explain why the learned were willing to invest so much effort and money in amassing large collections of textual information in their manuscript notes and in printed reference books.

1 Information Management in a Comparative Perspective

  • 11 The accumulation of new species, new texts, and new books in the Ren was not a necessary consequence of new travel and new technology but was motivated by a set of cultural attitudes, some of them new and some of them well-represented in earlier centuries, that can be summed up as "info-lust" or information obsession.
  • 13 Printing shaped both the nature of the information explosion, by making more books on more topics available to more readers, and the methods for coping with it, including a wide range of printed reference tools.
    • but this like Eisenstein obscures the role of capitalism, as Anderson 1983 points out about the latter, and which St Clair 2004 in some sense rectifies
    • see also Chartier 1994 for "libraries without walls"
  • 14ff info management in antiquity ~starting with the Pinakes, effectively a scroll library catalogue of Greek literature
  • 20 the techniques of text management that ancient authors [like Pliny and Eusebius] developed most effectively and bequeathed to the Latin Middle Ages directly were those of summarizing and compiling.
  • 21 Humanists could thus look to antiquity to justify their approach to the explosion of knowledge, even if in practice they relied heavily on techniques of info management that were first developed in the C13. But at the same time as humanists recovered a new abundance of ancient literature in the Ren, they also drew new conclusions [22] about the fragility of the transmission of learning, which so often had resulted in corruptions and permanent losses. As a result, I argue, EM scholars were especially eager to safeguard information: by stockpiling it, by sharing it with others in manuscript and print, and encouraging the foundation of great libraries by wealthy princes and patrons.
    • see Burke 2000
    • also the long history of the cultural attitudes underlying idealist Platonic scholarly editing -- see McGann 1991 -- even as the practices multiplied textual fragmentation
  • 34 [compendia (summaries) and florilegia] The Etymologies [Isidore of Seville, early C7] offered a long-influential model for info mgmt based on summarizing books, notably those difficult of access, and following a topical order that was not always predictable but that could be navigated through a table of contents listing book and chapter headings.
    • see 121ff below
  • 35 On the other hand, florilegia [from about the C13 on in most innovative form] diffused selections from and helped to reinforce a canon of authors who were otherwise well known in the middle ages, starting with the Bible and church fathers and emphasizing ancients like Ovid, Virgil [etc.].... On the other hand, florilegia could include excerpts from authors who were otherwise hardly known in the period.
    • the deep history of the practices Price 2000 tracks into the fictional realm in the C18, and the relationship between excerption/synecdoche and canonicity
  • 38 The method used to refer to the Bible had to be layout-independent, since each manuscript would vary in the amount of text included on each page. The division of the Bible into books had been established by the early church councils, [39] but there was no standard numbering of the chapters in each book among Christians until the Dominican concordance, in using Stephen Langton's numbering of 1203, made it standard. Verse numbering was first introduced in printed editions of the bible in the C16.
  • 44 [C13] Concordances and indexes to authoritative texts are evidence of a new sense of the limitations of the florilegium, which seemed increasingly inadequate to the complexity of [Scholastic] university teaching and preaching.
  • 47 Instead of trying to reduce the complex causal nexus behind the transition from Renaissance to Enlightenment to the impact of a technology or of any particular set of ideas, we can examine how contemporaries responded to the increasingly abundant and varied range of sources of information, both in theory and practice.
  • 49 [incunabula rubrication for indexing] Printing encouraged other ways of enhancing the legibility of the page, through the use of blank space, varied fonts, and typographical symbols or woodblock decorations or illustrations. Reference works in particular were often the site of such innovations, which facilitated consultation [extensive or consultation reading]. By contrast, other long works shunned such devices. For example, Montaigne's Essays (1580) did not even include paragraphs within chapters, some of which spanned up to one hundred pages of continuous prose.
  • 52 Above all, printing changed the economic dynamics of book production.
    • here we get something approaching Anderson 1983's print capitalism
  • 60 A study of Samuel Johnson has identified four different kinds of reading in which Johnson described himself engaging: "hard study" for learned books read with pen in hand, "perusal" for purposeful consultation in search of information, "curious reading" for engrossment in a novel, and "mere reading" for browsing and scanning without the fatigue of close attention.
    • l/u DeMaria, "Johnson's Dictionary," Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson
  • The multitudo librorum was not an inevitable outcome of a new technology - the perception of abundance predated printing in Europe and elsewhere, and in China printing existed for centuries without being considered a cause of abundance. The invention of printing in Europe coincided with a renewed [61] enthusiasm, visible in earlier centuries but revitalized by the humanists, for the accumulation of information.

3 Reference Genres and their Finding Devices

  • 117 Printed compilations were larger than their medieval counterparts and often grew larger still in successive editions, while remaining commercially viable; reference books were steady sellers despite their considerable size and expense and despite being accessible only to the Latin literate.
  • [consultation reading] ...Conrad Gesner explained the reference function of his alphabetically-arranged natural history of animals in 5 volumes (Historia animalum, 1551): the "utility of lexica [like this] comes not from reading it from the beginning to end, which would be more tedious than useful, but from consulting it from time to time[.]" Here the classical Latin term consulere, usually applied to the consultation of people or oracles for advice, was applied to books; aware of introducing a new usage of the term Gesner added "per intervalla" to make clear the intermittent and nonsequential nature of the reading he had in mind.
    • so also a different relation between reading and time
  • Reference Genres
    • Dictionaries - first "self-indexing" book (121)
    • Florilegia or "collections of sentences"
      • A recent study has suggested that up to 1 million collections of sayings and exempla of various kinds were available for purchase during the C16. (124)
    • 126 Miscellanies: "The miscellaneous order has been largely ignored in studies of EM organizational schemes, which have usually portrayed a contest between systematic order and alphabetical order, gradually resolved in the favor of the latter."
      • In the EM period alphabetical order itself was perceived as a kind of [127] miscellaneous order, since the arbitrary order of letters and of the words assigned to concepts and things resulted in items positioned side by side that had no conceptual relevance to one another.
      • florilegia and miscellanies were format independent, where other genres were generally large folios
    • 131 Commonplace Books: While most florilegia can be classed as commonplace books, "commonplaces" were also used to organize material that did not consist of authoritative quotations but, for example, of precepts or examples.
  • Finding devices
    • 133 list of authorities
    • 135 List of headings: "the lists were often called indexes, although they are not indexes by modern standards and I will not call them such[.]"
      • often multimedia: if page references weren't printed, readers could write them in
    • 137 alphabetical index of headings
    • 140 alphabetical indexes of proper names
    • 141 general alphabetical indexes: "Zwinger's Theatrum and Erasmus's Adages each accumulated four separate indexes, which were designed to complement and not repeat one another. As a result, to use indexes thoroughly in EM reference books required repeated consultations - with different keywords, in different indexes, even in indexes to the indexes."
    • 144 the branching diagram
      • 145 "Squiggly brackets" were common in medieval sermon manuals to bring together passages centered on a particular word and became standard for branching diagrams in print, though some incunabula left blank spaces for the bracket to be filled in by hand.
    • 152 Layout or mise-en-page
      • 153 "...C17 editions successfully packed more text on a page while enhancing readability."
  • Books about books
    • 161 library catalogues: Bodleian in 1605 published in print
    • 162 Bibliographies or libraries (Chartier 1994): "in the C17, these terms also designated other genres that gathered bookish information, like periodicals and anthologies."
    • 164 Sales catalogues
    • 166 New genres: book reviews and historia litteraria: "Billed as a solution to the overload of books, the book review of course generated its own overload." (167)
  • Encyclopedia
    • 168 a relatively new term in modern usage, dating from after Chambers's 1278 Cyclopedia and the Encyclopedie
    • 171 Authors of encyclopedia works were torn between addressing theoretical issues about the proper hierarchy of the disciplines and the practical difficulties of making available large quantities of information.
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