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On miscegenation

October 23, 2007 at 11:17 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Too many things going on.

Not here, not just me. Yes, I’m busy, but that’s not what this is about. Not directly, not immediately.

Too many things. Going on.

You should know what I mean.

Libraries don’t want Google and Microsoft to make them digitized books for free, if they can’t release them without restraint to the public. Good for them. German publishers opine that “world copyright” should only expire when the last government in the world releases its grip on a work. Bad for you. Authority of Wikipedia is crap. Good for everybody. Authority of printed books is an illusion. This is news? It’s getting so you can’t make a living as a content creator anymore. My ass. It’s getting so you can’t make a living as a content creator anymore without giving it away for free. How odd.

A swirl. A roil. And a real—but unremarked—opportunity for the world to break something all of us think is important: our own authority.

See, you clearly haven’t seen the future I have. You’re not making it seem that way, at least. It terrifies me on a deep level, and yet I will sit by the window watching for lights on the horizon, trying to discern thunder from mortar fire. Despite the fact that I expect to be caught up and consumed, destroyed, and remade in it.

What?

No, not physically. Nononono. Not “us” in the sense of the meat bags we walk around in. “Us” in the sense of this character writing this scary unintelligible rant right here. The author.

The auctorial “us”. The authoritative “us”. The definitive edition of “us”. We’re dead in the water.

You should know this already, at least: I spend hours every week preserving old books. I buy them, I scan them, I OCR them, I proofread them, and thousands of other people around the world help do that as well, and in the end we produce authoritative electronic versions that get distributed around the world.

It’s fun. You learn a lot. But a number—the majority, I’d guess—of our volunteer colleagues believe that what we’re doing is making correct and accurate editions of books. We’re preserving them. Saving them, in some way.

Some others of us just like to read random crap. Count me in that minority.

It makes you smart, this arbitrary magpie journey through bits and snips of disconnected learning. By my accounting, at least, it makes you smart. As in, it is not merely sufficient but necessary to do it.

If you don’t do it, then you are not smart. If you do it—read widely and indiscriminately, and find pleasure in variety and esoterica—you will become smart.

The coming war, the destruction and remaking of the world, is about that.

It’s not about music copying. It’s not about Flickr and consumer-generated content. It’s not about p2p networking and piracy and earning a living as a parasite on the creative class.

It’s about what’s true. Because if it’s in a book, it’s true.

See. Anybody can scan a book. Google, the Open Content Alliance, you. Go buy a Plustek OpticBook 3600 and some old books—or new books, if you’re feeling lucky—and scan the hell out of ‘em and post them to the Internet. As an individual, it should take you a day to produce a reasonable machine-readable version of any volume you want. Tops.

Go do it now.

First you will do it. And Google will do it. Microsoft will do it. Five Universities will also do it. If the book is at all of interest, there will have been multiple printings. Translations, editions, revisions, competing versions in print. Those will multiply, and propagate, and mutate, and they will all of them more or less be accessible. Soon.

What then is real? Which is right?

Further: Take each book, and make from it a sheaf of pages. Each page an image from a paper book, and metadata version of the words and images thereon. You’re looking online at page 23 of an old classic novel, or perhaps an original Mark Twain short story from The Galaxy Magazine, and you click the “next” button in your book-reader, and something happens on the Internet and you are shown page 24.

Which? The next one made by the same person on the same day, from the same edition of the same printed original? What if the microfilm from the 1970s was missing its page 24, but a friendly colleague in Minnesota has managed to scan one and post it on their booklog, and the magic of the world to come has linked the first broken record to the second, mending it?

That sounds safe, right? You just fixed the book. Collaboratively. That’s awesome and all web2.0y.

But here is the sound the drums of war will make in the distance: which page 25 is the right one? Whose page 25, reached from your 24? If there are six different 25s? If there are some that have been proofread and others made by machine OCR with no punctuation? If there are versions improved, with modernized spellings or improved standards of propriety or amusing in-jokes or footnotes or scholarly marginalia, or taken from manuscripts and drafts, or taken from mashups and foreign translations?

How can you know what is right, if any path to the truth is allowed?

Who will get credit? What will you cite? And who will you trust?

And so the book will die. Thousands more will take each dead book’s place… but they will not count.

And the author, as it is understood today—in the law, in the culture, in the academy—will die. And something else will take its place as well… but they will not count.

The science I was given as a child entailed pond water and hunting fossils and looking closely at the diversity of the world. The humanities I was taught as a child entailed reading footnotes and going to the biggest library and an immoderate lack of focus, of wanting to know more about the thing unremarked than the subject at hand. The art I was admiring as a child entailed illustrators, typographers, advertising, all their beauty made mundane by its prevalence and ubiquity, not the classics and the canon: the music of experiment, the museum in a magazine, the craftsman and the hobbyist’s greatest work. And my people were engineers above all else, and the engineer’s eye I inherited was the sense of potential everywhere, in every scrap of metal or snippet of code, to be remade someday into something wonderful, or necessary, or interesting. The same eye I use for science, and art, and scholarship.

I was raised to see straw spun into gold.

Not everybody was. And so there will be war, because what we are doing now in this age of digization is shredding the austere and canonical nuggets of traditional gold back into flakes and thence to straw. And raising up the dross and chaff and lost and lesser works that the world had thought it threw aside, and making them as easily reached as any classic tome.

The virtues of great works aren’t easily differentiated from those of unknown works, when you get a close look at them all. Nor are the virtues of scholars, and laymen; craftsmen and hacks. Nor even plagiarists, and compilers.

The contingent history of what is worthwhile and correct is being undone. Every day. And all that potential is being redistributed, willy-nilly, faster all the time.

This war will be sad, and terrible, and many whose lives revolve around the establishment and propagation of auctoritas will be hurt in this conflict. And it may in time spill over into the physical world as well: there will be imprisonment, and firings, and industries made and broken.

But the victims don’t deserve this inevitable pain, nor will they be prepared. For the most part, they have not been trained for it.

Ken Muldrew said,

October 24, 2007 @ 12:08 pm

“The virtues of great works aren’t easily differentiated from those of unknown works, when you get a close look at them all. Nor are the virtues of … craftsmen and hacks.”

‘Craftsmen and dedicated amateurs’, sure, but ‘craftsmen and hacks’? Not a chance.

“But the victims don’t deserve this inevitable pain, nor will they be prepared. For the most part, they have not been trained for it.”

How else to find out if one’s training was any good?

Tozier said,

October 24, 2007 @ 2:53 pm

No, I think I mean “craftsmen and hacks”.

Recall that I’m taking the long, historical perspective here, essentially.

Pick a time. Pick a handful of the classics of that time, its Important Works as determined by All the Important Judges thereof. Pick a handful of the bestsellers of the time, its chaff, dismissed or ignored by same Judges.

I’ll assume they’re different.

Now show a few short runs of individual pages to lots of diverse people, and have them pick which is “classic” and which “hack”. Repeat until you believe me.

Ken Muldrew said,

October 24, 2007 @ 4:13 pm

Consider furniture. Anything made by a hack fell to pieces ages ago and was consigned to the fire. Stuff made by craftsmen (or dedicated amateurs who care more about the joinery than the esthetic) can last for centuries. You can’t run the blind taste test because crap just doesn’t last. Judgment doesn’t enter into it.

“Good, fast, cheap”. A craftsman picks any two; a hack only the last two.

Tozier said,

October 24, 2007 @ 9:10 pm

Ah, but see: I’m talking about digitized media here. Pictures. Books. Music. Ideas. Scholarship. Models. Writing. Blogging. Software. Authority.

But let’s explore. The best-made furniture you see on Antiques Roadshow is found where? In people’s houses, handed down through generations? No, at least half the folks find them in the trash, at garage sales, in junk shops. “How much did you pay?”, “$10″ is not an exchange that connotes long-standing honored status of the piece.

And besides, you’re introducing a survivorship bias there with your lifetime standard.

Cheap crap that doesn’t last is—and has always been—the most popular stuff. At least for 200 years. If you think otherwise, you haven’t been to many estate auctions. Today’s particleboard Sauderware is no different from our best-selling books, and I’m willing to make the case that it never has been. People from Classical times have been decrying the lost golden age of craft, whether it’s a play or a piece of stoneware.

They’ve never made it like they used to, at least as far as authorities have said.

But unlike the pots, the furniture, and even the plays, we are reviving the otherwise short-lived books and music of the past. Preserving it on equal footing with its more refined, and admired, contemporary classic work.

I’ve scanned and OCRed and proofread novels and short stories written by Herman Melville’s colleagues and friends. You’ve never read them, and they were never considered classics. Nor was his big rambling book, for nearly a century. But they are on the face of it indistinguishable: the metaphor, the voice, the sense of humor, the themes, the language, the symbolism.

Are they crap? They’re works that never made it, and they are now lost in time and unremarked. They’re not part of the canon, and never have been. So by modern, and perhaps even scholarly, standards: yes. They lost the race.

I’ll wager some, if not much, was written with a thought of craft, but a draught of rushing to make ends meet.

But now they’re back. Zombie-style. Go tell me which is worth remembering.

Tozier said,

October 24, 2007 @ 9:14 pm

Case in point:

This novel is said to be by the author of Jane Eyre, and was eagerly caught at by a famished public, on the strength of the report. It afforded, however, but little nutriment, and has universally disappointed expectation. There is an old saying that those who eat toasted cheese at night will dream of Lucifer. The author of Wurthering Heights has evidently eat [sic] toasted cheese. How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors, such as we might suppose a person, inspired by a mixture of brandy and gunpowder, might write for the edification of fifth-rate blackguards. Were Mr. Quilp alive we should be inclined to believe that the work had been dictated by him to Lawyer Brass, and published by the interesting sister of that legal gentleman.

From “Review of New Books” in Graham’s Magazine, Philadelphia, July 1848, Vol 33, Number 1, pg. 60

Ken Muldrew said,

October 25, 2007 @ 3:37 pm

I agree with everything you wrote except the way you define craftsmanship and crap. I think you are saying that everything that makes it into the canon is retroactively defined as having been created by true craftsman, whereas everything that doesn’t is retroactively defined as crap. I don’t agree with that strawman (and I think your argument is sufficiently close that I cannot agree with it either, at least not yet). Craftsmanship is always based on a mastery (or at least a sufficient apprenticeship) of the methods of work and construction that have proven effective over time. Someone who is completely unschooled might still produce great work, through natural genius, independent experimentation, or some combination of the two, but it is far more likely that they will produce crap. It may be serviceable crap, and if it matches the fashions of the day, perhaps one can make a living at it. The point is that the creator of the work has neglected the improvement by successive approximation that has occurred over many lifetimes, by those who created similar works before. We get better at stuff that we do for many generations because we can learn from the mistakes of the past. These improvements are what craftsmanship is all about.

So the question is, who judges what works go into the canon that an apprentice must study from? Clearly, the canon doesn’t have to be exhaustive, only representative, *if* the goal is simply to get better. So Melville might go in, while his colleague across town, who is just as good, is left out. For the craftsman, who is only using the canon as a springboard for his own work, the choice of one or the other doesn’t matter; just as long as the canon doesn’t become too bloated to prevent an apprentice from arriving at the leading edge in a reasonable amount of time. But one must recognize that this canon has been created for a specific purpose. The appreciation of past works is not under the same constraints with respect to the canon, as the pedagogical use of those works. Thus it is lazy scholarship that appropriates the craftsman’s canon and insists that it should also serve as the afficianado’s canon.

A large part of scholarship concerns the compression of past works into chunks that are manageable (well, we’ve got pretty good pattern recognition machinery, so I guess one could reasonably expect us to try to make everything into patterns). Otherwise, who would have the time to delve into the arcana of every field over all of history (SIS once published a stat that it would take 1 person 1000 years to read the combined publications of medical science produced in 1 year)? It is difficult to get a statistical esthetic from things like literature, so one way to compress a field is to produce a canon. But one needs to be clear as to whether that canon is being produced to learn technique or to appreciate the fruits of applying technique. For the former, there is a clear path to consensus on what is craftsmanship and what is crap, for the latter, there is far more room for individual preference.

Do you see your effort as a way to improve the canon? I think that’s very likely; apply some collective cognition to the problem of scholarship and the results will improve. Or do you think that there is some way to avoid a canon for works in which an esthetic component is primary?

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