Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.

An historical approach to technology is always enlightening. While media critic superstars like Marshall McLuhan tend toward deterministic conclusions—that is, that technology changes our lives—history tends to indicate the opposite. My favourite such study, Raymond Williams' Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), argues that mass communication must be understood materialistically: "broadcasting," Williams argues, "was developed not only within a capitalist society but specifically by the capitalist manufacturers of the technological apparatus." He notes that the technology for broadcasting existed long before it was supposed to have "changed the world" and in fact, when broadcasting did come into wide usage by society, there wasn't actually anything to show. “It is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the demand," he notes, "it is that the means of communication preceded their content.” So too with the Internet.  The technology existed in the ARPANET project as early as 1969, the "Web" from 1981. But it's difficult to argue that the current cultural form of information technology owes its origin to those dates.

So what Darnton notes in a wonderful mixture of romantic nostalgia for the olfactory and tactile pleasures of the book ("I may expose myself to accusations of romanticizing or of reacting like an old-fashioned, ultra-bookish scholar who wants nothing more than to retreat into a rare book room." Darnton admits. "I plead guilty") and cautious celebration of the technological benefit the Internet affords, is that things are like they always were, only moreso:

the strongest argument for the old-fashioned book is its effectiveness for ordinary readers. Thanks to Google, scholars are able to search, navigate, harvest, mine, deep link, and crawl (the terms vary along with the technology) through millions of Web sites and electronic texts. At the same time, anyone in search of a good read can pick up a printed volume and thumb through it at ease, enjoying the magic of words as ink on paper. No computer screen gives satisfaction like the printed page. But the Internet delivers data that can be transformed into a classical codex. It already has made print-on-demand a thriving industry, and it promises to make books available from computers that will operate like ATM machines: log in, order electronically, and out comes a printed and bound volume. Perhaps someday a text on a hand-held screen will please the eye as thoroughly as a page of a codex produced two thousand years ago.

Since the Internet is an extension, rather than a replacement of the book (and here, Darnton is channelling McLuhan), we abandon the book at our peril. Rather, it is the library that must act as distributor and aggregator of the texts we seek.

Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital re-positories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.

Surely, such a conclusion appeases the romantic and the tech-nut in all of us.

But there are a couple of really heartening perspectives in the interview. Pallares-Burke tailored her questions to her subjects, and edited out the least interesting answers I assume, but there are some running themes that come up in most of the interviews: the importance of women's history, the balance between empirical work and theory, and so on. Sometimes the interviewees have answers, sometimes they gloomily disclaim the possibility of answering them, but Darnton frequently comes over as just having the answers to everything and making them seem obvious.

The first of these is where he is asked why he has such a passion for history, and his answer really is for me "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed":

I find something deeply satisfying about the study of the past, and I don't know quite what it is. I feel it most when I work in the archives. As the tenor of a life begins to emerge from the manuscripts and I see a story unfold from one document to another, I have the sensation of making contact with the human condition as it was experienced by someone in another world, centuries away from mine. It may be an illusion, and I may get it wrong. I may sound like a romantic. But the archives, in all their concreteness, provide a corrective to romantic interpretations. They keep the historian honest. Unlike literary scholars and philosophers, we must marshal evidence in order to sustain our arguments, and we cannot pull it out of our heads. We extract it from boxes in the archives.

And he goes on with a short defence of the existence of actual facts, but already he's got my vote there: that is exactly what I do it for, and if I'd paid attention to this when I first read it you'd all have been saved my waffling for several screens trying to say the same thing only worse. You get a glance of someone else's life for a short space of time: and you know that it was real, that this character you find or envision really did have a life and that you may with some luck and judgement be imagining them correctly, because there was a reality that you might be able to approach. Real people. It is the point.

The latter, and less inspiring perhaps but still very neat, is where Pallares-Burke poses him the query that she has put to several of the other historians interviewed: when you go to the archives, do you go with no idea of what to look for, and just report on what you find, or do you go with a theory and a set of questions? The one risks finding nothing because of lack of focus, the other risks finding what you looked for and no more. And, well, yes, true to an extent but surely there's some better conception because look, we do in fact get some history work done. It takes Darnton to add sense and a third way:

I love to do research because you never know what you'll find when you open an new dossier and start reading... I think that intellectually it's also invigorating, even though in my manner of describing it it may sound as if the historian's task is digging a ditch. The reason for its being invigorating is that you go to the archives with conceptions, patterns and hypotheses, having, so to speak, a picture of what the past was like. And then, you find some strange letter that doesn't correspond to the picture at all. So what is happening is a dialogue between your preconceptions and your general way of envisaging a field, on the one hand, and on the other hand, this raw material that you dig out and that often does not fit into the picture. So, the picture changes and you go back and forth between the specific empirical research and the more general conceptualization.

Again, he is right. Those Casserres parchments I blogged about earlier were my latest case of this: I went expecting to find a vicecomital takeover of a small church and a raft of donations and found instead what seems to be the wholesale adoption of a substantial mother church's archive by making what French diplomatists would call "copies figurés", copies meant to look like originals, and getting people to sign the new copies but putting them all onto as few parchments as possible... And I'm still going back and forth between what monastic archives are supposed to do and what this one seems to have done as a result. He has it right, I tell you.

Darnton seems to interview a lot: I found two more, both focusing on the impact of the Internet and Google (and Google Books, in one case), whilst looking for an image of him just now; so if you would like to know more, and since those subjects are hot concerns of both mine and others, you may find these links interesting.

Es la primera versión oral conocida de Caperucita, (véase otras hermanas orales de Caperucita en este blog) una leyenda cruenta para asustar a niños y… divertir a adultos; sin caperuzas, ni moralejas, ni leñadores salvadores, distinta a la que actualmente contamos a nuestros hijos y de la que se nutrirán otras versiones posteriores… pero eso es ya otra historia…

"Había una vez una niñita a la que su madre le dijo que llevara pan y leche a su abuela. Mientras la niña caminaba por el bosque, un lobo se le acercó y le preguntó adonde se dirigía.

– A la casa de mi abuela, le contestó.

– ¿Qué camino vas a tomar, el camino de las agujas o el de los alfileres?

– El camino de las agujas.

El lobo tomó el camino de los alfileres y llegó primero a la casa. Mató a la abuela, puso su sangre en una botella y partió su carne en rebanadas sobre un platón. Después se vistió con el camisón de la abuela y esperó acostado en la cama.

La niña tocó a la puerta.

– Entra, hijita.

– ¿Cómo estás, abuelita? Te traje pan y leche.

–Come tú también, hijita. Hay carne y vino en la alacena.

La pequeña niña comió así lo que se le ofrecía; mientras lo hacía, un gatito dijo:

– ¡Cochina! ¡Has comido la carne y has bebido la sangre de tu abuela!

Después el lobo le dijo:

– Desvístete y métete en la cama conmigo.

– ¿Dónde pongo mi delantal?

– Tíralo al fuego; nunca más lo necesitarás.

Cada vez que se quitaba una prenda (el corpiño, la falda, las enaguas y las medias), la niña hacía la misma pregunta; y cada vez el lobo le contestaba:

– Tírala al fuego; nunca más la necesitarás.

Cuando la niña se metió en la cama, preguntó:

– Abuela, ¿por qué estás tan peluda?

– Para calentarme mejor, hijita.

– Abuela, ¿por qué tienes esos hombros tan grandes?

– Para poder cargar mejor la leña, hijita.

– Abuela, ¿por qué tienes esas uñas tan grandes?

– Para rascarme mejor, hijita.

– Abuela, ¿por qué tienes esos dientes tan grandes?

– Para comerte mejor, hijita. Y el lobo se la comió."

© Robert Darnton. “La gran matanza de gatos y otros episodios de la historia de la cultura francesa”. Ed. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, 1987.

Artículos relacionados:

Caperucita Roja. Versión del Lobo.
El cuento popular francés de Caperucita.
El “chaperoncito rojo” de Charles Perrault.
Caperucita Roja. Versión del Lobo enamorado.
Caperucita roja según los Hermanos Grimm.
Caperucita Roja políticamente correcta.
El Cuento de la Abuela y otras hermanas orales de Caperucita.
Caperucita Roja de Gabriela Mistral
En Hechizos: Tags Caperucita Roja