Which historical figure would you have lunch with?
I love great discussions. Not discussions about the weather, but rather discussions about the great things in life like, “What motivates you and why?”, “What might have happened if…?”, “How does the study of the past help in planning for the future?”. There are a good number of questions that are great to ask if you really want to break through the usual chit chat and really create a dialogue with someone. Unfortunately, I have seen a decline in these conversations in the last couple of decades. One particularly fun question I have heard a few times is a variation of “If you could have lunch with any historical figure who would it be and why? What questions would you ask this person?”
Is history important? If so, why?
While the lunch question is a great question to start a discussion, I am curious about the purpose behind the question. My guess is that an honest response will give you insight into a person’s deepest held values or curiosities. We ask deep questions because we care to know the answers and in talking to others it helps us build relationships. While this lunch question is largely a way to get to know someone better it can also lead us to understand if and why history is important to others and why it matters. If history is important and we are living in a digital age, what exactly are the implications for the future? One topic that keeps coming to mind is the possibility of a future universal library and how that might affect how we study and curate history.
A universal library?
You might be thinking that the idea of digitizing everything into a universal collection is a crazy idea but we might be closer than you think. If you look at recent history since the dot com boom in the early nineties we have been living in an age preparing us for this very idea. Think about the way you consume music, media, even the way we turn in homework assignments. The world wide web is a relatively recent invention and still allows for the online cataloging of vast amounts of information available at your fingertips at a moments notice. In an age where information is so readily available why does it seem that it is harder to determine which sources are reliable and which are not? A simple one word answer might be, Google.
Google and solving disagreements
Admit it. You have had a disagreement with a friend that has ended in the sentence, “Let’s find out right now, let me Google it real quick.” The real challenge is choosing a source that you and your friend will both agree is a fair and correct answer to an important disagreement. While that might work with a disagreement over details like plain facts, it won’t solve a disagreement over why you believe one source to be more trustworthy than another. How do we solve this problem? My best answer lays somewhere between educating more citizens to think critically and providing access to more information for citizens to more quickly research and discuss a topic. Going back to the idea of a universal library, wouldn’t it be great if you could look up all of the printed books and search through them for answers? Google has attempted and actually almost succeeded in this endeavor.
Project Ocean? Google Books and the controversy
While the history of Project Ocean and Google Books is less than twenty years old, it is technically at the intersection between current policy debate about copyright and historical innovation leading to new technology and new ways of accessing information. Business Insider wrote a quick blog post about the basic details in 2013 that highlights the controversy and recommends a documentary if you want more information. The Atlantic has a great article likening the Google Books saga to Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria. Fortune magazine recently highlighted Google’s twenty years of growth and provided a helpful timeline for our understanding of their growth. The Guardian offered some significant perspective on the controversy by juxtaposing two of my favorite subjects, philanthropy and piracy. Ultimately there were challenges by major competitors as well as authors who were worried about their copyrights.
Google Books today and working with copyrighted materials
Google Books actually got around to digitizing over 25 million books before they ran into legal challenges and settled into a new plan. The idea of a digital collective providing resources available to all may not have come to completion but it got a heck of a kick start. So what kind of opportunities and tools has this digitization project created? While researchers looking for information and businesses looking to profit off of new business models are both eager to continue building a digital collaborative, the result of this attempt to digitize as many books as possible has led to the creation of the Hathi Trust Digital Library.
Hathi Trust Digital Library and analyzing copyrighted books
Read more about the Hathi Trust Digital Library and how it provides a workaround in the form of a ‘Data Capsule’. Below is a quick explanation of how researchers can use a Data Capsule to conduct analysis of some copyrighted materials.
The HathiTrust Research Center allows Underwood and others to work with copyrighted materials. “I can’t physically get the texts under copyright, or distribute them, but I can work inside a secure Data Capsule and measure the things I need to measure to do research,” he says. “So it’s not like my projects have to come to a screeching halt in 1923,” he says. (That’s the year that marks the Great Divide between materials that have come into the public domain and those still locked out of it.)
A Data Capsule is a secure, virtual computer that allows what’s known as “non-consumptive” research, meaning that a scholar can do computational analysis of texts without downloading or reading them. The process respects copyright while enabling work based on copyrighted materials.
New tools and future conversations with history
While Google Books has an amazing history and has led to some interesting research tools in the present, what comes next? Google just announced a search tool powered by artificial intelligence this year that will attempt to answer any question you have by reading thousands of books as a reference point as a result of Google Books. This new tool is called “Talk to Books” and I’m sure it is something that you will want to try out as it is in it’s early stages. Remember how I asked which historical figure you would have lunch with and what questions you would ask? What if Google tried to simulate that conversation? We aren’t there yet, but like I said before we aren’t too far off either. Get your questions ready. We might soon get a simulated response.
I think this is something really important to consider especially Public Historians thinking about creating digital copies and how accessible they can become. People depend on access to information for everything from a simple debate to google scholar to find secondary sources which I may or may have not done before. *cough cough* I have never thought about how this type of access to information can change history and the truth. It kind of reminds me of the book,” Farienhiet 451″ and the control of knowledge. I’m not saying digitizing is wrong, but creating this and as you pointed out the reliance people have can expand but censor what people know.
Very well written. As I was reading this it had me moving through various levels of anticipation and imagination. As I got toward the end it had me thinking of Sophia the robot. The fact that we already have that level of sophistication accessible makes me feel that we already could have lunch with our favorite historical figure………Actually, I just remember the fear that took over society at the expense of Sophias dry humor. maybe I should be scared, I mean you know someones going to choose a Stalin type figure to have lunch with. Either way its super exciting to think about where we are technologically and how advancement seems to be pushing full steam ahead.
The development of A.I. is absolutely nuts. I don’t know if you’re familiar with ‘Cleverbot’, but it was all the rage when I was in middle school and early high school. The A.I. would respond to your conversation as best it could, using data that other users had provided. Check it out here– https://www.cleverbot.com/ . I think digitally archiving materials for research has infinite utility, but the thought of an A.I. utilizing those materials is still pretty scary, in my opinion.