March 8-10 2002, University of California Santa Barbara
Christian Jacob
Directeur de recherche au CNRS, Paris
www.ehess.fr/centres/GDR
(all rights reserved)
Scholarship is an issue of technology, of mental activity and of social interaction. Being a scholar means using tools and physical devices, reading and writing texts, processing data through various intellectual filters and operations, and eventually sharing the results of this work within a professional community and a society.
Interfaces of knowledge could be considered at these various
levels, either as technical devices allowing control over data, or as filters
used to transform these data according to hypotheses, questions or any
intellectual project, or as a way to circulate results among a community and a
society.
Interfaces of knowledge are interfaces between the scholar
and his or her community, between mental operations and the various physical
supports and inscriptions displaying data, between the scholar’s study and the
library from which he or she draws texts, knowledge, ideas, material suitable
to a given project.
In my paper, I will discuss the meaning and particular forms of « interfaces of knowledge » in the ancient Alexandrian library. In my conclusion, I will argue that today scholars, while using digital libraries, have to solve problems not so different from those of ancient Greek scholars. The solutions, however, rely on a new balance and a new interaction between technology, mental processing and social organization. In such a paradoxical comparison between the ancient universal library and today’s digital libraries, the most striking change lies in the development of external technical devices making possible the mechanization of operations that previously relied on the training of specific intellectual faculties. Cognitive processes and social organizations change according to the innovations in the technologies of writing, of archiving and of information.
At the beginning of the third century BC, the king Ptolemy I
founded the Museum of Alexandria, which included a library, in the palace of
the new Greek dynasty ruling over Egypt. The library had a symbolic and a
political function: mastering cultural memory was a matter of power and of
identity. Through the accumulation of books, the new dynasty was entitled to
claim the Greek cultural heritage as its own, against other Hellenistic kings.
The library was also a research tool and a research field open to a small
community of court scholars, poets, grammarians and polymaths. Members of the
Museum were among the few users of this extensive collection of books. They
were also in charge of its organization and arrangement. Their scholarly work
was actually indissociable from the technical and intellectual management of
the library. The king was interested mainly in buying as many books as possible
in order to create the largest library of the Ancient world. He intended to
gather all the books ever written, both in Greek and in foreign languages, to
translate some of the latter into Greek, and to concentrate in one single place
all the knowledge and literature from the past. Scholars had to control this
flood of papyrus book rolls through various interfaces and techniques.
Intellectual control was a basic condition for making the library usable as a
reference and research tool, that is, for producing new texts from the reading
of older ones and for adding knowledge to the corpus of previous scholarship.
According to a Byzantine author, Tzetzes, the collection amounted to 490,000
book rolls under the rule of the second king of the dynasty, Ptolemy
Philadelphus. The number of literary or scholarly works was obviously much
lower, since such works were usually composed of several papyrus rolls or
“volumes,” sometimes a hundred rolls or more. Librarians used to count book
rolls, not individual works.
The Alexandrian library itself was not a building with a
reading room, but rather a storage space for papyrus rolls, consisting of
shelves against the walls of storage rooms, perhaps with vertical divisions in
order to create compartments devoted to a particular literary genre or
scientific field. The library was one of the several scholarly resources of the
Museum.
The physical organization of the library provided written
culture with a spatial ordering principle, that is, with a map. Being a scholar
in the Alexandrian library meant first to master this physical arrangement,
that is, to be able to link a place in the storage compartmentalization with a
given literary category, or even with a precise text. Such a topographical map
of literature and scholarship was indissociable from the place itself, from the
shelves of the library. It was, so to say, the visual and physical memory of
the location of books, as any reader in a library can experience it today, at
least when he or she has access to the shelves and to the books. But such a map
was indissociable from the territory. Actually it was a map at the scale of
1:1.
A different kind of interface appeared when this
topographical scheme became an abstract structure, independent from the
library, that is, from the territory, and provided users and scholars with a
map of written culture regardless of where these individuals were located. Such
was the achievement of Callimachus, one of the scholars who worked in the Alexandrian
library under the rule of Philadelphus and were responsible for its
organization. Callimachus’ work is entitled “Pinakes,” that is “Catalogues” or
“Maps.” The Greek word “pinax” means a wooden or a metallic “tablet” where
lists, maps and drawings could be written down. The term was also used for any
kind of tabular inscription, for lists and catalogues themselves, regardless of
their physical support.
The catalogue of the library coincided with the map of
culture (paideia). Like any map, this
catalogue could be used on its own, independently from the physical space it
organized and reflected. Callimachus’ catalogue was the first comprehensive map
of ancient Greek literature and scholarship, and was used in Alexandria and
elsewhere -- in Rome, for instance, where it provided the literati with an overview of the classical heritage, of genres and
subject categories, and of individual works. The catalogue reinforced the
feeling of sharing a common heritage of memory, language, art and knowledge.
As a map of written culture, the catalogue is the first
interface allowing a form of control over the thousands of book rolls of the
physical library. The catalogue lists works, not physical volumes. It makes
possible specific operations, such as the inventory of works belonging to a
same literary genre or a same intellectual field; it also permits
classification, and thematic bibliographies. Bibliographic descriptors, such as
the author’s name, the title, the number of volumes and the first lines of the
text, were meta-data allowing the catalogue user to locate texts on the map of
literary or scientific fields, to organize a thematic bibliography without
physically handling the books. The Alexandrian catalogue gave rise to a
scholarly tradition in which bibliography became independent from the library
itself and became meaningful on its own.
A bibliography might be defined as a portable library of
text descriptors. The library gathers physical books, sometimes several copies
of a same work. The bibliography is an ordered list of texts, a tool helping to
define literary canons and a scientific corpus. Various biographical and
historical data could be linked to the descriptors. Many other libraries,
whether large or small, private or public, may use such a bibliography as a
reference tool to create and organize their own collections.
This shift from physical books to texts, seen as literary
and intellectual units, was part of an overall Alexandrian strategy that
emphasized the reading of texts instead of the handling of books. For the king,
a universal library needed to gather the largest number of book rolls. For
scholars, it had to be structured as a map of ancient literature and
scholarship. The catalogue allowed the Alexandrian scholars and the king
himself to get an overview of the collection, of its extent and its
organization. Through the catalogue, the accumulation of papyrus rolls became
an icon of universal culture. The “Pinakes” were not a synoptic catalogue,
since they were composed of 120 papyrus rolls. The catalogue was however a
miniaturized interface with the library, one that could be handled, copied,
browsed and updated independently from the library itself.
Philology was another indicator of this conceptual shift
from books to texts. Textual criticism allowed Alexandrian scholars to
reconstruct the major literary works of the past through the comparison of the
copies archived in the library. The “master copy,” with its critical signs
written in the margins between the columns of text, was an interface between
the author, the corrector and the readers, making it possible to condense on a
single support the various different readings of a same literary work. The
annotated copy was simultaneously the archive of the textual tradition and its
provisional end. The reader was constructing his or her own text, choosing from
the materials inherited from the past, and the criteria were his or her own
conceptions of language, style, grammar, and sometimes of “political
correctness” (what behaviour would be suitable to a Greek god or goddess?). But
such a correction did not delete the original text: it was a “virtual edition”
and readers could decide to read the original text as it was written or to take
into account the correction suggested in its margin., In Alexandria, the
philological edition of a text was an interface between textual scholars, a
collaborative device where any new scholar could check the corrections proposed
by his or her forerunner and add new ones. It was an interface between the
original text and its commentary, on another book roll where the scholar
explained his or her critical choices about a given textual locus.
For today’s observers, Alexandrian scholarship displays a
major tendency: in order to master the library and its innumerable books,
scholars had to create their own portable and miniaturized libraries. They had
to imitate, in their daily practice, at their individual and private level, the
operations that took place in the state library: collecting, selecting,
ordering, and indexing. But scholars were not merely collecting books or texts
— they did not need to, while working in the Museum of Alexandria. They
collected units of knowledge, information, words and quotations, as basic
materials to be used in new texts. Reading and writing were closely linked
operations: Alexandrian scholarly writing was first and foremost devoted to
archiving and to re-organizing material excerpted from books read and to
produce new knowledge from older textual fragments. This meant the processing
of textual data through successive steps of rewriting and through various
physical supports. In a first step, the scholar could write specific marks on
the margin of the column of text, before a relevant locus, in order to retrieve easily these notabilia. In a second step, he had to copy or to summarize these loci on another support, either a wax
tablet or a book-roll, following the order in which they appeared in the
original text. In a third step, he had to reorganize this material in another
book roll according to new ordering principles, such as alphabetic order,
chronology, geography, themes or keywords. This third step could imply the
merging of notes excerpted from different books. In a fourth step, the compiler
could eventually use these ordered reading notes for writing a new treatise,
such as an encyclopaedia or a universal history. The difference between the
third and the fourth steps was not always very clear. With more or less
reorganization and rewriting, the reader produced a new text, made from fragments
linked together and ordered according to defined intellectual criteria: it was
an hypertext, a written thread through the library. Such a collection could
gather rare Greek words, local myths and cults, deeds and witticisms of
historical characters, curiosities of nature, or data regarding any branch of
human life, from the art of cooking to the famous courtesans of classical
Athens.
Writing down and handling reading notes are key steps of the
scholarly work in a library, and this Alexandrian practice was the paradigm,
and sometimes the historical starting point of a long tradition, through
Western and Eastern cultures. Reading notes could be intended for personal use
only, or could be “published” and available to other scholars. During the Roman
Empire, literati could buy at a very
high price such miscellanies, especially if their author was a well-known
scholar. Such scholarly compilations reflected the reader’s curiosity, his rare
bibliographical findings as well as his or her technique in browsing as many
book-rolls as possible. The library was a physical and a cultural space, open
to explorations and discoveries. Through excerpting, quoting and copying,
readers could get a new control over this space and make unexpected
discoveries. According to the Ptolemies’ propaganda, the library was the
archive of all what was written down in the ancient Greek world and beyond, a
complete record of language, wisdom, literature and knowledge. The library
could then be used as a starting point for remote exploration of this vanished
culture through a methodical inventory of words and units of information,
through their collection and re-organization in new texts, making their
retrieval easy or at least easier. Such a process meant a change of focus, from
books and literary works, as encompassing frames, to their content, to words,
quotations and facts, whose value and meaning were no longer linked to the text
they belonged to, but to the collection in which they were re-organized. The
collection, as a new discursive and semantic context for words and textual
fragments, produced new intellectual effects and new meanings.
Compiled works provided writers with rough material that
could be selected, edited and used again in new texts, either as quotations, or
as facts to be discussed or as data or exempla with an illustrative function.
Such works were interfaces between the library and its scholarly users. They
were, so to say, “readers’ digests,” intended to be used by their author and by
other readers as well. As a matter of fact, Greek book rolls were not
convenient supports for the indexing, the browsing and the easy retrieval of
textual loci and data. A scholarly
compilation created thematic or lexicographic clusters ad hoc from the textual excerpts. They might be seen asthe results
of a full text search through the library database.
When they were involved into the writing of a monograph,
ancient scholars had to prepare their documentation, that is, collect
information by reading books. They had
to create their own reference tools or to use existing ones. Usually, they used
both. A scholarly reader had to be the librarian of his reading notes and to
process them through various steps of rewriting, from the original book-roll to
the final text he intended to write. Slaves could be used as research
assistants at these various steps, as Pliny the Elder testifies.
Such interfaces between a reader and the library took
various forms throughout history, such as commonplace books during the
Renaissance. The interfaces were the result of an intellectual process of
selection, extraction and archiving of useful material: according to scholarly
traditions, this material could get an objective status or remain linked to its
bibliographical source. Compilation was a form of textual tradition,
reorganizing knowledge according to other criteria than the bibliographical
attribution of a quotation to an author and to a text. It was also an ongoing
work: writing and reorganizing one’s reading notes could be a task for a
lifetime.
Such a process was infinite. Written compilations provided a
scholar with a reader’s summary appropriate to a given topic. Should his or her
curiosity change, the work had to be done again from the beginning. At the end
of the Hellenistic period and during the Roman Empire, however, the number of
these glossaries, miscellanies and compilations increased dramatically. This
could be interpreted as a symptom of an age in which scholars were overwhelmed
by a textual overflow, beyond the reading capacities of anyone. Collecting,
filtering, reordering, creating new clusters of local coherence were among the
primary tasks of scholars. These new clusters could be merged, glossaries were
merged to form an hyper-glossary, and so on. The same material could be
reorganized according to different key-words or themes.What should have been
the preliminary step of a new scholarly project was frequently an end per se. Compilations displayed reading
skills, bibliographic expertise, and the ability to dig up and to reorganize
information from a shared library. Producing such interfaces was the the
obsession of the age of Hellenistic and Roman libraries.
Interfaces as written texts, however, did not bypass the
ergonomic limitations of the ancient book format. A papyrus book roll was
always more difficult to handle than a codex, and browsing a compilation in
twenty volumes or more was as difficult as browsing the original works.
Specific navigation tools, however, were used during the Roman Empire, such as
tables of contents, summaries, various links between the volumes of a treatise
(“we have already seen in volume II that... ”). Alphabetic order or a clear
thematic structure could also provide the reader with guidelines on the way to
use such encyclopaedia or such lexicon. We do not see, however, a systematic
development of textual research tools, as can be observed during the twelth and
thirteenth centuries in Europe with the new organization of the codex page’s
space. This absence could be explained by sociological and social reasons more
than by mere technological factors: ancient scholars were located far away from
medieval universities and from their scholastic methods.
The memory of scholars and readers provided them with a more
flexible interface than the book-roll. Written collections of reading notes
were useful as filtering devices, focusing the reader’s gaze on a collection of
selected materials, but the dynamic links between words, quotations and facts
worked the best as mental processes: scholars kept the records of their
readings in the wax tablets of their mind. And finding the appropriate
quotation at a given step of a scholarly talk or of the writing of a book was
an issue of mnemonics more than of physical interfaces.
A library was at the same time a collection of books as well
as the book that encompassed the reading notes excerpted from one or many other
books. The portable library created a new textual frame where the content of
other books was merged according to a thematic filter and to a structuring
principle. But such a dynamic reorganization of data was frozen in a new text —
some of these collections could be composed of one hundred book rolls or more.
Only the mental library allowed a continuous and dynamic reorganization of
data, according to various thematic or lexical triggers. A striking feature of
ancient mnemonics was the possibility of browsing large mental databases of
texts in a non-linear way in order to retrieve a particular verse in a poem, or
to quote the various authors who dealt with a given topic or used a particular
word. Scholars were able to link together quotations from different texts
according to a thematic thread or a key-word search. Such a memory could be
structured and nourished from the reading notes and from the rote memorization of
major literary works, such as epic poetry or drama. Memory was used in
retrieving and ordering reference material while writing a new text, but also
as a trigger during oral performances and learned conversations. Quoting
poetical verses from memory was a shared entertainment for learned Greeks and
Romans, especially during banquets and wine parties. In this game, there were
average players but also very accomplished virtuosos, who could navigate freely
through the library of their mind. A Greek biographer alludes to such skills,
when he describes the sophist Longinus as “a living library and a walking
museum,” that is, as a human Alexandria. Various sources offer a detailed
description of the performances of these “living libraries.” Social interaction
was an important part of their activity. Since these scholars selected, stored
and organized textual material according to their own professional orientation
and curiosity, they interacted through literate and scholarly games where they
exchanged quotes, puzzles, questions, pieces of knowledge drawn from their
mental libraries. Challenges, surprises and discoveries where possible, despite
the fact that these mental libraries relied on the same physical libraries, and
sometimes on the same portable libraries too. These scholars were living
interfaces of knowledge, and their dialogues and games could be considered as
parties of a high quality readers’ club, where the talks and their hypertextual
dynamics would draw innovating threads from the individual archives of a shared
memory.
A striking feature of ancient mnemonics is that the library,
as a compartmentalized storage space, was one of the structuring principles of
human memory. One could conceive that scholars, as “living libraries,” just
browsed their mental libraries in order to take a mental book-roll from a given
place, to unfold it, and to begin reading it. The book-roll and the wax tablets
were other structuring principles: one wrote data on the wax tablets of the mind in order to store them,
one read these mental wax tablets in order to retrieve this information. But
the books of the mental libraries were not closed textual entities. Memory was
trained to create as many links between them as needed, and to browse the
mental library content in an hypertextual way that would have been impossible
in the physical library. The indexing was a mental process.
What is the meaning today of the ancient Alexandrian library
and of the scholarly techniques of its readers? I am not interested in basic
analogies or in an evolutionist history, from the papyrus book roll to the
digital medium. I am more interested in a conceptual archaeology in which an
historical situation could help us in understanding the changes and challenges
of our current scholarly practices.
So, what could we learn from ancient Alexandria? A scholarly
culture is a way to appropriate the library available at a given time to a
given society, with specific tools and interfaces. This culture relies on
writing and reading techniques and on intellectual projects. It implies
specific mental faculties and produces external devices allowing one to
simulate these operations and to perform new ones. Last, it shapes patterns of
social interaction and behaviour.
Alexandria is the first historical situation in which a
community of scholars had to face a critical overflow of books, a textual
archive whose universality was a factor of entropy and saturation. In order to
save this memory, one had to conceive and to use various interfaces. These
interfaces were like optical lenses or filters. They changed the focus from the
accumulation of objects to the mapping of genres and disciplines, from the
collection of books to the editing of texts, from the textual frame to the
mobility of words, quotations and facts. Glossaries, collections, reading
notes, books were not the signs of a lazy compilation and “digest” culture, but
were attempts to produce new intellectual results through the artificial and
experimental linking of previously unrelated materials. Filtering the library
and its books was a step allowing to produce local clusters of knowledge, about
food, animals, plants, rivers. It also made it possible to construct new forms
of totality, such as glossaries of Greek regional dialects or of literary
idioms, universal history and universal
geography and cartography, through the addition and reorganization of partial
data regarding the past or the remote space.
Alexandrian scholars had control over the library through
the establishing of literary canons and through the mastering of the map of
genres and field divisions. Scholars had to be experts in librarianship, either
physical libraries, or portable and mental ones. In order to produce knowledge,
they relied on various tools and on interfaces, either physical or mental.
Scholars, as a community, from the third century BC to the third century AD and
onward, shared the same methods and instruments. The accumulation and
reorganization of knowledge were possible because the physical interfaces
relied on these methods and on shared cultural prerequisite conditions.
Today digital technologies have fundamentally changed the
way we deal with libraries, with texts and with the knowledge they encompass.
Authentication, validation, selection and relevance are challenging issues for
anyone searching the internet on any topic, especially on scholarly topics.
Archiving and organizing information, such as digital texts, images and sounds,
is at the same time a collective and an individual task. The scholar still has
to be a librarian, and his laptop computer is his or her walking library. It is
necessary to conceive new tools for a new scholarship, such as database
programs, indexing and annotation softwares, web sites for on-line and
real-time collaborative work, e-publishing, e-conferences. Such a conception
implies a creative dialogue between software designers, librarians and
end-users.
The Alexandrian experience, however, reminds us that
technology is a tool, not an end in itself, and that it should prove its
effectiveness in promoting intellectual creativity and new forms of writing and
thinking, in organizing knowledge, as an archive devoted to its own progress.
Cognitive efficiency is the key issue for the new Alexandrias of the web, at
both the individual and collective levels. The new Alexandrias should reach the
same achievements as the old one: devising technical, graphic and mental
interfaces allowing the appropriation and the transformation of data, from the
universal library to the individual scholar, with his or her own interests,
projects, background and social networks.
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C. Jacob, " Ateneo, o il Dedalo delle parole ", introductive essay, Ateneo, I Deipnosofisti. I dotti a banchetto. Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2001, vol. I, pp. XI-CXVI.
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