Too Much to Know’ and What To Do About It

Thanks to you all for making the kickoff trip so successful! It was a real pleasure learning more about all of your projects, some of which have changed quite substantially since you applied. I’ve spent a few hours this morning going over my notes and thinking about what steps we should take next. I’ll be contacting some of you individually through the next week with follow-up notions.

During our discussions I several times mentioned a book I’ve been reading “Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age”, written by Ann Blair. Blair is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Harvard. She has been writing about how early moderns dealt with ‘information overload’ for a long time. The book is a serious work of history, detailed, specific, and heavily referenced to the rest of the scholarship on the topic. That’s an interesting choice, as a popular work on the ‘human search engines’ of the past might well have been commercially successful.

I’m most of the way through this book (I usually read three or four at a time) and have really enjoyed it. My reading notes tell me that I’ve completed four other books since I started this one:

• Feynman: a graphic novel by Ottaviani, Myrick, and Sycamore
• Whistling Vivaldi: a popular book about stereotype threat by Claude Steele
• Darwin and the Barnacle: about Darwin’s 8 years of work systematizing barnacles by Rebecca Stott
• The Pun Also Rises: a popular work on the neuroscience, linguistics, and history of puns by John Pollack

As I mentioned, Blair’s book not a light read, and I go through it slower than others, but for me the labor is clearly worthwhile. She is writing, in a larger sense, about a permanent human problem. We might like to know it all, to fully appreciate and understand the world in all its complexity. But this is, and has always been, impossible. Acknowledging that, so what? On the ground, the pleasure comes from the process, expansion of what you know, not from finishing. So Blair’s discussion is about how to make hay: how to do what you know you want to do better, not to accomplish the final goal.

I was excited by the discussion we had about reading on Monday morning, and want to build on that. Let’s talk on Thursday about how we might each put together and share reading lists for the summer, then try to cross-fertilize them, perhaps picking something from someone else’s list that you’d like to read and jumping in on that. This might not work for everyone, but it would be fun to set it up for those who are enthusiastic. Throw your thoughts in as comments here or bring them to the meeting Thursday. See you there.

By the way, this is my very first blog post. I have no idea if I’ve done anything like what I should. So let’s talk about that too on Thursday…