Sunday 4 November 2007, 3:52 PM

Reading by the light of the fire: Google versus the historian

Posted by Rupert Goodwins

If you've got a few minutes, pop over to "Future Reading" by Anthony Grafton, an excellent Sunday roast of a piece in the New Yorker. Grafton rattles through the history of libraries and how they sit at the intersection of culture, knowledge and technology: how, in short, they are enormously more than just so many word hoards. And it is in short: this four thousand word article is so full of deliciousness it deserves to bulk up and join the many million strong army of published books.

It's impossible not to warm to Grafton's arguments, as he says that ideas of a utopian online Library of Everything are not entirely desirable and in any case impossible: "In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience". He mentions without comment that as microfiche records took hold, they encouraged libraries and archives to destroy original documents. Together with the story he relates of an historian going through eighteenth century letters, sniffing each one for the scent of vinegar in order to trace the spread of cholera – the condiment was thought to be a disinfectant – the implications are plain. The libraries and archives themselves, to say nothing of their denizens, are part of the green fuse of knowledge, and it would be boldness indeed to say what part of that collective DNA is indispensable and what just so much post-evolution clutter. Having everything available at once would dissolve away this inherent structure, and the results may not be what we expect or want.

He continues that the grinding machineries of commerce, copyright and computation just aren't capable of creating the omnilogical dream – the size of the task alone should add some seasoning to the sweet smell of hype. Here, I think, he's not being entirely fair: Eric Schmidt has said that Google itself considers three hundred years a reasonable estimate of time required.

Still, the hype is there. It doesn't take too much sceptical acid to etch away at the idea of any human endeavour lasting for that long with that much focus. This is the world of science fiction, where Asimov's Foundation sets itself aside from the decline of civilisation to collect all knowledge, or the self-conscious application of religious eternity, where men teach sons how to chip away at the unfinished masonry on cathedrals started by great-great-grandfathers. Yet the tradition of academic information he traces back beyond Alexandria suggests that time alone is not enough to quench cathedral dreams; the printing press shows how developments can fundamentally rearrange the physics of ideas and replace linear time with the exponential. With Google, a thousand ages in its site are but an evening gone.

The trouble is, Grafton's thrust is so generous to the reader and their sense of belonging to intellectual tradition that it verges on the pornographic, an inherently reactionary genre and not just in the Newtonian sense of push and counter-push. There is an important context missing, an irony masked by the very great deal of historical and contemporary mise en scène he so ably wheels in. That missing context is the rate of change, the driving forces behind it and the apparent limits they have already shown themselves capable of circumventing. He himself recognises this but declines to engage: "...it is hard to exaggerate what is already becoming possible month by month and what will become possible in the next few years," - instead of examining this absolutely key observation, he falls back on how well the current state of the art, online and off, encourages rich results.

In particular, he ignores the incendiary nature of the Internet. Each new chunk of access is a pail of petrol that ups the temperature, and fire never follows a linear function. At some point, even stone vitrifies.

Grafton is a much-honoured history professor at Princeton, a tonsured member of the cathedral who can lightly toss off the aside that JSTOR – that bastion of academic apartness, still unavailable to individuals – is now indexed by Google and thus easier than ever to access. For the rest of us, that indexing just pushes our noses up against the stained glass. Once you have the torch-bearing peasants massed outside wanting in, it doesn't really matter how carefully you try to ration the pitchforks, or pitchfork in rationality.

That's why this piece deserves to be a book. Grafton is a superb historian, and like all sane, gifted academics understands the risks of stepping outside his magisterium while still in his robes – hence the subtle diffidence that creeps in when he swaps lectern for browser. That same sureness of uncertainty could not be anything but an advantage into a fuller investigation of the future, rather than the past, of reading.

As the folkloric destruction of the Alexandrian Library illustrates, the context of the past can always be trumped by the context of the present. This time, the fire will be more akin to an anti-neutron bomb, an event that destroys the walls but leaves the living untouched. Grafton has ably sketched out the citadel of ideas in the grip of changing, uncertain times. But he barely comments on the smell of smoke in the air. A Sunday roast is a lovesome thing, God wot, but this Sunday falls on the 2nd September, 1666.

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