The facts, all(?) the facts, and motivations.

     Sweeping and valid generalities about the past are the El Dorado of historians and political scientists, but first they must panhandle in the river of facts, risking drowning. They need archivists for their guidance and safety.The Hoover Archives possess a remarkable and growing collection of documents and a splendid staff of archivists. However, now in the computer age, an array of websites provide a surfeit of facts, factoids and lies serving a cause. How does one grapple with them?
     Confronted with the mass of such websites about th Chiapas situation, I asked Hoover archivist Elena Danielson what was being done about them. She said properly that each curator was responsible for his area. However, there was disagreement about preservation. the obvious answer is to keep the materials on disks, but Karen Fung said disks had a limited lifetime, and that everything should be printed out. That rsises the technical question of the comparative lifespan of disks and paper, and the problem of the masses of paper printing out would produce.
     Now the war in Yugoslavia has produced a forest of websites, each one telling a different story. An excellent summary is provided by "War on the Web" in The Economist (May 15, 1999). Everyone doing research on that war should read it, even though you may end up despairing of mastering the facts and finding the truth.

Ronald Hilton - 06/01/99

More on The facts, all(?) the facts, and motivations.

     Martin Packard comments on my memo about news on the web. He says:
     Your last message Re History is so profound and true. The internet is a remarkable resource, but it is full of garbage. The average person has no way to separate fact from fancy. The medical profession worries about this problem and we see it in the dog world [which Martin follows scientifically]. There is no way that we can correct the material spread on the web.
     This is what the New York Academy has called "Flight from Science and Reason" I have attempted to do something about the problem, knowing full well that I can do nothing. My comment: Did Martin mean "correct" or "collect"? Hitlerīs early rantings were dismissed as garbage, but now a favorite intelligence job is going through garbage. Would it be technically possible to store all this on-line garbage electronically and then punch in a term to get a collection of items on that subject? It would not be possible if the stuff was kept simply on paper as printouts.
    
     More on The facts, all(?) the facts, and motivations.
    
     John Wonder's concern is like that of Martin Packard. He writes:
     I have for some time been skeptical of the durability of CD's. Why would the economic motivation be to make them eternal? However, I suspect they could be so made. In such a case, however, we would probably have people wanting to make all kinds of apish trivia eternal. Thus, it is probably better to recopy at decent intervals. This would also prevent the mindless preservation of utterly worthless and uninteresting material.
     My comment; Tut, tut, John. You are like the British Library people who discarded all the old railway schedules. Now historians are angry at this loss of important documentation. You may remember that some time ago I raised the question about preserving old university catalogs for future historians of higher education. I checked several institutions, including the Library of Congress, but drew a blank until I found that an outfit in San Diego is putting the catalogs in microfilm. Stanford administrators were glad to get this information. The Stanford Registrar had no realized that the law requires him to send two copies of our catalog to the Library of Congress, which apparently is making no effort to collect them. John is a literary historian. Much is made of the scribblings on books by various people, including Thomas Jefferson. When a person becomes wellknown, his scribblings are treasured. We go back to the old question: What is a weed? A plant whose value has not yet been recognized. However, I agree with John that lawns should be weeded.
     John goes on to denounce the term behavioral science. I am full of respect for psychology, sociology, political science (!), and economics, but their claim to be sciences is properly disputed. I prefer the term government.

Ronald Hilton - 06/01/99