On Wednesday afternoon I have a honor of delivering the Henderson Lecture at the UNC School of Information and Library Science. The subject of my talk will be:
The Human Knowledge Project (Part 1): Four Conceptual Errors concerning Massive Digital Library Projects.
The rush to digitize the stacks of major research libraries has proceeded in haphazard fashion and with a far greater emphasis on expediency and quantity than quality and utility. This talk will outline the grand mistakes that we are making in the rush to digitize everything and offer a vision of a better way to link the greater population of the world with the greatest sources of knowledge.
You might notice that the title has a little "Part 1" on the end. That's because on February 22 I will speak down the road from UNC at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.
That lecture will be:
The Human Knowledge Project (Part 2): How to Build the Best Possible Global Digital Library
The rush to digitize the stacks of major research libraries has proceeded in haphazard fashion and with a far greater emphasis on expediency and quantity than quality and utility. This talk will outline the principles, practices, and policies that would generate a better way to link the greater population of the world with the greatest sources of knowledge.
The Duke event is part of a whole day of amazing talks by some of my favorite people:
Friday, February 22, 2008
1:00 - 6:00 PM
Rare Book Room, Perkins Library
Books Without a Future?
A Symposium
Panel I - Recycling Books
Knowing by *.pdf
Lisa Gitelman, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Catholic University
Page, Paper Waste: Book Recycling in Victorian London
Leah Price, Harvard College Professor & Professor of English, Harvard University
Panel II - (Re)Constructing Books
Revising Thomasin von Zerclaere's "Welsche Gast": Image, Emotion, and the Creation of a Book
Kathryn Starkey, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures & Director of the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The Human Knowledge Project (Part 2): How to Build the Best Possible Global Digital Library
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Associate Professor of Media Studies and Law, University of Virginia
with
Roger Chartier (Respondent), Chair of Writings and Cultures in Modern Europe, Collège de France; Professor of History, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Annenberg Visiting Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Roger Chartier will deliver the 2008 Franklin Humanities Institute's Annual Mellon Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities on Thursday, February 21, 5:30 PM, at the Nasher Museum auditorium.
This is a very cool opportunity. I am very grateful that both UNC and Duke have granted me these stages. I look forward to some very helpful feedback on these issues.
I am working on a very long part of my next book, The Googlization of Everything. And these two talks come out of that work. I will post text from these lectures after I give them.
Oh, and the best part is that after the UNC talk on Wednesday I am going to see Duke play UNC at the Dean Dome!
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Comments (1)
I attended your UNC lecture (a few of us made the trip from Duke!) and had a particular comment about your title "The Human Knowledge Project." I understand the inputs to this project as capturing written (or illustrated) human knowledge. Things get fuzzy for me, however, as we start heading to the outputs. Isn't this knowledge simply being atomized and commodified so that it is no longer knowledge but simply information. The "cure for cancer" could unknowingly have been scanned into the project but it's not really knowledge until somebody knows it and is able to place it in the broader context of medicine/chemistry/biology. The whole of human knowledge or even the "mind of God" is pretty useless unless it able to be incarnated into the minds of individuals and communities. "Human Knowledge Project" sounds better than the "Human Information Project" but I wonder if it doesn't over-promise in the work of transferring information back into knowledge.