the pursuit of an age-old fancy; or, the resumed advent of the tower of cyber-babel

Reflections on the Publishing Scene

The Pursuit of an Age-Old Fancy; or, the Resumed Advent of the

Tower of Cyber-Babel

Richard Abel

E very thoughtful person connected with the book/journal trade in one way or another--whether author, publisher, printer, book-seller, librarian, or

reader--may readily be forgiven these days for a growing reluctance to open the vast bulk of the general magazines dealing with one or another aspect of the book/journal world, from the trade journals to the review media. This reluctance can in no small measure be attributed to the sheer tiresomeness and irksomeness arising out of the continued hashing and rehashing of the immi- nent appearance of some kind of marvelous intellectual cyberspace. This splen- did new omnium gatherum is to finally be the incarnation of that age-old dream---documented from, at the very least, the construction of the Tower of Babel--of devising a Temple of all Learning. This edifice is not only to contain the entirety of the world's acquired information, know-how, knowledge, and wisdom but this vast and awe-inspiring harvest is to be immediately accessible with all related thought and data thoroughly and rationally related, thanks to hyper-text links, at the mere "press of a button." One of the first corollaries deriving from this marvelous fabrication of one of humankind's most sought after and fervently pursued ambitions will not simply abnegate but destroy any and all grounds for the publishing of books, journals and their cousins in this close-at-hand but yet unspecified future. A second corollary of this ex- traordinary technological revelation is the virtually instant disutility of the institutional library of the last two-and-a-half millennia as an organized collection of books, and more recently journals.

Now this sort of wearisome and thought-numbing prattle might be excused among those who have grown up in the constant company of a computer-- those described by the designation "hacker'--just as the recent convert to any weltanschaung or cause may be forgiven some brief period of time for the enthusiasm with which his/her newly found convictions are voiced ad te- dium. One can only sympathize with those poor souls destined to the misfor- tune of spending any significant amount of time in the company of such adepts. But quite extravagant visions of this emerging Tower of Learning in

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Cyberspace are now being advanced by any number of members of the b o o k / journal world. Not, mind you, simply by some of the computer types who have been recruited into the information and knowledge fields to assist in computer iz ing various mechanical or technical chores--word-processing, typesetting, design, inventory control, order-placement, circulation, on-line catalogs and indices, accounting, record-keeping of various kinds, E-mail-like de- livery of documents , and similar ancillary functions. But rather, and most alarmingly, such visions are being advanced by older hands who have risen to positions of power and eminence in the cultural world of the book. A distress- ingly large number of these veterans can regularly be heard or read reiterating the new doctrine with virtually the same conviction as those whose fortunes are intimately entwined with the success of this new revelation.

One must certainly inquire when reading or listening to these scarred-up, old dogs if they have forgotten the failed outcomes associated wi th the con- t inuing stream of analogous prophecies announced with equal flourish and certi tude throughout the 1960s and 70s. To both refresh the memories of those who were active in those days and catalog some of them for the benefit of those who entered the trade more recently, a few examples may be useful:

1. The automation of indexing. This wonder -work ing application was pro- claimed as not simply the means of greatly reducing the costs of indexing the contents of a particular text or group of texts--as in a subject index for a collection of books or journals--but of providing indexing of a much finer and detailed kind thanks to this reduced cost.

The results proved at best a droll exhibition of the complexities of language and at worst an unintelligible shambles. An intelligent and informed mind proved in the end to be an absolute necessity for sorting through an individual 's unique text to identify the meanings coded in that singular selection of words; KWIC, KWOC, and HTML indexing, despite their shortcomings, s imply con- firmed this conclusion.

2. The automation of translation. This, like indexing, was one of the declared giant killer applications of the time. Suddenly, the entire wor ld ' s literature was to be readily and cheaply available to any reader in that reader 's native language. No more costly translators and editors would be needed. All that was required was the input of the world 's texts: some software to establish the equivalencies between words in the original and target languages; and the input of the major dictionaries of the world 's languages.

Well, in the first trials, not quite. Only an unintelligible jumble of words tumbled out upon the pages. After some head-scratching the cognoscenti agreed that all that was needed to genuinely make the thing fly was a more elaborate and subtly constructed set of dictionaries.

With another round of generous grants in hand the savants set to work and in time produced several translations based on linguistically enhanced dictionaries. But these new and better translations still required as much and not infrequently more of a translator's time to correct (because the errors were less blatant) than an original translation wou ld have taken.

52 Publishing Research Quarterly/Summer 1996

The only subsequent news on this brave new venture came not from the camp of the faithful but rather from traditional translators seeking to recruit knowledgeable linguists to deal with the mounting burden of not just literary but commercial translation demanding to be done in the usual way.

3. The automation of concept generation. This was so revolutionary a pro- posed application that it was hardly ever bruited about outside the ranks of the committed. Only in the circles of the true adepts was this notion raised or discussed. The adepts consisted of a handful of journal editors and some "natural language" computer types. The belief, in this case, was that the papers in selected subject areas carried in the world 's scholarly journals would, after input to a computer-based typeset t ing/design system in preparation for con- ventional print production, be placed in a computer-maintained database. This database would, in turn, be searched by a powerful search and matching en- gine to automatically locate possible commonalities or relationships between the contents of two or more papers. The results of these search/matches would then be printed out as potentially useful concepts.

At one such meeting, held in the headquarters of a prestigious UK scholarly society which sustained a large journal and book publishing operation, one participant advanced the notion that had such a scheme been operational in Darwin's time the difficulty the latter encountered in adducing the mechanism to explain genetic variation, genetic drift, and speciation need never have been. The system would have associated Mendel 's paper, which described this mechanism, with Darwin's work and thereby have alerted the latter to the mechanism needed for his later theory of evolution.

Save for several meetings in this country and in the UK in the early 1970s where this extravagant notion was enthusiastically discussed, I at least, have heard nothing more of it.

4. The advent of the paperless office. This one seems to share with cats multiple l ives--it never quite dies however often the failures. Any number of the continuing innovations in the world of telecomputing seem to give it new leases on life. So unlike the previous examples of telecomputer futurology which proved unfounded and so were quietly, if embarrassedly, dropped, one needs to look to other evidence to establish the limited likelihood of its realiza- tion. That evidence is readily come by in the paper-based book/ journal world; the competition for the better grades of paper by the rapidly escalating de- mand for computer, fax, photocopying, etc, use had contributed to repeated wor ldwide paper shortages and radical increases in paper pr ices-- leading in turn to increased book/journal prices. For further confirmation, one need look no further than the year-on-year increases in the volume of mail carried both domestically and internationally.

Other less grand proclamations could be recalled here of how the computer was to radically alter--usually by way of work-simplification, cost-savings, a n d / o r t ime-savings--the process of informat ion/knowledge transfer. But the point is, I trust, surely made that distinguished players in the book/ journal world have repeatedly chased a variety of wild hares set in their midst by one

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or another handful of true electronic-believers. Having these so-recent examples clearly before us, it is difficult to comprehend how some can yet once again be seduced into the active advancement of what are immediately upon their face chimerical notions.

Now this is not to say that the emerging electronic environment has not or will not continue to powerfully influence what goes on in the information/ knowledge transfer process. Clearly, any number of ancillary functions central to this process have already been more-or-less changed--most authors now compose on the computer and submit both hard copy and disk to publishers; many editors now edit these author's disks on the computer; much typesetting, layout, and design are now computer-driven; etc. Secondly, an equally impressive number of useful innovations at the user/reader/researcher end of the information/knowledge transfer process have also become widely, if not cheaply available--a broad variety of electronic call-up or network accessible literature databases/indices of all kinds searchable, in most cases, by author, title and subject, and particularly notable, massive indices to the magazine and journal literature; network accessible databases of many types, e.g., chemical compounds, genetic sequences, etc.; collections of print-journal papers, pages of which can be down-loaded to purchasers' computers; reference books of fairly specific kinds, dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, etc. In yet a third class, is the widespread substitution of E-mail for postal correspondence; tele- phonic communication; or travel to meeting/conferences.

However convenient, cost-effective, etc. all these innovative ways of per- forming traditional information/knowledge transfer ancillary functions may be--including the use of the various databases for research/fact-checking purposes - they remain simply tools for the manipulation of information. For all that they yet constitute a great, and rewarding body of technical advances which can profoundly improve the world cultural climate--in part, because the precincts of ignorance have always been the Elysian fields of the charlatan, and, in part, because the time of the principal consumers of information is almost always valuable and in short supply.

But such improvements in process are largely beside the point. The issue needing to be addressed is the suitability of the electronic environment to the underlying information/knowledge transfer process. But before dealing with this it is necessary to look at three other classes of electronic use as it is these that have most commonly been referred to as paving the way to the electronic information/knowledge transfer future. Both those in the book/journal world and those in the telecomputing world routinely hold such uses up as examples of the emerging paradigm of the content of the new Tower of Cyberbabel.

The first is the ubiquitous array of computer or multimedia products produced and presented variously as floppy disks, CD-ROM disks, or down-loads from on-line networks; etc. The vast bulk of this class of products consists of interactive games but it includes a remarkably diverse assortment of materials having other specific uses, most of which can be described as simply providing entertainment. The latter includes narrow subject compilations of how


things or organisms of one kind or another work or look or behave; multimedia encyclopedias whose sole distinction from an on-line fact check is the effort devoted to jazzing up the textual content; and interactive fiction; etc. Other kinds of product aim at a more serious objective, such as the hand-held, electronic book, which in addition to presenting the text of a book will also perform some low-level linguistic analysis and text comparisons. All are, whatever the professed aim of their promoters, fundamentally simply entertainments or "gee-whiz" astonishments. None has anything to do with cognitive acts which lay at the heart of the information/knowledge transfer process.

The second class of interest here is that of computer modelling of various large-scale or complex natural processes such as the impact of E1 Ni~o on world weather patterns or the impact on world trade of a tariff increase in a particular country. But again this kind of modelling has nothing to do with the information/knowledge transfer process for the knowledge concepts driving the models are embedded in the code from other knowledge sources--they are not derived from the model.

Lastly, and presently the queen of the electronic beauty contest, are the relatively recent excursions into network-mounted, on-line journals. It has been estimated at the time of writing that something on the order of forty electronic- only journals are on-line. It is, however, five or six that presently share the limelight due variously to the size or prestige of their sponsors; the novelty of the mechanisms employed to deal with the routine tasks of refereeing, editorial selection, requirements for revision, etc.; the vigor with which the issue of copy-holding is being asserted or denied by the sponsor; and, above all, who pays and to whom and how much and by what mechanism.

In these three cases, and particularly the latter, a clear case can be made that information is indeed transferred electronically. For present purposes the electronic-only journal is most pertinent simply because it most nearly parallels the traditional print journal. It can fairly be said that that much of the same range of uses to which the print journal and report literature has traditionally been put can be exercised by the reader/viewer. And in both cases those few papers germane to the present or future work of the user will be reduced to paper--in the case of the electronic form by printing out and filing the down- load thus precisely paralleling the common practice of photocopying and filing the paper form. (This single illustration of the universal, archetypal human need for a tangible, manipulable form of record is a powerful explanation for the failure of the notion of the paperless office.)

Clearly, the information factor in the linguistic formulation commonly used to describe the flow of data (information) and concepts and principles (knowledge) from one who knows to one with a need to know--the information/ knowledge transfer process--seems to be served by electronic means. But the knowledge factor in this analysis equally clearly remains unserved. I will re- turn to this issue after addressing what may prove a major gamble in the case of electronic information transfer.

This gamble has to do with the vexing issues of priority of publication;

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authority; authenticity; and most importantly, preservation of a validated text. It is commonly assumed by the adepts that these are difficult but soluble issues that will be resolved in due time, thus assuring the future of the electronic-only mode of publishing. Such confidence may, however, prove mis- placed when viewed in the light of the enormous effort it has taken over the centuries to maintain the integrity of the canonical texts, the totality of which were set down in a tangible, manipulable, visible form upon relatively sturdy and durable materials. All these qualities of form and material are closely and neatly adapted to the inborn faculties of humankind. The electronic media possess none of these characteristics. So, it is only reasonable to conclude that the difficulties of maintaining the integrity of texts so presented will be radically increased, as will the costs attendant thereto as well.

The Editor of this journal, Albert Henderson, has long and forcefully made a well-documented case that the present "crisis" in library budgets, which in turn has led to the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of journal subscriptions, can be laid directly at the door of the university and research adminis- trators who have diverted to other purposes those matching grant funds meant to support library services used by research grantees. In short, they have failed to use the resources meant to maintain the inclusive integrity of the national/ international information/data base for that purpose. (Ironically, it is the bud- getary crunch in libraries, particularly university libraries, and the consequent continuing cancellation of journal subscription that has provided much of the stimulus for these electronic journal excursions. The argument is that if university research staff put their research findings up on the Internet the data would thereby be much less costly than print journal subscriptions and universally available.)

Now, if the traditional guardian of the culture's wealth--the academy--has been so short-sighted and remiss in maintaining the culture's treasure-trove of information/data, which underlies the body of synthesized knowledge concepts and principles defining the culture, in its traditional cheapest form what reasonable expectation can the thoughtful assign to the likelihood that they or their successors will adequately support the more time-consuming and costly routine of maintaining the integrity of these texts in an electronic form?

But, for the sake of argument, let it be assumed that the will to allocate the resources required to maintain the integrity of the information data texts in electronic form will be rediscovered and exercised, a much graver problem remains, as was noted earlier. That is the question of the transfer of knowledge.

It is, of course, self-evident that information and knowledge are two quite different classes of cognitive elements. Information involves the discovery of facts about the observable world--in short, pieces of data. From an epistemo- logical point of view information/data/facts are discovered whether by simple observation at the most rudimentary level to the pursuit of active, sophisti- cated research at the other end of the range of acts leading to the discovery of facts. As discrete bits of data, information lends itself well to handling by

56 Publishing Research Quarterly / Summer 1996

electronic means. Most importantly, a bit of information/data/fact possesses no meaning in itself--a single datum or an assemblage of data simply exist as raw bits of reality. To acquire or be invested with meaning, information/data/ fact must be subjected to a distinctly different kind of mental operation. That distinct kind of mental operation is the rational exercise of knowledge.

Knowledge is that body of mental concepts and moral principles created by/ in the minds of human beings. In the vast percentage of instances the concepts and principles are synthesized out of various bits and pieces of the body of available information/data/fact. Virtually all concepts and principles contained in the total body of knowledge available for use today have evolved over greater or lesser periods of time largely as a rational response to the discovery of new facts or the manifest disutility of an earlier formulation in the real world. Knowledge can never be discovered for it is singularly a product of the mind whatever the association of its information/data/factual content with external reality. It is critical to quickly add here that simply because knowledge resides only in the minds of humankind does not make it any less a reality than the reality of the external world. Indeed, Karl Popper, probably the foremost philosopher of this century, assigns this collective body of knowledge, of culture, a claim to reality as great as that of the external world. It is some portion of this body of knowledge that is the immediate reality in the mind of each individual, enabling that individual to make more or less sense of the world--or that ever-changing, kaleidoscopic, jumble of sense impres- sions which is constantly assailing our minds. By virtue of the involved and complex nature of knowledge it is recorded and must be comprehended through the linguistic medium of discursive exposition or through the mathematical medium of a coherent but extensive series of equations---quite unlike the brief recording of a bit of information/data.

Knowledge has traditionally been collected and recorded in books. The technology of the book was not simply a lucky happenstance or find but rather the product of a long, thoughtful search for the best means not simply to collect, record, and store knowledge but more importantly to provide the reader with the most convenient and efficient means to wrestle with and finally comprehend the typically convoluted and discursive construction of a knowledge concept/principle. And most commonly additional complexity must be added to the exposition/comprehension of a single knowledge concept or principal for it is usually necessary to integrate a specific concept/principle with related concepts/principles. The technology of the book has evolved in a carefully considered and thoughtful way to the highly effective and efficient form of the modern codex. Of even greater importance is the consonant evolution of the several ways of structuring the discursive knowledge content contained within the codex. The evolution of these editorial conventions, also, has been driven, in part, by the needs of the knowledge synthesizer for the structural means to organize the body of concepts/principles being presented but more importantly by the needs of readers for familiar and readily understood conventions which assist in the comprehension of intricate and multifarious lines of argu-

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ment, the marshaled supporting evidence (most commonly bits of information/data), and the integration of numerous related or contingent concepts/ principles.

Careful reflection on the intrinsic nature of knowledge and the associated complexities of recording, storing, and, most importantly, comprehending (learning) it can only radically question the glibness of the adepts who contend that books yet to be written, to say nothing of the books presently collected and stored in libraries around the world can be successfully used in electronic form. To put the matter in its starkest terms: Can any but the faithful even imagine trying to come to grips intellectually with Immanuel Kant's three Critiques, of Pure Reason, of Practical Reason, and of Judgment on a computer terminal? Virtually all who have tried to become intellectually conversant with any small fraction of the cultural heritage of the several great civilizations of the world have thereby come to understand the utility of the codex and its associated editorial conventions in successfully grappling with such a difficult undertaking. In short, knowledge is enormously unlikely to be a serious candi- date for use in electronic form. A few of the committed will undoubtedly make the venture, but readers/users/buyers already possess so relatively cheap a learning tool--so highly efficient, so highly adapted to the human mental configuration, and so readily stored--that the success of these ventures is highly improbable.

So what counsel might more careful reflection offer those in the book/journal world so preoccupied with the foreboding and often forbidding forecasts of the place of telecomputing in /on their world? Let me venture several:

1. Computers will continue to provide significant help to authors in recording entertainments, information papers, and knowledge books. The rate of development of such forms of help has probably peaked, so, revolutionary introductions akin to word processing, spread sheets, optical scanning, etc. are likely to be more widely spaced in the future.

2. Computerized reference sources, databases, catalogs, indices, and analogous research aids will continue to proliferate and become increasingly useful for researchers, writers and readers.

3. Computers will continue to provide significant help to publishers in the ancillary functions of manuscript control, editing, typesetting, layout, office functions, etc. As in the case of assistance for authors, the rate of introduction of radically new electronic support systems will probably slow down in the near future.

4. Entertainment packages in multimedia formats will continue to proliferate for they will enjoy a rapidly growing market. But floppy disk, CD, and other formats will no more drive out the entertainment book in its traditional dress than have motion pictures, television, video, etc.

5. On-line journals, whether in on-line only or in joint electronic-print forms will remain much in the minority until the the difficult questions of priority of publication, authority, authenticity, preservation, ownership, and who pays what to whom in what amount, are resolved. There remains a substantial


question whether some of these issues are even resolvable. If some remain unresolved, intellectually sound on-line journals will remain a rata avis, even though the Internet will be awash with pseudo-journals the content of which is even trashier and of less utility than the dishearteningly high percentage of the papers in print-journals.

6. Books of genuine substance will continue to appear only in codex form although a few abortive efforts to put them into electronic form will be under- taken from time to time.

7. The trade media and trade figures should turn their attention to other more pressing matters and simply let electronic developments evolve, keeping an eye cocked for potentially useful applications. Those more pressing matters include:

A.

B.

C.

D.

Assuring the funding of libraries adequate to support the collection and preservation of the accumulating body of information as cheaply as possible in the present print form.

Raising standards of the publication of information--possibly to the level at which only 10% of the journal literature is never cited by anyone other than the author(s).

Backing away from supporting the publish or perish standards for advancement set by university and research bureaucrats.

Encouraging separation of the publishing and sale of entertainment books from genuine book publishing and book selling.

There are far more pressing and culturally useful tasks for the book/journal community worldwide to address and for which to provide at least partial correction than to take up yet once again the transitory fancies of this decade's true believers.

the pursuit of an age-old fancy; or, the resumed advent of the tower of cyber-babel

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