From papyri to the digital world: the evolution of knowledge

Historians, anthropologists, philosophers of science, librarians, and book researchers can all be considered ideal readers of Christian Jacob's recent work, From Lettered Worlds to Places of Knowledge (Ampersand), by French intellectual and director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). The work, which forms part of the Argentine publisher's Scripta Manent collection, compiles a series of articles that reflect on the history, production, and transmission of knowledge , in a journey that connects the Library of Alexandria with today's intangible digital world .

Jacob's aim is to propose a "spiral journey" at different levels about the nature of human knowledge and what grounds it, creates it, and makes it communicable. Is this a book about the history of libraries? No. But it is an approach to it and other spaces of knowledge, and it proposes a set of reflections on how knowledge is generated, preserved, and communicated, whether on papyrus, scrolls, flash drives, or in the elusive and fragile "cloud."

A core part of the text is based on the Library of Alexandria , which, as the author points out, despite being "such an influential institution," left "few material and documentary traces of how it functioned." Located in northern Egypt and immersed in the Hellenistic culture that created the city in 331 BC, it actually depended on the Museum, which offered it as a shared space for the intellectual community.

There, scholars could consult the collection of papyrus scrolls , located on shelves built into niches or small rooms. The Library was funded by purchases made by the authorities in Athens, but also by works requisitioned from ships docking in the Alexandrian port on the Mediterranean.

Calculations estimate that the place held 490,000 scrolls, which for Jacob represents the "condensation of the inhabited world on the Museum's shelves" and a truly "universal and saturated memory." A useful resource for orientation were Callimachus' Pinakes, some 120 scrolls that served as a catalog.

The Library was obviously only accessible to an elite, and its management was in the hands of figures such as Apollonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes, and Aristophanes of Byzantium, among others. The site's prestige prompted other kings to build and display their own book storage spaces , which also functioned as displays of their power and as laboratories for intellectual production.

Baghdad under the Abbasids, the courts of Persia, the Italian Renaissance, and the French absolutist monarchy, according to Jacob, all looked to Alexandria at different times as a beacon. It also had a particular influence on Imperial Rome. For centuries, the Library of Pergamon, in present-day Turkey, rivaled its Egyptian counterpart.

Philosophers, astronomers, historians, engineers, and even music lovers sought access to Alexandria to consult the works that allowed them to expand their worlds , in an era of scarce information. Orbiting around that place and the Museum, they generated theses on calculating the Earth's circumference, the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and the heliocentric hypothesis.

One of the many paradoxes of history is that such an important place, so focused on housing objects and ideas, has left no material traces of its construction. Various fires, looting, and wars ravaged the site, with kings of different religions sharing responsibility.

For Jacob, the fatal blow to the Library came from the military campaign of the Roman Emperor Aurelian against Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. In any case, transformed into ideas, Alexandria and its library resonate to this day.

The Book of Jacob, in its “spiral” journey, also addresses the changes in the production and transmission of knowledge with the arrival of digital technologies .

Like all intellectuals of his generation, he, born in 1955, was educated by searching libraries to find and read books and magazines , taking notes and creating index cards that were then stored in wooden or metal cabinets. Academic work had a much greater physical, tangible, and place-based component than it does today.

The arrival of multimedia devices and the Internet disrupted these tasks. Jacob states: “Today we are in a new Library of Alexandria.” As we know, we can consult an online article written by researchers from the University of Granada or the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal without leaving our room or a specialty café in Palermo.

On the other hand, the exchange of letters has evolved into the use of emails; this transition generates shorter and more direct messages than handwritten ones, the use of images, and the ability to have the email to which one is about to respond in the same "space." For the "learned world," as Jacob points out, email is "an instrument for weaving a network" that unites interlocutors from different countries, facilitates the organization of symposia, circulates information and texts, and coordinates the selection of thesis juries.

At the same time, these possibilities have a dark side. The average researcher "is often buried under a constant avalanche of emails, which pile up and overflow their inboxes, to which are added, even more numerous, all kinds of spam," Jacob emphasizes.

Furthermore, this present poses other problems for academic work: intellectual domain, due to the ease of copying texts from others without attributing authorship ; authentication, as it becomes difficult to distinguish what is valid and what is not in this kind of digital path into which the Internet is becoming; and perpetuation and preservation , since it is not known how many and which files to keep in a way that they can be consulted in the future.

The other "downside" is that these heavy, invisible blocks of data may disappear in a few years , unsaved. Jacob recalls the "technological hazards" and the human error or intentional act of deleting information stored only in emails. He wonders, in a question that is gradually becoming more intellectual, whether the historians of tomorrow "will still have that volatile archive at their disposal."

The concern for the survival of everything society writes and that is stored only in digital media reappears repeatedly in the text. In fact, the author asserts that the "digital humanities" must address, among other challenges, how to build and structure corpora of data , writings, images, audiovisual content, and statistics with standards that ensure the durability of this vast mass of information while remaining compatible with the technologies of the moment.

This same immensity of data poses another problem even today: how to choose, what to select, what to discard? How to "escape the fascination of the quantitative and the fantasies of exhaustiveness and accumulation, with their risks of flooding and intellectual paralysis?"

Finally, it is worth highlighting Jacob's vindication of the humanities, so degraded in discourse and practice by numerous governments in different latitudes. "The attempt to understand the universe of a Mesopotamian scribe, a Greek encyclopedist, a Renaissance physician, an African healer, or an Amerindian shaman is interesting in itself, and there is no need to make excuses or engage in a logic of utilitarian justification ."

The thinker emphasizes that in the social sciences, research is "the art of expanding horizons," an art that provides direction and meaning and that stimulates the journey that is every intellectual adventure.

From the world of letters to the places of knowledge , by Christian Jacob (Ampersand).