§1 cardiCast 97 – Mita Williams on blogging and Twitter
Some weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking about the “golden age” of library blogging and the end of library twitter with Hugh Rundle as part of a podcast series he’s been hosting on the Australian GLAM podcast called cardiCast.
The episode was released yesterday and I listened to it last night. I am now sitting with the irrefutable evidence that I am a person who unironically says, “Yup!” among other curious vocalisms that I would have otherwise denied ever uttering.
cardiCast is hosted by newCardigan, “a social and professional group for cultural memory workers.”
Today, I want to write a blog post about (cultural) memory work.
§2 Huginn and Muninn
My grandfather was once the borgmester of a small kommune called Vojens in Denmark. Vojens as a town still exists but it no longer exists as a separate political entity as it is now the second largest town in the Haderslev Municipality. Vojens used to have its own coat of arms featuring Huggin and Munin
In Norse mythology, Huginn (Old Norse “thought”[1]) and Muninn (Old Norse “memory”[2] or “mind”[3]) are a pair of ravens that fly all over the world, Midgard, and bring information to the god Odin.
Besides my family connection, I have always been fond of this particular coat of arms with it depiction of noisy mythology and silent industry. I liked it so much that I used it for my personal bookplates and, as you can see in the top left corner of this page, as a logo for this blog.
§3 Philosophy, Poetry, and History
Almost all Canadian academic libraries use the American Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system in our work and our public libraries mostly use Dewy Decimal Classification (DDC)
The main difference between DDC and LCC is their approach to classifying. Dewey’s system is a comprehensive classification to all topics, with no regard to the actual collections a library might hold. While this has allowed it to be successfully adapted into more modern classification systems for use outside of libraries, such as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC),[16] it does make it more unwieldy for large or specialized collections. On the other hand, Hanson and Martel designed LCC specifically for library use, which means while it does not completely enumerate the world, it does more reflect what books a library might hold.
The original collection of the Library of Congress was burned by British forces during the War of 1812. To restore the collection, Congress bought Thomas Jefferson’s personal collection of books. Jefferson had his own book classification system.
Jefferson arranged his 1783 Catalog of Books into three sections–History, Philosophy, and Fine Arts–adapted from Francis Bacon’s three categories of knowledge: Memory, Reason, and Imagination.
Diederot’s Encyclopédie was also adapted from Francis Bacon.
The three main branches of knowledge are: “Memory”/History, “Reason”/Philosophy, and “Imagination”/Poetry. This tree of knowledge was created to help readers evaluate the usefulness of the content within the Encyclopédie, and to organize its content.[34] Notable is the fact that theology is ordered under “philosophy” and that “Knowledge of God” is only a few nodes away from “divination” and “black magic“.
§4 The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
Readers of this blog know that I follow the work of child psychologist Alison Gopnik and her work has strongly informed how I think about the current state of artificial intelligence systems.
Earlier this year, Alison interviewed author Ted Chiang which was published by Public Books. It began with:
Alison Gopnik (AG): I am so delighted to be part of this conversation with Ted Chiang. When I started doing work trying to use children’s learning as a model for AI, I had about five different people who sent me copies of Ted’s amazing novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, including Ezra Klein when I was on his show. When I read it, I was so blown away by the fact that not only was this a wonderful novella about AI, but it was also the best literary account of being a parent and a caregiver that I had ever read. It’s interesting that there aren’t more conversations about caregiving in the literary tradition. We could think about some of the reasons why. But this seemed to me to be the most profound example of a fiction about caregiving and the one that captured caregiving best.
You can find the novella in the book Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang. Last week I finished the book and while I did find The Lifecycle of Software Objects as an insightful read, I think my favourite work in collection was The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.
I don’t want to spoil the short story, but I will let you know the work suggests that there are truths and memories that are right and there are truths and memories are accurate, and that accurate memories might not prove beneficial to our personal and societal relationships.
On the other hand…
§5 Calculated and Culpable Amnesia
Libraries, museums and archives are known as Memory Institutions.
I have explained to others that some people are more likely to support institutions when they can provide them with a direct connection to their grandparents.
When I searched online for a good introduction to the concept, I found a post from Lorcan Dempsey called Memory institutions redux: pluralizing memories and a stay against forgetting. The text should be read in full, but I want to pull out this particular quote because it captures two concepts in bold that I want to touch upon:
Linking these two texts, there is a contrast then between at least two conceptions of memory. First, there is an ‘Official History’ which entails a ‘Grand Narrative’ which in turn requires a calculated and culpable amnesia, a selective remembering and forgetting in the archive. Or, in the example above, the neglect of a monument to the Irish dead in the First World War. Second, there is a complicated and pluralized memory, a fuller record of mixed identities and experience based on stories which have to be retrieved. But such a pluralized memory often depends upon the archive or library or museum which intervenes to save and keep those memories.
When I read this post, what immediately came to mind was Hugh Rundle’s 2024 ANZREG Keynote, and the story he told about a recent project of the State Library of Queensland: “The Virtual Veteran is a generative-AI chatbot trained on a selection of texts the library holds about the First World War”.
Despite claiming that Charlie has “the persona of a World War I soldier”, his responses have the blandly safe tone you might expect from an official government spokesperson. The bot was trained on the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War 1914-1918; on newspaper articles from the time that were subject to government censorship; and on war correspondence donated to the library. Generative AI by its nature provides confident responses to any prompt based on the content it was trained on. When it was trained on the official narrative of a government that declared war in support of the British Empire, it’s hardly surprising that the result is a sanitised imperial view of the world.
What does Charlie have to say to Australians of Turkish, German, or Arab descent? How does the chat bot provide insight into the multiplicity of experiences Australians had during the first world war?
§6 Thought and Memory and Blogging
I have been blogging since February 4th 1999. I have written more than I can remember.
Where is a part of me that wonders whether I should feed all my archived texts into an LLM.
But what would I ask of that system that I wouldn’t ask of myself?
What would to mean to no longer trust myself to have remembered what is most essential in this moment?
The body is also a Memory Institution.