Motivations, Highlights & Challenges – part 2
Motivations, Highlights & Challenges – part 2
by Digby Hartridge
Studying the history of Africa, especially in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, has been instructive. Over the last twenty or thirty years there came a gradual shift in attitudes – I’m best qualified to speak of attitudes to Zimbabwe and to Empire in Britain. And a sharper change in the facilities available to amateurs, and I suspect to professionals. I’ve never found it easy to conform to fashions, whether in day-to-day life or in theory. My degree is an uncommon combination of English, Economics and Social Anthropology (I’m most at ease with the latter). I started working as an archivist rather than an historian, my loyalty going to the sources rather than an ideology; then I became an oral historian. As a librarian I was more interested in the reader than the mechanics of running a workplace. An MPhil proposal on patterns of readership was turned down on the grounds no one was qualified to supervise it (only recently has the topic been treated systematically). Anyway, I’m an accidental cross-disciplinarian, a would-be Renaissance man; when forced to join LinkedIn I called myself an “Antiquarian”, and felt all the better for it.
Unfortunately, the world prefers specialists and clearcut paths. When I started it was no great handicap: public libraries retained elements of the glory days: the remnants of the brilliant subject specialisation system; affordable interlibrary loans (books and photocopies of journal articles); adequate book budgets. Secondhand booksellers, eagerly responding to the opportunities provided by the internet, allowed me to buy a few tattered copies of quite rare books. Publishing wasn’t yet totally dominated by an oligopoly and more imprints took risks. “Political correctness” (give me a better term!) wasn’t triggering self-censorship – I guess I’m thinking of the hold universities, market-led by students, was securing on course content and then scholarship. (Look, space won’t allow me to develop the idea and you’ve heard it before…) Ah, and the internet was broadening the scope for studying from home in a way only dreamers had envisaged.
What has happened? Public libraries are a joke; reserve stocks have been ruthlessly sold off; interloans are limited in range and by price. University libraries are closed to outsiders. Amazon robs most booksellers of their profit margins, as do other promising cooperative schemes as greed and consolidation took over; once-popular, as well as obscure titles, have rocketed in price. Britain became first ignorant and then ashamed of its past (the two reinforcing each other). We’ve always found it difficult to understand the mindsets of the past; we certainly don’t realise there have been losses as well as gains.
But it’s the state of the internet that grieves me most. A third of the sites I used no longer exist (independent studies bear this out). Google and its competitors seem to employ the same tired algorithms, and the results of course refer repetitively to consumables and celebrities and it’s suddenly impossible to bring up more than ten measly sites at a time. It’s also harder to eliminate irrelevant answers: perhaps the assumptions of the programmers are narrower? And I suspect AI will encourage uniformity. So far such “deep learning” is unreliable, as an old colleague found out when asking about David Livingstone – the answer showed confusion over the chronology of his journeys to the Zambesi.
