[IP] The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google
Title: The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google
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From: Mark Goldstein <markg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Organization: International Research Center
Reply-To: <markg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 01:15:14 -0700
To: <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google
For IP if you wish.
While my wife and I were traveling over the Christmas holiday in Paris, I was reading the International Herald Tribune over breakfast each day. There was an intriguing editorial on December 22 by Alberto Manguel titled “The pursuit of knowledge, from Genesis to Google” that I thought IP readers might find of interest.
“The desire to know everything on earth and in heaven is so ancient that one of the earliest accounts of this ambition is already a cautionary tale.” Though I at first expected the author would begin with Genesis’ telling of Adam & Eve’s eating of the tree of knowledge and being summarily ejected from paradise, he instead leads with the Tower of Babel (Genesis Chapter 11) and follows on to the Library of Alexandria. “If Babel symbolized our incommensurate ambition, the Library of Alexandria showed how this ambition might be achieved” with its annotated catalogues and recommended reading lists.
The author also focuses on the failure of Gustave Flaubert’s comic heroes Bouvard and Pecuchet to read everything on every branch of human endeavor and cull and compile a universal encyclopedia, yielding several object lesson for Google’s current efforts at digitizing significant holdings from some of the great libraries of the world, including a conservator’s concern for the fragility of electronic media storage. He concludes that “The world encyclopedia, the universal library, already exists and is the world itself.”
The editorial may be found on the International Herald Tribune site at http://iht.com/articles/2004/12/21/news/edmanguel.html, though it neglects to conclude with the author’s background given in the print edition. (Alberto Manguel’s latest book is “A Reading Diary.” His study on the idea of libraries, “The Library at Night,” will be published next year.) And to all a good night.
Best Regards,
Mark Goldstein
International Research Center
Voice & Fax: 602-470-0389
IRC: http://www.researchedge.com/
Harnessing Global Information Resources for Informed Decision Making
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