Offline Penumbras
The most interesting thing about this week’s readings for me is the offline penumbra in Patrick Leary’s article on the Victorians. Offline penumbra refers to a condition in which people become so accustomed to online searching that they forget about what is not on the internet; in effect, what is offline does not exist except for specialists (page 13). Leary mentions this about students in particular: “[o]ne result of the growing ubiquity of the online world that is already widely evident, particularly among our students, is a blindness to the limitations of the internet generally” (13). As I read the section on the offline penumbra, I began to realize that I was influenced by the blindness, too. This is a strange realization to me, because I have always surrounded myself by books (paper ones) and, outside of this class and searches of eBooks, I never read electronic texts for pleasure. When I was writing this post, I had a few small stacks of paper books on my right side from my classes. However, when I think back to some classes I took as an undergrad, I realize that I suffered from the offline penumbra syndrome.
As an undergrad, I was a philosophy major and obsessed with the ancient Greeks. I took classes on Plato, the Pre-Socratics, and even an independent study on Aristotle. I assumed, because I was surrounded by old, dusty, British translations in different libraries (some of the books had strong Victorian influences actually), that the internet was not creeping its way into my coursework. Now that I think back, however, I remember how much I used the Perseus Digital Library. I have wanted to post about that digital library, so here is my chance.
The great thing about the Perseus library is that it has all of those old philosophy books in the original Greek and in translation. All the text has hypertext links, which open up small windows with information about the meaning and frequency of the words, grammar, and so on. Please check out the site, but it can at times be painfully slow. There are also other non-philosophy, non-Greek texts on it, as well.
Once I discovered the Perseus library, I used it all the time (now and again these days, too). The problem is I now understand better the limits of the site. I do not know, for example, how accurate the transcriptions are. A bigger problem is that the site lulled me into thinking that I have direct access to the texts, and that leads me to ignore or be blind to the offline penumbra: the books in the library or even the originals on papyrus, vellum, parchment, or whatever. I probably will never see the originals, but I should not assume that what I see online is as good or better than the original copies. Maybe Perseus needs to add extra pages, if they have not already, of images of the available original texts.
Continuing with this idea of access to texts, the discussion of Holocaust testimonies in The Cultural Commonwealth report is interesting. I am intrigued by the possibilities of amassing thousands and thousands of documents. Professor Cohen has mentioned this in class a few times. I wonder what we could learn about the Holocaust by looking at so many testimonies. Beyond learning more about the Holocaust, we may be able to use the SHOAH Foundation’s collection to check Holocaust-deniers who claim that, because of the lack of evidence, we cannot say that there was genocide. Maybe we can take similarities between thousands of testimonies as evidence. The upshot of this for me is that I need both to be careful about what I assume about texts online and to be open to advantages of digital sources.
