Blog
What is a Date? (1)
By yorkc on August 4, 2010
What is a date? A seemingly trivial question, and perhaps Foucault would not appreciate the tongue-in-cheek tribute to his influential essay on authors. However, as digital humanists move to embrace online timeline tools and explore new ways to visualize temporal relationships, it’s worth examining whether the fundamental unit of a timeline, the “date,” fits our expectations. How do humanists use dates? Are these dates the same as computer dates, whose implementation reflects generations of software engineers filling specific needs in operating system and programming language design? By contrast, what is a humanities date “for”? As part of Hyperstudio’s exploration of digital humanities timelines, this series of four blog posts will probe the boundary between humanists’ dates and computer dates, with an eye to the practical consequences for timelining.
The author’s name, if nothing else, provides a convenient way to order a shelf of books. (Consider this Foucault for digital librarians.) Readers examining an unfamiliar novel by Jane Austen, nevertheless approach it with certain expectations in terms of genre, milieu, quality and so on conditioned by its shelf-mates by Austen. However, one could just as easily order the books by publication date, a scheme that might instead sensitize readers to the grand sweep of prior thought and inculcate a notion of the changing concerns of particular eras: an intellectual timeline, if you will.
Much like reading through a box of ordered letters between a group of close correspondents, classification by date rather than author presents an invitation: to periodize, to speculate about influence and intention, about cause and effect, to draw connections between seemingly disparate events and to situate specifics in context. Beyond all of these, it brings into contrast missing evidence, whose absence is otherwise hidden. In an ordered file of Beethoven’s correspondence, a wide silence opens in reply to his impassioned letter to his “Immortal Beloved”—immediately sparking curiosity and date-based inquiries. Did Beethoven destroy her reply, if any? Which female accomplice could he potentially have met in Karlsbad in July 1812?
Or, return to the analogy of a date-ordered library: here the shelves corresponding to materials from the Library of Alexander would doubtless stretch empty miles to mark Caesar’s careless torch. Wallace and Darwin’s books would jostle each other a mere call year apart. Horrified accounts of Aztec human sacrifice would take up dialog with neighbouring Counter-Reformation tracts and religious self-examination. As these and other cases suggest, viewing the world through the ordering lens of dates incites us to explore not just presences but also significant absences, explore unseen connections, periodize and debate influence and affiliation.
Carlo Ginzburg aptly terms the humanistic process “sleuthing,” and points out that its modus operandi bears more resemblance to Sherlock Holmes’ technique of close observation, with inferences drawn from many scattered clues, than it does to a scientist’s exploration of phenomena through repeated experiments. In the world I suggest above, ordered and examined through the lens of dates, the sleuth comes furnished with tools for several different kinds of temporal inference. Forensic accumulation accounts for some—for example, consider John Snow’s famous conclusion that the London cholera outbreak on 1854 was somehow tied to the water pump at Broad Street in Soho. Here the sheer number of cholera cases with dates within a single week suggested an affiliation or causal influence.
However, the accumulation of dates just as easily suggests inadequacies in the evidence. To take another cholera case: wandering through Neapolitan graveyards and noting the curious prevalence of dates around 1910-11 prompted historian Frank Snowden to uncover another cholera epidemic, which Naples’ council authorities had systematically covered up, for fear of damaging the city’s international trade. Here the accumulation of dates and silences conspired to suggest new avenues of research beyond the official timeline.
The addition of new dates in a series can completely reposition the accepted interpretation of an historical situation, and the motivations and affiliations of the actors involved. When Fidel Castro revealed (decades afterward) that he had in October 1962 requested that the Soviets launch an all-out nuclear strike on the United States—the missiles were already in place—it prompted scholars to re-envision the international dynamic of the era. Kennedy’s “finest moment” as a firm, strategic negotiator with the Soviet Union was revealed, as well, as the moment when the US pushed Cuba to trigger armageddon.
Perhaps more important than virtuoso interpretations of individual events, however, viewing knowledge by date develops a sensitivity for periodization: an intuitively-understood affiliation between specific circumstances and their larger context. So the mention of an American conscientious objector in 1970 immediately suggests a set of concerns and a timeline relevant to the Vietnam war, and a wider shift in American attitudes towards nationalism and citizenship. Or, the story of a Sephardic merchant in 1550s Amsterdam immediately identifies a specific milieu, probably involving Jewish persecution in the Spanish or Portuguese Inquisitions. Likewise, someone with a keen knowledge of Detroit would summon up very different pictures of the city in the 1950s golden era of unions, and in today’s economic hardship. So the process of seeing through dates may involve engagement with specific incidents; but the end proficiency is often aggregate, a form of cultural literacy involving rough knowledge of periods and milieux more than mastery of detail.
Hence, to the over-general question posed earlier, “what is a humanities date for?” we can scribble at least the beginnings of a list. Dates constitute an invitation to consider problems of influence and affiliation, to ponder the difficult boundary between co-occurrence and cause and effect, to situate specific incidents in context, to develop rough maps of periodization. This does not, of course, advocate for the primacy of timelining over other ways of seeing. Returning to the library metaphor: there is nothing necessary or natural about organizing knowledge, whether books or otherwise, according to either date or author. Pragmatic factors, such as the physical organization of a library as a “user-interface” could just as easily dominate. Hence it should come as no surprise that Harvard Library’s first catalog in 1723 classified books according to their size and Latin title. No doubt a similar rationale impels package stores to sort scotches onto the top shelf and trial sizes together elsewhere: this conserves shelf space, is esthetically harmonious, and correlates clientele with stocking patterns.
By contrast, how did the dates used by computers develop, and do they lend themselves to humanities timelining? The remaining posts in this series will consider, in turn, time and mechanical calculation; the genealogy of the computer date; and adapting computing dates to humanities purposes.
Next week: Time and mechanical calculation
Further materials on this post.
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1977).
Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop 9 (Spring 1980): 5-36.
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven. New York: Schirmer (1977).
Frank Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884-1911. Cambridge University Press (1995).
James Blight and janet Lang, Fog of war: lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield (2005).
John Caserta, “Lost in Time: The Decline and Fall of the Universal Library.” Harpers Magazine (Jan 2000).
Hayden White, Metahistory: the historical imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1973).
