0.31 European elephants in the room (are they the ones with the  (Page 10/9)

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On August 4, 1914, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, reportedly stood in front of his office window looking out onto the dawn of St. James Park as the street lamps were being extinguished, and famously declared: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” August 4 was the day the British declared war on Germany. His  eerily prophetic statement came to represent the devastation of two world wars and the horrendous interwar period that followed.   

We are not quite likening the crisis facing scholarly communication, and the particular difficulties in regards to digital scholarship that this meeting is addressing, to two calamitous world wars. Yet for many of our peers, the potential loss of print culture and the institutional and professional structures that have been created around it seem nearly as momentous. For the majority of academics, intellectuals, journalists, and probably much of the reading public, print culture represents the pinnacle of mankind’s achievement: the legacy of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It is an inheritance that has resulted in some of the crowning glories of our shared cultural heritage, bridging languages, cultures, and time.

The digital, on the other hand, represents a return to the Dark Ages, the potential disappearance of a thousand years of intellectual achievement, a loss as huge as the  destruction of the great library of Alexandria. The digital, with its impermanence, mutability, fads, technology shifts, and hype, is not a brave new world but one fraught with changing expectations, littered with unusable devices, lost content, and a fair proportion of the population functionally illiterate:  an illiteracy as pervasive as that before the great enterprise of free elementary education that began in the West in the mid-nineteenth century.

Oddly enough, when looking for a quote (distantly remembered) about the analogy linking the Middle Ages to this new illiteracy, a Google search for  “digital middle ages” revealed thousands of hits, but none of them (at least in the first few pages of returns) referred to this idea. Rather, they demonstrated the abundance of scholarly and popular activity in rediscovering the Middle Ages through the use of digital technologies.

This abundance of information (scholarly, popular, even misleading) is available in seconds from anywhere in the world with Internet access. Or at least we presume when designing our projects that there is nobody left connecting on a dialup line (although this is how most people still connect in Ireland outside the major cities). This page was generated in Taiwan with dynamic translation demonstrating the democratizing of print as never before . Yet there is a dichotomy: the frontier mentality of the World Wide Web with its multifariousness, its leveling of high and low culture, the pressure it exerts towards open access and free availability of resources, is not a good fit with current academic structures and expectations of scholarship.