转帖:由于电子邮件,未来的历史学家写历史起来可要难了?
发布时间：2007-01-16 00:41
分类名称：默认分类
分类名称：默认分类
Send an e-mail? Just forget it...Anjana Ahuja
In the summer of 1945, Robert Oppenheimer sent a cryptic telegram to his friends at the University of California, Berkeley: “Any time after the 15th would be a good time for our fishing trip . . .” Thus did the physicist summon a trusted coterie to the desert of New Mexico to witness, on July 16, the first detonation of the atomic bomb. Sometimes it is only through written records such as this — telegrams and letters — that the friendships and feuds of our great scientists can be charted. Maurice Wilkins, credited with Francis Crick and James Watson with discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, referred to their colleague Rosalind Franklin in a letter to Crick as “our dark lady”. This memorable phrase fed the idea that Franklin, whose work precipitated the DNA breakthrough, was a thorn in the side of her male co-workers.
Now that e-mail has largely replaced the written word in scholarly communication, academics fear that future historians will have a much tougher time decoding the past. “It is not just that searching through a hard disk or database is less romantic than poring over a dusty box of old letters in an archive . . . Far more worrying is the question of whether e-mail and other electronic data will be preserved at all,” Robert Crease, a philosopher and science historian at the State University of New York, writes in Physics World.
Professor Crease has a point: nobody has been able to read the first e-mail ever sent. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson, a programmer working in Massachusetts, sent a message from his machine to the one next to it. Unfortunately, he has forgotten what he typed (he suspects it was QWERTYUIOP but isn’t sure).
I suspect that the rapidity and ubiquity of e-mail is a blessing. Academics can whip up intemperate responses in an instant and press “send” before the urge for diplomacy intrudes. This confers an honesty to them. Blogs, meanwhile, have become an exciting arena for gladiatorial spats, such as that between the physicists Peter Woit and Lubos Motl, who disagree over string theory. Motl calls Woit a “crackpot”. Woit’s response? “His (Motl’s) views on almost every topic are completely idiotic.” And, to think, you don’t even need a stamp!
If Xerox has its way, though, printed paper will be no guarantee of posterity. The company is developing “erasable paper” — printouts in which the ink fades after a day. The ink contains a compound that changes colour when exposed to light and disappears after 16 hours. So far, Xerox researchers have been able to re-use the erasable paper up to 50 times. Some are sceptical about whether new paper technologies are called for. As I type this from beneath a mountain of e-mail printouts, old cuttings, magazines, press releases, notepads and letters — a veritable one-woman campaign against the paperless office — I am not one of them.
Have Your Say Unfortunately, unless an emphasis on research skills and objective discussion in the classroom based on respect and knowledge and not opinion, agenda, and propaganda are reinstated into the educational systems along with free thought within the realm of disciplined debate, so the goal of education is, again, to teach the ability to think , no amount of accrued documentation will matter a whit.
If Histories ,Political Science, American, and British Literatures and the Great Classics of our Western Tradition are not required in the curricula and the public libraries and demonstrated to be of profound import to existence, the degree of sheer ignorance will , also, render documented histories moot.
C Barnett, Lathrup Village, USA/Mich.
I do not think that e-mail poses such a formidable problem for future historians as is often made out to be. There would be people(prominent or otherwise) who would store their e-mails, though archiving would naturally be a problem.
Secondly, the availability of documents from the past is often a matter of chance. More often than not, they survive for the use of historians not because they have been preserved consciously but because they have not been thrown away. So just as today's historians find a bunch of letters or tablets or incriptions, future ones may find hard disks. We may have developed by then technologies to decipher them, like the Rosetta stone or the hieroglyphics.
Abhay Datar, Pune, India
In the summer of 1945, Robert Oppenheimer sent a cryptic telegram to his friends at the University of California, Berkeley: “Any time after the 15th would be a good time for our fishing trip . . .” Thus did the physicist summon a trusted coterie to the desert of New Mexico to witness, on July 16, the first detonation of the atomic bomb. Sometimes it is only through written records such as this — telegrams and letters — that the friendships and feuds of our great scientists can be charted. Maurice Wilkins, credited with Francis Crick and James Watson with discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, referred to their colleague Rosalind Franklin in a letter to Crick as “our dark lady”. This memorable phrase fed the idea that Franklin, whose work precipitated the DNA breakthrough, was a thorn in the side of her male co-workers.Now that e-mail has largely replaced the written word in scholarly communication, academics fear that future historians will have a much tougher time decoding the past. “It is not just that searching through a hard disk or database is less romantic than poring over a dusty box of old letters in an archive . . . Far more worrying is the question of whether e-mail and other electronic data will be preserved at all,” Robert Crease, a philosopher and science historian at the State University of New York, writes in Physics World.Professor Crease has a point: nobody has been able to read the first e-mail ever sent. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson, a programmer working in Massachusetts, sent a message from his machine to the one next to it. Unfortunately, he has forgotten what he typed (he suspects it was QWERTYUIOP but isn’t sure).
I suspect that the rapidity and ubiquity of e-mail is a blessing. Academics can whip up intemperate responses in an instant and press “send” before the urge for diplomacy intrudes. This confers an honesty to them. Blogs, meanwhile, have become an exciting arena for gladiatorial spats, such as that between the physicists Peter Woit and Lubos Motl, who disagree over string theory. Motl calls Woit a “crackpot”. Woit’s response? “His (Motl’s) views on almost every topic are completely idiotic.” And, to think, you don’t even need a stamp!
Have Your Say Unfortunately, unless an emphasis on research skills and objective discussion in the classroom based on respect and knowledge and not opinion, agenda, and propaganda are reinstated into the educational systems along with free thought within the realm of disciplined debate, so the goal of education is, again, to teach the ability to think , no amount of accrued documentation will matter a whit.If Histories ,Political Science, American, and British Literatures and the Great Classics of our Western Tradition are not required in the curricula and the public libraries and demonstrated to be of profound import to existence, the degree of sheer ignorance will , also, render documented histories moot.
C Barnett, Lathrup Village, USA/Mich.
I do not think that e-mail poses such a formidable problem for future historians as is often made out to be. There would be people(prominent or otherwise) who would store their e-mails, though archiving would naturally be a problem.
Secondly, the availability of documents from the past is often a matter of chance. More often than not, they survive for the use of historians not because they have been preserved consciously but because they have not been thrown away. So just as today's historians find a bunch of letters or tablets or incriptions, future ones may find hard disks. We may have developed by then technologies to decipher them, like the Rosetta stone or the hieroglyphics.
Abhay Datar, Pune, India
