Two events this week have made me mull over our personal histories, our personal archives, and what we choose to leave behind.
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Mixed miscellanies
I think this is going to be a fairly varied collection of posts on stuff to do with art, science, culture, geekery and science communication. But we'll see, eh?
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We are all history in the making. How are you making yours?
- Date:
- Thursday, 15 May 2008 - 23:39 GMT
The first was at a Maths-Art Seminar at London Knowledge Lab on Tuesday night, or rather the walk back from LKL to Charing Cross afterwards with one of the attendees, Brian Wichmann, who was involved in the early development of Ada,) a programming language commissioned by the US Department of Defense to be suitable for safety-critical systems1. Now retired (and busier than ever), he’s heavily involved with the Computer Conservation Society and is researching the history of a particular computer from the 1960s.
No complete version of this computer exists (I forget the name, regrettably), and the documentation available is incomplete too – so rebuilding it would require several educated guesses and suppositions. This is not some relic from the ancient past, but a computer that was in use just forty years ago or so. One that he himself used to use, one that he himself used to have some of the documentation for, and one that he himself remembers throwing away some documentation for – documentation that they now need and want.
The second was tonight, at St Bride’s Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture, where Erik Spiekermann talked of his own personal history as a typesetter, compositor, graphic designer and type designer.
He’d hoped, he said, to dig out past key works to show how he had developed and designed them – but it was only when he went to look that he realised that much had been lost – binned, flooded, stolen or just mislaid. In amongst is 6000 book library and boxes and bundles from his past, gaps filled spaces where his past should have been.
“I realised I’ve not been good at keeping my archive”, he commented. It reminded me of my own previously-documented ruthlessness as a man half their age, and a talk I’d been to by Douwe Draaisma on autobiographical memory.
Apparently, our brains are constantly rewriting our past – or at least our memories of them. Refreshing the archive in our brains, merrily throwing out what it thinks it will no longer need, retelling our experiences to suit the facts that remain stored.
What must our brains discard in memories, smells, images and words, just as we discard paper, books, photos and notes. What will I come to regret not including in my physical archive, and what will I not know to regret omitting from my archive memory?
1 You don’t want Missile Command running on Windows VisualBasic. Trust me, I’m a computer scientist.
Last updated: Thursday, 15 May 2008 - 23:39 GMT
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Comments
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Lovely post, Scott.
Ever thought of keeping a journal? Then you can have that experience I get more and more these days: sometimes I flip through my old notebooks at random and read about events and people about which I have no memory whatsoever. Literally none, so much so that even reading about it doesn’t trigger the memories. It could have happened to someone else. Wiped.
But I like the fact that it is preserved, all the same.
I think its Dave Allen who promotes the idea of having a ‘system’ that you can trust to hold your diary, records, materials, etc because then your brain, once accepting that the system works, stops recycling through these things and allows you less stress and more time to be creative and productive.
I wonder sometimes whether in putting stuff online whether we are in fact diminishing the power of our own memories. Certainly in dealing with undergraduates I am often shocked by how poor their memories are. They are used to having it all at their fingertips via Google, so they don’t bother to actually remember anything.
I find that when I go back and even look at old photos, but especially read old diary entries, that there is a sort of cognitive dissonance. These don’t jibe anymore with the person I am now, and I don’t quite fit in the head anymore of who I was then. After a while it makes me really uncomfortable, like wearing the wrong strength spectacles.
Happy to see you credit Douwe Draaisma; he wrote a great popular science book entitled Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older (reviewed in link).
Maybe it was the KDF9? (The computer from the 60s?) The date would be about right, I think.
Ever thought of keeping a journal?
The closest I get is writing a short scribble of what I did in my diary each day – but its a case of “LKL event maths art” rather than a dear diary… I thought I should try something like that before, but its finding myself the patience to find the time. A friend is one of many on flickr doing Project 366 a daily self-portrait. I thought about that too… but commitment, me? (sez he, 6 years, 51 weeks, 2 days into his current job)
Heather: I know of Douwe’s book through work – and am fortunate to have met him too. He’s lovely. I remember that.
The trouble with maintaining one’s own archive is that we’re generally too busy creating more and more to be archived. I am quite aware of the need to do it and take photos, keep copies of notes, tickets, souvenirs etc. but filing them is another story! Also there’s only so much space without moving house.
I thought digitising photos & press cuttings etc and sharing the result would be a good idea. No point in hoarding all this stuff if no one sees it and electrons take up less space than hard copy. So I tried to document one period in my life in a blog ( http://workstowear.wordpress.com ) but it’s ground to a halt. Looking back is really a lot less fulfilling than the next project. I guess I’ll leave it all to my cousin and my nephew to throw away in 30 or 40 years.
I guess I’ll leave it all to my cousin and my nephew to throw away in 30 or 40 years.
Or, as seems to be common, to do in your retirement… :)
No, when I retire, I’m going to organize my grandfather’s stamp collection. I’m serious. He never got around to it, and neither did my mother. If I get a chance, it might be worth something to someone, and if not, I’ll leave the whole pile to my kids as is. As was.
I took monthly photos of my first child with a clock set to 12:05, then 12:10 etc. each month until about 5:15. I only made it to 2:30 or so with the second child. It’s not too late to snap a couple more – but how much more fun it would have been to look back on, had I kept up regularly! Diaries and blogs are kind of the same.
What is this thing you Earthlings call “retirement”?
When the govt. forces me to stop working for ICMS because of my age, or if we win the lottery and I can pack it in early, I’ll be too busy with all the interesting stuff I couldn’t do because I had to spend time earning a living. Retirement is not a big empty time waiting to be filled by archiving.
Better to make some effort to archive as you go and hope that’s good enough.
Retirement is not a big empty time waiting to be filled by archiving.
Don’t think “archiving”, think, “greatest hits”. “retrospective” or “telling the young kids how it was done”.