ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Designing Intelligence to Suit a Particular Problem in a Time and Place: An Historical Polemic about Counting Bay Psalm Books

• In Event: CTRL ALT SHIFT. Expériences, Knowledge, Activism, Methods - 2

English Abstract

The influence of a system for intelligencing--the practice of collecting and reusing information to act--is often taken for granted by those engaged in intelligencing. For example, users of card files of fellows struggle with unstable identity, buyers of coloured pencils for reviewing journals reject non-hierarchical relationships, and harried scriveners filing in early modern pigeon holes don't have time to consider the postal fold as a topical boundary. In an historical investigation, the assumptions of a material system place us within a particular epistemic community. That is, the act of *adopting* a more-or-less everyday technique for a time, place, and community in the globe can signal association, training, and influence. Beyond the everyday technique, however, acts of *customisation* evince the individual's relationship to that community. As historians, this symmetry between *adoption* and *customisation* enriches our understanding of the past: the given everyday intelligencing system is illuminated by its partial rejection and failure. Indeed, this panel explores the theme of attending to radical uses of information technology.

The symmetric analysis of adoption against customisation demands further reflexive analysis: how does our deeper understanding of our subjects' information technologies apply to our understanding of our information technologies? In this paper I will outline some historical research into intelligencing systems and how I relate these analyses to the design, maintenance, and use of an information system I've adapted to the systematic bibliographical study of the Bay Psalm book. Accounting for over three hundred copies, spread over hundreds of libraries, examined over several years, this system adopts from one particular epistemic community and also rejects their assumptions along the way. I reflect on the short sightedness and advantages of both *customisation* and *adoption* as a reflexive mode of praxis in my research.

Author

• J.P. Ascher, University of Edinburgh