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  3. About Archives At some point most of us realize that having a personal arc

About Archives At some point most of us realize that having a personal arc

游客2023-12-28  6
问题    About Archives
   At some point most of us realize that having a personal archival strategy is an inescapable aspect of modern life: one has to draw the line somewhere. What should the policy be toward children’s drawings and report cards? Toward personal letters and cancelled checks? Toward family photographs and wedding mementos? Toward favorite but no longer usable articles of clothing? People work out ad hoc answers to such questions, usually erring, I suspect, on the side of overaccrual. My father who is an artist, still has all his art school sketchbooks from when he was in his early teens, and he has some 10, 000 Polaroid photographs of himself that he took over the years in order to capture details of lighting and drapery. He has a field of newspaper clippings about Fordham football games from the 1930s. Almost everyone seems to save — to "curate" , as archaeologists say — issues of National Geographic. That is why in garbage landfills copies of that magazine are rarely found in isolation; rather they are found in herds, when an entire collection has been discarded after an owner has died or moved.
   I happen to be an admirer of the archiving impulse and an inveterate archivist at the household level. Though not quite one of those people whom public-health authorities seem to run across every few years, with a house in which neatly bundled stacks of newspaper occupy all but narrow aisles. I do tend to save almost everything that is personal and familial, and even to supplement this private hoard with oddities of a more public nature — a calling card of Thomas Nast’s, for instance, and a baseball bat of Luis Aparicio’s and Kim Philby’s copy of The Joy of Cooking.
   I cannot help wondering, though, whether as a nation we are compiling archives at a rate that will exceed anyone’s ability ever to make sense of them. A number of observers have cited the problem of "information overload" as if it were a recent development, largely the consequence of computers. In truth, the archive backlog has been a problem for millennia. The excavation of thousands of cuneiform tablets in the ancient archives of Ebla, in what is now Syria, was hugely important, but it will be many decades before the tablets are fully translated, and by then further discoveries will no doubt have dug scholars more deeply as it were, into a hole. A few years ago a Vatican official spent a morning taking me through the rich labyrinths and frescoed recesses of the Vatican Library: "Do you even know what you have?" I asked at one point. He shrugged and said that although the name of every item probably existed in the records somewhere — " Here, like this," he said, pulling out an 18th century ledger and pointing to an entry in an elegant hand — he guessed that no one had actually opened up and looked at two-thirds of the collection.
   Writing’s great advantage over memory has ever been that it allows one to remember what one can then forget about — an invitation to warehousing. The process keeps speeding up, and Roy Williams, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology’s Center for Advanced Computing Research, has attempted to calculate how fast. He notes that the amount of information now stored in all printed sources everywhere in the world is roughly equivalent to two hundred petabytes, a petabyte being one quadrillion bytes. In contrast, Williams has calculated, the amount of information that will have accumulated in online media alone by the year 2000 — that is in the course of a mere couple of decades — is two and a half times as much as that, and he conceded that this figure may be a gross underestimation.
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答案    关于收藏
   我们大多数人都会在一生中的某个时刻认识到，对于个人书面材料的去留制定一个策略，是现代生活中的应有之举：每个人都要确定一个标准。幼年的涂鸦、成绩单该怎么处理?私人信件、用过的支票呢?家里人的照片、结婚纪念品?曾经钟爱过但是现在已经不穿的衣服?对于这些东西，人们会心血来潮，随意做出决定，然而，却往往错在多多益善上面。父亲是画家，至今还保留着他十多岁时上艺术学校画速写的本子，以及多年来用拍立得相机拍摄的上万张自己的照片，以捕捉灯光服饰细微的差别。他有一摞福德汉姆橄榄球队比赛的剪报，从20世纪30年代开始，一张不落。看来，我们每个人都在储存，或者用考古学者的话说，是在“收藏”《美国国家地理》杂志。也许正是因为这个原因，在垃圾填埋场很少见到单本的《美国国家地理》，一旦见到，都是成摞成摞的。那是杂志主人去世或搬走之后，才舍得扔掉的。
   我碰巧也是一个有着收藏癖好的人，一个家庭级的顽固不化的收藏家，尽管还不像卫生部门每隔几年就能碰上一个的那种人，家里堆满了一捆捆报纸，只剩下窄窄的几条过道容人通过。但是凡是个人或家里的东西，我也几乎一件不落地统统收藏起来，除此之外，还要收藏一些公众人物的物品，以作补充，像托马斯-纳斯特的名片、路易斯-阿帕里修的棒球拍子、金-非尔比写的《烹饪之乐》等等。
   然而，我忍不住要问，作为国家，我们存档速度是否太快，人们根本来不及将它们全看过来。有些观察人士将这种现象归咎于“信息爆炸”，好像这个问题是最近才出现的，是随着计算机而来的。实际上，档案存多用少的问题已有几千年的历史了。从现今叙利亚爱尔巴出土的几千块楔形文字牌意义重大，不过，要破译这些文字牌需要几十年的时间。到那时，会发掘出更多的楔形文字牌，考古学者无疑会进入更深洞穴发现新的文物。几年前，我在梵蒂冈一位官员陪同下，花了一个上午，参观了迷宫一般的梵蒂冈图书馆，馆内曲径通幽，有许多绘有壁画的阅览室、藏书室。“你们是否真的知道有多少藏书?”走到某一处，我问道。那位官员耸了耸肩膀，答道，尽管每一本藏书都可能登记在册， “瞧，就像这本书一样，”他边说边抽出一本18世纪的登记册，指着一处笔迹娟秀的条目。不过据他猜测，图书馆里有三分之二的藏书从来没有人真正打开看过。
   书写对于记忆而言，最大的优势莫过于可以记住本来会忘掉的事情，这就促使人们大量地储存信息。这一过程在不断加速。加利福尼亚理工学院高级计算研究中心研究员罗艾-威廉姆斯试图计算出这个过程到底有多快。威廉姆斯发现，迄今为止，世界各地以印刷媒介储存的文字材料大约相当于200 petabyte，一个petabyte相当于2的50次方个字节，总共合2000亿个字节，而威廉姆斯计算出来，到2000年为止，仅仅网上储存的信息量，也就是前后大约几十年光阴的储存量，是印刷文字材料的2．5倍。而且，威廉姆斯承认，这个数字还可能是被大大低估了的。
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