How will California survive the end of the American empire?

The question might seem hypothetical, but I found it inescapable last week in Rome, where I was running a global forum on the future of direct democracy. Our forum’s mission, on its face, was hopeful: Hundreds of participants, from 80 countries, discussed how to make the world’s democracies more participatory through initiatives, referenda, and other tools.

But each morning, as I left my budget hotel, I found myself picking through the less-hopeful remains of the fallen empires that lay directly in my path.

To reach Rome’s city hall, the conference site, I had to walk up Capitoline Hill, passing two ancient monuments, each of which inspired a different thought.

The first monument, the Colosseum, seemed less special with each day’s viewing. I mean, what’s the big deal about a dilapidated old stadium known for hosting violent spectacles on the field and in the stands? Heck, you can go to Los Angeles and Oakland and see similar coliseums today.

But the second monument, the Roman Forum, felt more profound and sobering, every time I passed. Its layers of ruins—of temples and stores and the grand plans of so many great powers—serve notice that no regime and no republic lasts forever.

Still, the most enduring lessons of the Eternal City lie not in the ends of eras, but in how people respond in the aftermath of those ends.

A new book, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings, shows how Romans, having been conquered so many times over thousands of years, have responded in every conceivable way in the post-sacking. They have brushed off some defeats quickly, while stewing over others, according to author Matthew Kneale, a British novelist who is a longtime Rome resident. Romans have sometimes abandoned the city, and in other cases have returned to the city to buck it up. They have come together, and they have turned on one another. They have descended into authoritarianism as well as anarchy. They have turned toward religion and turned away from it.

But Rome has survived because Romans eventually “shrugged off catastrophes and made their city anew, adding a new generation of great monuments,” Kneale writes.

Californians can’t match the history of Romans, but our state too was reshaped after apocalypses. For all our booms, from the Gold Rush to Silicon Valley, the state has mostly been fashioned during the busts, when we were forced to reassess. Our current state constitution was a response to disastrous financial panics of the 1870s. Our state government’s progressive structure was fashioned by survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake while their city lay in ruins.

Today, Californians from Redding to Santa Rosa to Montecito are wrestling with the decisions that come after massive destruction from fire or mudslides. Do we stay? And if we do, do we rebuild the way it was, or figure out something different?

In a larger sense, the state is still struggling to renew itself after the Great Recession. Our record in this is mixed. The economy has come back—along with our spirit—but we responded to the housing bust by not building housing, creating a historic shortage. And it appears that, by embracing Jerry Brown’s excessive frugality, we missed a great chance to rebuild our state’s crumbling infrastructure when land and construction were cheaper at the beginning of this decade.

But for all California’s experience with disaster, the soon-to-come end of the American empire—accelerated by crushing debt, faltering defense alliances, educational underinvestment, trade wars, racial resentment, and, of course, that Nero in the White House—will test California like never before. We are accustomed to being the richest part of the richest country, playing in an international economy that runs on our money and follows our rules. So it is hard to know how we’ll respond when all of that changes.

Will we be drawn deeper into the internal fights of a polarized America, and ape its violence? Will we quietly accept a diminished status? Will we fight and turn on each other? Or will we come together, reinvent ourselves, and find a distinguished place in a less American world?

Rome is the perfect place right now to think through such questions, not only because it’s old but also because the city has a vital young government that is thinking anew. Led by 40-year-old Virginia Raggi, the first woman to rule Rome since Marozia in the year 930, the government is run by an internet-based party called the Five Star Movement, which uses an online program (named Rousseau) to let members choose its candidates and determine its agenda.

And so ancient Rome is now run by a team of highly educated, self-critical millennials who don’t share an ideology but are obsessed with technology. As they will tell you, it’s unclear whether Five Star can transform Rome and reinvent democracy with its digital platforms, or whether it will splinter or fail like so many other populist movements. (One worrying fact: At the national level in Italy, Five Star is governing via a tenuous coalition that includes an anti-immigrant Trumpian party called the League.)

But it was refreshing to spend long days with the young people running Rome. Unfortunately, each day’s optimism would last only until I went back to the hotel, where the lobby TV was turned to CNN.

The screen conveyed all the late-empire awfulness of America’s leaders. And it posed that question again: How will California get through this? The psychologist from Palo Alto dominating the news embodied the Californian predicament. There Dr. Blasey Ford was, struggling to maintain her cool and her dignity in the face of the American meltdown.

From Rome, it looked like opera buffa, with the tenor Kavanaugh singing his angry arias about the maiden he claims he did not violate. And why couldn’t they get younger actors for the chorus of senators? Our own representative on that stage, Dianne Feinstein, is more than a half-century older than the officials I was seeing at Rome’s city hall. How could the New World of America have gotten so old, and the Old Europe of Rome become so young?

One evening, Mayor Raggi and her staff took hundreds of conference attendees to a fashionable, open-air Roman nightclub. I quickly realized that I’m not cool enough for my own conference.

The nightclub was covered by a canopy of cypress trees so beautiful that even Monterey peninsula residents would marvel. And, in another California-style twist, different areas of the club seemed to represent different ecosystems—marsh, forest, beach—while various bars and food stations offered wildly different cultural styles—Japanese, Thai, Cajun, TexMex, Hawaiian, and something reminiscent of Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room. There were hammocks, beds, and even an attached second nightclub with its own maze of laurel bushes.

I couldn’t see a sign, so I asked a manager for the place’s name. “The Sanctuary,” he replied.

California is proudly a sanctuary state for unauthorized immigrants. But when empires fall, we all need sanctuary. Here’s hoping that, when the time comes, California can construct its own new and diverse democracy on top of the ruins of the American one.

The post How Will California Survive the End of America’s Empire? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A mythology grew up around the importance of inserting graphic elements at the ends of written online text: Because we aren’t face-to-face with our interlocutor, we need to provide additional information to convey what our demeanor, body stance, or vocal intonation might have offered. During the early popularization of email and IM, newbies were warned that online messages could be easily misunderstood. As a safeguard, emoticons could help.

Over time, online graphic markers have evolved in type, number, and function. The Japanese invented kaomoji, a version of emoticons but written horizontally, in 1986, and the style spread in Asia. GIFs—essentially small pictures, these days often animated—first appeared in 1987. And then there are emojis, initially introduced on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s. (The word “emoji” sounds as if it’s related to “emoticon,” but it’s a combination of two Japanese words meaning “picture” and “character”.) Though it feels as if there are now zillions of emojis, the official total in the Unicode Standard was just over 2600 as of July 2017. Users of mobile devices can pluck off what they like to incorporate into messages.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, we might think that emojis, like their emoticon and kaomoji ancestors, could be relied upon to clarify our online written messages. It turns out, though, that emojis are subject to the same potential pitfalls as traditional speech and writing.

Emoji cookies. Photo courtesy of Clare Griffiths/Flickr.

At its core, human language enables people to convey meaning to one another. When language or other symbolic systems don’t seem adequate to express what’s on our minds, we get creative. We repurpose existing words to have new meanings, as when in the 1950s, Americans began to use the word “moonlighting” to mean working a second job (as it were, by the light of the moon). We borrow from elsewhere, as with the wonderfully onomatopoetic “schlep,” taken from Yiddish, which had earlier schlepped over from Middle High German.

We also borrow (or make up) words or symbols that concisely express what otherwise would require a whole phrase. Think of German “Schadenfreude,” which is definitely shorter than “pleasure derived from the misfortune of others.” Or take the “thinking face” emoji——or the “person getting a massage” emoji—. The expressive power of today’s emojis make the original smiley and frowny seem primitive.

Even with plenty of words, though—or plenty of emojis—communication can be misleading or ambiguous. For communication to be successful, both sender and recipient need to assign the same meaning to symbols. But there may be no guarantee of a match. If I’m your supervisor, and I say, “Just take an hour” for lunch, you might bristle because you interpret me to be a stickler for time on the job, when I mean to encourage you to get out of the office and relax. (This is an actual example. It took two years before my administrative assistant revealed she’d felt insulted.) When The New York Times tweeted on June 4, 2017 that “The London attacks [on London Bridge] hit a nation still reeling from the shock of the bombing in Manchester almost 2 weeks ago,” resilient Brits reminded the world that in the U.K., “reeling” denotes a Scottish form of dancing. With emojis, if I send you a message that just shows a person in a bed——am I saying that I’m going to bed? That you should? That I’m about to buy a bed? That I’m in the hospital? It turns out that pictures rely on context for correct interpretation, just as words do.

But there’s another requirement for communication (offline and online) to be successful, and that is knowing how to express what we want to say. Writers have long looked to others for help. Take the old-fashioned genre of “complete letter writers”—books which provided sample missives for all occasions, from writing home to your family to asking a business associate for money. By the early 20th century, when use of the telegraph became more familiar and affordable, Western Union started offering pre-set messages for those who (in the words of Annteresa Lubrano, author of The Telegraph) “needed help in finding the right words for the right occasion.”

Emojis on Halloween, 2014. Photo courtesy of Chris Blakely/Flickr.

Then there’s the printed greeting card, which first appeared in the mid-19th century. Those purchasing such cards don’t need to figure out what to say or how to say it. Be it a wedding or birthday, retirement or death, just sign the card, address the envelope, affix a stamp, and find a mailbox.

Sometimes greeting card messages accurately convey what is in our hearts. But not always. Valentine’s Day cards are the perfect example. Stand at the greeting cards section of a store in the run-up to February 14, and you find men and women purchasing mushy sentiments that hardly represent what they feel about their significant other. The same duplicity occurs in spoken language: Think of passing an acquaintance on the street, asking “How are you doing?” and hastening on before waiting for an answer, or of telling a person you instantly dislike, “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

What about using pre-fabricated emoticons or emojis in online communication? Do we always mean what they say? Sometimes we insert graphic markers because we feel we are supposed to. Teenage girls, studies have found, judge male age-mates to be unfeeling if they don’t liberally pepper their text messages with graphic add-ons. At the other end of the user spectrum, my professional colleagues of a certain age are now inserting icons from their mobile phone menus, though they would never wink or stick out their tongue that way IRL, even with their closest friends. When I ask why, the answers are “It’s fun,” “It makes me feel young,” or “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

As teenage girls, mature academics, and millions of others can attest, using graphic markers can add enjoyment, along with creativity, and often clarity, to online communication. Such benefits are important because they encourage us to think about what meanings and emotions we wish to convey to others.

However, as with spoken and written language, is there any guarantee that our symbols will consistently convey to our interlocutor what is in our minds or hearts? As any linguist—or psychiatrist—will tell you: Don’t count on it.

The post Emojis Don’t Give Meaning to Our Deepest Feelings appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What does “crowd-work platform” mean? Basically, Mechanical Turk is a website where workers (“Turkers”) can find jobs and employers (“requesters”) post them. Jobs are varied, anything one might do on a computer that a computer cannot do alone—tagging photos, writing copy, classifying videos, taking surveys. But jobs are not very big. Instead, each big project is broken down into numerous tiny “microtasks,” called Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs.

Imagine, for example, if a requester wanted to use Mechanical Turk (mTurk) to translate this article into French. Offline, someone might hire a single person to translate the whole thing. But on mTurk the piece would be cut into single sentences, turning one job into hundreds of small jobs. The entire pile appears online, on the mTurk dashboard, at once. Thousands of workers at their different computers rush the pile, grabbing as many as they can.

The workers complete all of those sentences at the same time, so the translation takes just a few minutes—rather than the few days it might take one person working alone. The HIT method is also cheaper than employing a single worker, as each sentence pays only a penny or two. Amazon facilitates the entire process. The job poster just has to upload the work, prepay Amazon’s fees, and wait a short while.

Cheap, easy, fast: No surprise that businesses and academics use mTurk frequently. The most common business tasks posted are transcription, content creation, classification, and feedback. Academics—as much as half of requesters at any given time are researchers—often seek study participants (asking them to provide information as innocuous as their favorite food or as disturbing as their experience of sexual abuse). Since academics tend to offer the worst pay on the platform, workers have gone so far as to create a set of guidelines for researchers to urge better treatment. Businesses are not much better. One study found the median hourly wage for all mTurk tasks is only $1.38.

mTurk likes to emphasize worker perks. You can work when you want, where you want. Most of the tasks do not take advanced skills to complete. People who struggle to find a job offline—such as those with disabilities, those with criminal convictions, and those who must stay home—can make money Turking. And supposedly, you can be choosy about the work you want to do, skipping tasks that you don’t like or that you feel do not pay enough.

But that wasn’t my experience. I started at mTurk when it opened in November of 2005. An entrepreneur, I had always attempted to stay on the cusp of profitable online work, and I was intrigued. Within just a few minutes I was choosing which of three images shown on screen best represented the front door of a business. I didn’t see it as work—more an experiment, something new to try while the kids were sleeping.

Then in April of 2010, my husband lost his job. We had just bought our first home, and when we moved I’d closed the daycare I ran. I realized mTurk would have to be my family’s income. I worked seven days a week, sometimes 17 hours a day, to make enough. While my husband went back to school, and over the two years it took him to find a new job, I kept Turking to feed us and pay our mortgage.

I developed a ganglion cyst in my wrist, then tennis elbow, then problems with my trapezius muscle in my shoulder. There was a psychological toll as well. “Content moderation” work on mTurk can mean exposure to some of the worst imagery available online: tagging a photograph of decapitated heads, classifying photographs and videos of animals being tortured and murdered or children being sexually abused.

Could I have refused these tasks? Technically, yes, although there is no way to definitively know the content of a task before you accept it. But you cannot be picky when you have a daily income goal to meet. You don’t know if another task will pop up—and most HITs pay less than a dime per piece. The worker flexibility and choice that Amazon touts, therefore, was to me mostly a mirage.

A typical day began as soon as I woke up. I would turn on my “refreshers,” scripts which looked at HITs posted and alerted me to anything feasible. I looked at my Dashboard, which told me how much of my recent work had been approved or rejected. If things were okay, I could get breakfast. And lunch, since I knew I would not be making it to the kitchen again any time soon. If there was some good work up, I would rush and make my dinner as well, preparing for a long day at the keyboard, during which teeth might not be brushed, showers not taken, doctor’s appointments missed, and my child would make her own way to the school bus.

Studies show that looking for work takes more time than completing it. Since tasks are posted randomly throughout the day and night, I had to stay glued to the screen; planning anything apart from mTurk was difficult. When I found HITs, I would rush to get them done, because thousands of profitable tasks can disappear in a matter of minutes. One second I would be frantically completing a batch, the next looking desperately for something to do. I might be designing a logo, then watching a video of a man immolated by ISIS, then translating business documents into French. The grind was wearing.

So was worry about rejection. Requesters on mTurk can download work you submit before approving payment. If they want to keep the work for free, all they have to do is reject your payment. (This paper explains the limited means of appealing rejections: “Dissatisfied workers … had little option other than to leave the system altogether.”) The more rejections you get, the less work you can access; requesters often disallow anyone with a low “approval rating”—and “low” can mean 98 percent—to access their work. Too many rejections may get you suspended from mTurk completely.

A few years ago Amazon added the “Master’s Qualification,” billed as a status given to the best workers and provided at a premium to requesters. But Amazon does not say how they grant this status—workers have seen it given to people with low ratings or even those currently suspended for bad work—and Master’s qualified work isn’t better quality or better paying. mTurk also rolled out a new “worker’s website,” but it offers no real new tools, just streamlined looks and a better mobile platform. Amazon doubled their requester fees in June 2015, after which the number of jobs plummeted, making it even harder for workers to meet income goals.

Despite all of this, I continued. I couldn’t work outside my home, so my offline choices were limited. My family had to eat and needed shelter, so I stayed.

What improved my worker experience on mTurk is the organization of workers themselves. TurkerNation.com, a forum for mTurkers, opened in November of 2005. Hundreds of workers gather there to share tips. We warn each other which requesters to avoid and sound the alert when good work is posted. I started to work as a community manager on TurkerNation in 2005. If not for that group of people and their support, I do not think I would have been able to make enough to live in the last decade, let alone kept my sanity through the process.

The most amazing thing about Turkers is how varied they are, and I like to refer to the community as being like a quilt. Each square is different, from the homemaker in the United States, to the IT consultant from India, to the content moderator from the Philippines. Some are young, some are old; some are unemployed, others are looking for additional income; some do it for fun, others for money, and still others to learn or to fill their time. This variety serves requesters well, as any demographic they wish to reach is easily available, and yet it sometimes keeps the Turkers separated due to language and cultural differences. Regardless, those who do participate in the community make it rich, and their participation is the reason why I stick around.

So mTurk has changed for me, from an experiment, to a job that makes me miserable, to a community of people I have come to love. The moment my husband found a new job in 2013 I promised myself I would never work on mTurk again. I went back to school, finished my degree, and hope to keep that promise. I continue to stay a part of the mTurk community, however, because of the forum. I’ve grown to see them as my family, and I will fight to the end to try to help all of them earn as much as they deserve.

More and more stable, well-paying jobs seem to be making way for precarious workplaces such as mTurk—or TaskRabbit, Uber, Instacart. Turkers are asked to be journalists, pathologists, programmers, graphic designers, legal assistants, academics, and virtual girlfriends. None of these jobs are disappearing. They are just going to a cheaper, faster, and more efficient platform, offered to a crowd of workers at pennies a piece. Right now, thousands are ready and willing to take the offer. In the future, thousands more may have to. Based on my experience, this scares me.

The post What the “Crowd-Work” Economy Taught Me About Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the same time, cyberattackers, and their rising diversity and sophistication, offer an opportunity to innovate and grow new markets. You can see what that looks like in San Diego, where I live and work.

San Diego has long been a center of America’s national defense, and the infrastructure and businesses that support it. The cyber age—and San Diego’s savvy response to it—has changed the nature of that defense. San Diego is now home to more than 100 cybersecurity companies that employ 4,230 people in the region. That’s on top of the 3,390 employees who work at the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Command (SPAWAR). And those numbers are growing rapidly.

In just two years, between 2013 and 2015, information security analysts grew by 13.9 percent per year on average in San Diego, nearly double the national 7 percent average, and employers expect their cybersecurity workforce to grow by an additional 13 percent in the coming year, according to a 2016 study for which my nonprofit and other San Diego institutions conducted research. The annual economic impact of the industry is already estimated at $1.9 billion—that’s the equivalent of hosting four Super Bowls each year—and puts San Diego on par with sister cyber hubs in Silicon Valley and Maryland.

This rapid growth is not merely a matter of technological change. It reflects strategic efforts by people and sectors across San Diego—the military and intelligence community, high tech industries, academia, municipalities, utilities, transportation agencies, and the region’s various governments—to become a leader in cybersecurity.

I play a role as leader of the San Diego Cyber Center of Excellence (CCOE), a nonprofit established in 2014 by cyber industry, higher education, and government leaders to address cybersecurity challenges here. To become a center of this new line of defense, the region has had to tackle three tasks crucial to the sector’s success. San Diego is cultivating a cyber workforce, showcasing its successes in cutting-edge technologies, and fostering a more secure cyber environment across the region’s institutions. (Being a leader in cybersecurity can make you a bigger target to attack.)

These challenges resulted from regional economic planning, in particular the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation’s cybersecurity economic impact study. In some places, regional economic reports get dismissed, but not this report and not here. The report identified a clear top challenge: the sourcing and development of a cyber workforce. This is what drew me to this work and the CCOE—the opportunity to help find and secure the next generation of cyberwarriors was too good to pass up.

To start, our team convened leaders in industry, government, and all 15 of the cybersecurity, computer science, and engineering deans from regional universities, colleges, and extended studies programs to discuss greater alignment between academic supply and industry demand. The collaboration has been highly productive. It helped create a catalogue of courses that universities and programs offered, or could add, to meet the skill sets sought by the industry. It also generated a regional cyber Job Board, as well as an Internship Pipeline and Link2Cyber programs that connect students, recent graduates, veterans, and seasoned professionals with career opportunities in the region. 

Not only are these cybersecurity positions in demand, but the average annual salary for analysts, computer scientists, and software developers is six figures, according to that 2016 economic impact study that CCOE helped conduct.

The combination of wages and opportunity have made San Diego a hotspot for talent, investment, and research and development. The region’s universities and colleges annually graduate 3,000 students in the computer science and engineering fields. The University of San Diego and California State University San Marcos recently launched cybersecurity masters programs with industry-driven curricula to help feed the pipelines. The region’s higher education sector also supports trailblazing research at facilities like the Super Computing Center at UC San Diego and the Advanced Computing Environments Laboratory at San Diego State University.

Demand for talent is being driven by a convergence of commercial security and defense security. This creates a real community around cybersecurity. Industry leaders such as Qualcomm, ESET, ViaSat, and iboss call San Diego home, citing access to clients, customers, vendors, suppliers, and proximity to SPAWAR as the region’s greatest strengths.

San Diego is likely to see more growth as the industry moves toward private sector customers. The share of firms focused primarily on the commercial market (as opposed to military and defense) has grown substantially, now constituting 47 percent of the sector in San Diego. This shift reflects the importance of practical applications of cybersecurity, like protecting healthcare and financial data, and energy and water grids. This is good news in an age where the Internet of Things (IoT), electromagnetic pulse (EMP) blasts, mass grid outages, and ransomware attacks are no longer just Marvel Comics storylines.

San Diego as a regional hub is also mobilizing to address potential threats to its own infrastructure. The Secure San Diego initiative, launched earlier this year, is, among other things, generating a regional cyber response map for businesses and a regional incident response management plan similar to state of emergency protocols used in natural disasters.

Sometimes I marvel at how threats and defense strategies have evolved since my time as commander of SPAWAR, but the one constant of war remains: You can’t go it alone. While San Diego has developed a cybersecurity sector, cyber threats have no geographic or industry bounds, and the need for qualified cybersecurity workers is increasing. My hope is that San Diego can serve as a template to mobilize other regions to adopt best practices and grow our nation’s next generation of cyberwarriors, defenses, and innovations.

The post In San Diego, Building a Cybersecurity State Is Good Business appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That provocative observation, offered by moderator and Zócalo Public Square executive editor Andrés Martinez, framed a Zócalo/Democracy International event in Donostia-San Sebastián, a coastal city in the Spanish Basque Country.

“Does the Digitization of Journalism Threaten Democracy?” was held in conjunction with the 2016 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, and drew an audience of journalists, democracy scholars, activists, and elections administrators from six continents to the ornate council chamber, the Salon de Plenos, inside Donostia-San Sebastián’s city hall.

The panelists—journalists from Germany and Switzerland and an international elections assistance official who has worked in conflict zones—wrestled with several challenges that digital media have posed to democracy. These include the undermining of the businesses of established media organizations, the exacerbation of intolerance and balkanization, and the rapid spread of misinformation and fake news via social media. But they also suggested there were reasons to be hopeful about the future of media and democracy.

“Democracy needs informed citizens, and it needs responsive officeholders. On both accounts, we’ve been failing big time,” said Maximilian Steinbeis, a German lawyer, writer, and political journalist well known for his blog on the constitution.

At the same time, he said there is a growing recognition of the need to return to high professional standards in journalism. He also identified “encouraging” new models to support professional, democratically oriented media work. He mentioned crowdfunding effforts; the Dutch news platform Blendle, which unbundles media and allows readers to pay per article; and recent trends suggesting that people are more willing to pay for high-quality media.

Steinbeis also introduced a new “cooperation collaborative” of independent journalists, the Reef, of which he is a co-founder. They are working to build a network of independent and professional journalists who collaborate with each other to build audiences, support good work, and bolster new financial models. (Read a new essay about the Reef by Steinbeis and Christian Schwagerl at Zócalo)

Annette Fath-Lihic, a Sweden-based senior manager for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, praised the Reef effort. But she also cautioned against pinning too all our problems with journalism and democracy on digital media.

“We need to understand that technology is just a tool … there will always be good guys and bad guys,” she said.

Fath-Lihic said that expectations for the positive impact of new media on democracy had been too high. “When it comes to fake news, fact-checking and all that, it was the same hope—kind of like with capitalism—that it would regulate itself … that people would recognize it, and then correct it.” As someone works on elections, including in conflict zones, she’s seen firsthand how poorly used digital media can be a real threat. “You might have the hate speech, you might have false information on electoral results—that is so dangerous,” she said.

Reto Gysi von Wartburg, deputy editor-in-chief for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation’s Swissinfo, said he does not see journalism as a threat to democracy. But “I do share disappointment for what social media can do to democracy,” he added. He pointed to a Swiss study showing that over 20 percent of young people use only social media to get informed, and he cited the financial pressures on media organizations and the related pressures on journalists to produce more stories.

“One problem is that the quality of journalism is hard to measure,” said Gysi von Wartburg, “But the traffic, the story’s reach, is very easy to measure.”

Martinez, the moderator, pressed panelists on ways to regulate digital or social media sites. While Fath-Lihic acknowledged the problems, including what amounted during the U.S. election to “almost hate speech against certain groups of the population,” she said trying to control social media violated human rights, particularly freedom of expression. She was critical of countries that have shut down their Internet during elections. She pointed out that media controls have contributed to the shrinking of political space in Russia, Turkey, and other countries, as government close down NGOs, are harsh with citizen journalists, and seek control of Twitter and Facebook. She said she preferred that citizens and media develop and sign codes of conduct to encourage responsible behavior around politics and elections.

Steinbeis questioned the algorithms and very nature of Facebook—a private company that is a public space, he noted.

He offered two situations for a journalist or publication posting a new article. “If you have a brilliant story about something interesting and original, and people say this is interesting, they are going to ‘like’ it,” he said. That’s all well and good. “Where if you write something completely outrageous, off-the–wall, batshit crazy, people will click ‘angry’ or ‘hilarious’ or ‘sad’… and these reactions in the algorithm are preferred to the interesting thing.”

The post Fake News Won’t Kill Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We think we’ve found a model at sea. It looks like a reef.

Coral reefs are miracles of evolution. They are among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. They exist in a nearly nutrient-free ocean and have no central control—and yet they are enormously productive. They are also endangered.

Reefs have more than a little in common with freelance journalists. Freelancers are one of the most important resources for media businesses. In times of cutbacks and shrinking editions, freelancers are often the only people who still have the expertise and specialization necessary to find and tell original and elaborately-researched stories. They know how to reach audiences. They are often creative and entrepreneurial. They are out and about in the world. They make sure that the media actually has something to say about the universe outside its self-referential filter bubble.

But freelance journalists are also one of the weakest links in the media food chain. They are dependent on publishers, who pay them worse and worse wages, and provide less and less support to boost the value of their editorial projects. Freelancers are individual combatants, often without access to colleagues with complementary skills such as photographers, illustrators, data visualizers, and lecturers.

How can such journalists join forces productively? It requires being attached to a larger body: The reef.

Reefs have many niches, small and large inhabitants, symbioses, cooperation—and also competition. Freelance journalists need their own reefs, places where they can join forces to form cooperatives and access the resources they need to do what they do best: quality journalism.

On the “Reef,” journalists would have choices. They could form alliances to cover themes under a common name; they could cooperate with each other and share external costs. They could work with publishers and institutions to disseminate their work. And they could, if they wish, develop ways to get paid by readers directly, or to collect advertising revenues through their work.

A Reef of this sort would require technology. At the core of our Riff Reporter project (Riff is German for reef) is a joint work platform named PolyPublisher, which we have been developing over the past two years. PolyPublisher will offer Reef inhabitants a modern, lean content management system that works with text, audio, video, and still images. It will give writers the possibility to publish as teams or all by themselves, the possibility of monetizing their work through micropayments, and interfaces with social media through tools such as Facebook Instant Articles, and payment platforms.

We are close to building our Reef. At the end of November, a small alpha version of PolyPublisher will launch, with limited features, for a select number of journalists. In the spring of next year the beta phase is to start. The official launch is planned for early summer 2017.

At the moment, the Reef project is still organized as a limited liability company which develops, operates, and maintains the software and, for the time being, also publishes content. As we bring in more authors and partners, the next step will be to found a cooperative that provides its members with the tools they need and the public with a wealth of high-end journalism.

Reef is a project by journalists for journalists. More than two dozen contributors plan to populate the Reef initially, and to use it to produce diverse stories and projects. The Reef may be low in nutrients (as paying for journalism isn’t typical in the “digital ocean” yet), but it will be rich in species. The reef’s founders will be there. Christian is a freelance journalist for the German magazine GEO, Yale E360, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a past political correspondent with Der Spiegel; Tanja Kramer is a technology and neuroscience freelancer with editorial experience;. Maximilian is a legal journalist and founder of the widely read constitutional law forum Verfassungsblog, and was formerly a long-standing political correspondent at Handelsblatt. Other co-founders include the web designer and programmer Sebastian Brink, and Uwe H. Martin, freelance photographer and multimedia producer at the Bombay Flying Club.

At first, our main focus will be on science, technology, the environment, health, and society. These are subject areas that interest millions of people, and that require special expertise and creativity in storytelling. At a time of discussion about the “post-factual” age, science journalists remain in demand. If this works—and by “works” we mean produce high-quality journalism, collaborations that support that journalism, and revenue—the Reef can grow to touch other journalistic topics.

What isn’t the Reef? Not another mass-media online magazine with a central website. We don’t think the world needs that. Journalists need support and agility so they can build up their own readership, and present projects through a variety of channels and social media.

Ultimately we don’t believe the Reef should be a publisher. We don’t envision competing with publishers. As in a real coral reef, there will be no boss who controls everything. Every author will be responsible for his projects, both entrepreneurially and legally. At the same time, the Reef will be a creative community that offers standards, tools, and rich possibilities for cooperation.

The Reef is also not a blogger or “citizen journalist” network of the type we see in many cities and countries. It is for professionals, and you won’t be able to buy a membership. The idea is to limit it to people who meet high professional standards and have been invited in by existing members.

In this era of climate warning and ecosystem collapse, coral reefs become ever more endangered and ever more important. Digital media faces a similar problem as the media ecosystem evolves. This is why we think reefs are a perfect symbol for our project: They are a diverse and adaptable living thing that the world cannot afford to lose.

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I bet having your picture taken by someone with a bulky film camera is not on your list. Yet it might have been, if you lived 100 years ago. For back then “Kodak Fiends” prowled the land and—hold onto your bonnets and bowlers—took pictures of us without our awareness or permission! At the time this was considered a major intrusion into one’s privacy, so much so that they even tried to write laws to prevent such violations.

It may seem strange that merely having your picture taken in public—and we aren’t talking about anything so salacious as upskirt photos—could evoke such psychological distress and paranoia. But is it really that puzzling? How do you feel if someone hacks into your email or social media accounts? It evokes the same unsettling sense of intrusion as Kodak Fiends did a century ago. Perhaps in the near-distant future hacking could become so commonplace that being hacked is just taken for granted, and 100 years from now readers of this column will be mildly amused at our naiveté.

We tend to throw the word “paranoid” around rather loosely, like we do the term “depressed.” Just to be clear, paranoia is a clinical (pathological) condition characterized by excessive undue suspiciousness and the belief in the mal-intent of others. So when you receive an offer from a complete stranger somewhere in Africa who wants to share with you the $350 million they just inherited, and you are suspicious of the offer, you are not paranoid. Just as there is a difference between being “suspicious” and being “paranoid,” so too is there a difference between being “just paranoid” and having “paranoid delusions.” Delusions are those beliefs that we generally feel are improbable or highly fantastic. But the line between reality and delusion can be thin indeed.

Take, for example, Raul Murillo Diaz. According to police, he was fed up with Google’s surveillance and decided to fight back—allegedly by shooting out a window of the company’s building and torching one of the Google camera cars. Ads popped up that seemed to know exactly which websites he had just visited. Ironically, Google denied he was the subject of surveillance, yet it had video footage of his SUV. Don’t those activities constitute surveillance? If you believe that some person(s), government, or other organization is watching you, monitoring you, and digging into your personal life and they actually are, then are you paranoid?

Interestingly, each generations’ paranoid fears appear to be coming true. The fear that Kodak Fiends would steal our privacy has become a reality. There are few places you can go these days without being photographed or caught on security camera. The fear of being watched from on high has also become true, as has the fear that computer chips would be implanted in our brains.

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to review records of mentally ill patients from different eras. Almost every new scientific discovery or technological advancement has become the stuff of paranoia. The discovery of gasses in the late 18th century became the paranoid delusion of one James Tilly Matthews, who believed that “pneumaticians” operated an air loom beneath the streets of London, influencing those above.

Dirigibles evoked that feeling of being spied on from above, which is exactly what they were doing, only occasionally lobbing an explosive devise of some sort. Blimps were quickly replaced by airplanes, and then jets as paranoid individuals continued to look skyward to see their tormentors. Then satellites were launched. Now paranoid individuals could no longer see their surveillers, but they knew that they were up there, silently spying on them from the recesses of space.

Although it is unlikely that many individuals went through the expense of buying an aircraft to spy on others, the same can’t be said for inexpensive drones. Now you can spy on just about anybody with what amounts to a toy. As the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies (and those enemies probably have drones).

Similarly, the discovery of X-rays led paranoids to fear that others could see through them, which was of course quite literally true. The telegraph gave way to telephones, which stepped aside for cellphones. Each factored into the paranoid’s suspicions. And then there is the now venerable computer chip. Paranoid individuals have long fretted that such chips could be implanted in their brains in order to control them. Ironically, biomedical research is making great strides today in doing just that in order to help a broken brain function adequately.

And then there are “targeted individuals,” aka TIs. As the New York Times recently documented, these folks, and there appears to be quite a number of them, believe that they are being stalked by gangs and monitored electronically, often using satellites. They have created a platform to share their plight, but ironically, that platform is electronic. A Google search—which was probably monitored—for “targeted individuals” reveals numerous websites where TIs from around the world post testimonials, support, videos, and advice. At the same time they are warned that just about anyone can be a “handler” (the surveiller or stalker) engaged in electronic stalking and mind control, which they abbreviate to ESMC. If you believe yourself the victim of ESMC, you can buy devices designed to block all sorts of malicious attacks including “psychotronic” attacks. (Sorry folks, couldn’t find a good definition for this one in all of my psychology textbooks and journals. Your imagination will have to suffice). But even TIs are encouraged not to be suspicious of everyone lest psychiatrists label them as paranoid.

So what paranoid horrors lay ahead? Well, self-driving cars are becoming a reality. While I may not have to worry whether the person driving toward me is drunk, now I do have to worry—or be suspicious about—whether that car is going to be hijacked (or perhaps a better term would be hihacked) and driven right at me. The TIs may fear that their cars will be remotely operated by their stalkers. Whatever the new technology, it will become the preoccupation of a new generation of paranoid individuals—and they just might be on to something.

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Something is missing, even a blind person could tell that. The scent is all wrong. Instead of damp mustiness, it smells of, well, tourists. You are not in the real Chauvet cave, which is closed to the public, as the atmospheric conditions which preserve its fragile paintings must be maintained. Instead, you are in the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, a recently opened replica of the Chauvet cave. It’s accurate down to the last undulation of the stone wall—to the last stalactite—but patently false.

Now, you travel blindfolded to some anonymous, freshly built art museum. Down goes the blindfold, and you stand before van Gogh’s Almond Blossom. Surely you must be in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Why, the painting is obviously a van Gogh, with the artist’s globular, three-dimensional application of vast, snotty quantities of oil, so much that the paint casts a shadow.

But no, you’re looking at a work from the Relievo Collection, an odd package offered by the Van Gogh Museum to collectors and institutions who would like nine of van Gogh’s greatest hits on their walls, at a cool quarter million dollars for the bunch, proving that even for the wealthiest people art can be difficult to procure and prohibitively expensive. These pricey reproductions are pinpoint accurate, made with sophisticated three-dimensional scanning and printing, so that every brushstroke is just as van Gogh made it. Only van Gogh did not make it. A printer did.

Caverne du Pont d’Arc.

Welcome to what we might call “art in the age of digital reproduction.” This idea is riffing on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which he argued that authentic artworks have a certain, indefinable “aura” about them that makes them great. Reproductions—whether produced mechanically, as they were in 1936 when Benjamin was writing, or digitally as they are today—are missing this. We might even risk calling this the missing “soul” of the work—a key component that art lovers find lacking when they see a digital copy of a work.

I specify digital copy, because these reproductions are very different from forgeries. In my recent book, I discussed whether a forgery of a great work of art could itself be considered great. Most forgeries that make any headway in fooling experts are unique works themselves, made by hand by an artist in fraudulent imitation of the work of some other, more famous artist. These forgeries are “originals,” in that they are still created by a passionate craftsman, and therefore possess their own kind of aura. They are just made in a derivative style and then later passed off as something they are not.

Such unique, handmade forgeries, created with skill and ardor—like Han van Meegeren’s Vermeers, Eric Hebborn’s rendition of Van Dyck’s Christ Crowned with Thorns or even Michelangelo’s Sleeping Eros, which he passed off as an ancient statue before he had made a name for himself—can indeed be great works of art unto themselves, in a similar vein as the work done by an assistant in a master’s studio. Apprenticeship is part of a long tradition in Western and Asian art, distinct from forgery in that there is no proactive attempt at fraud. With few exceptions, at least since the days of ancient Athens, master artists all worked in the studio system. The master was the head of a studio consisting of apprentices, who functioned like live-in interns, and paid assistants. While these apprentices and assistants handled much of the actual painting—the under-layers, still-lifes, architectural features, backgrounds, and clothing—the master designed the work and supervised its creation. The mark of a good assistant was his ability to paint in a way that was indistinguishable from the master’s style, so that the finished painting, sculpture, or decorative object would appear to have been created by a single artist. All the works that emerged from the studio were under the authorship of the master, who was licensed by the local painter’s guild to run the studio and accept commissions.

This method was almost always the way artists worked, with the few who did not run studios—such as Caravaggio—acting as the exceptions rather than the rule. One might pay a fortune to get a work entirely painted by Rembrandt, or a more modest sum for a work designed by Rembrandt but largely painted by his staff. This did not mean that the less expensive option was poorly made, and technically, it could even still be called a “Rembrandt.” This process was an entirely legal, artist-sanctioned form of forgery.

When we speak of scanned and printed works of art, copies made by computers and a fabrication mechanism rather than a human hand, it is a different story altogether. It might look good, but what about Benjamin’s “aura?”

Almond Blossom, Vincent van Gogh.

Digital reproductions do not have to be copies of existing works. Recently, The Next Rembrandt project saw scientists develop a brand-new painting, complete with an original subject and composition, digitally designed and printed to look like a lost work of Rembrandt’s. Aesthetically, when viewed on a computer or television screen, it convinces. Since the most successful art forgers do not copy existing works, but instead create new pieces that they attempt to pass off as an established master’s lost work, the compelling nature of this digital experiment is disturbing. Giorgione created only a handful of paintings in his career. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more works “by” Giorgione could be created? Or would it?

Perhaps creating new works of art designed by committee, and made by computer, feels morally questionable. But what of resurrecting works that once were, but are now destroyed? My next book is an illustrated history of lost art—the technology exists now to recreate lost masterpieces, from the Athena Parthenos to the bombed-out ruins of Palmyra. And what of finishing projects that the fates did not permit to come to fruition? Leonardo’s colossal Sforza horse would have been the largest cast-bronze sculpture in the world, but he only made a full-size terracotta version of it before he was driven from Milan by the invading French (who used the horse for target practice). Now we could build the bronze version according to Leonardo’s exact specifications. But should we?

It is when you see such a work in person that the veil begins to peel back. One can just feel the inauthenticity of the Caverne du Pont d’Arc cave paintings, of the Relievo van Goghs, of the “new” Rembrandt. These digital copies lack Benjamin’s aura. That aura is what divides the real world from the Matrix. In the film, The Matrix, most of the world chooses to live in blissful ignorance in a computer-generated simulation of a pre-apocalyptic version of the world. But a handful of heroes want to “unplug” the Matrix and reveal to humanity that it is living in a simulacrum, a lie, so they can rebel against it. One scene from the film references Lewis Carroll: The hero, Neo, is offered either a blue or a red pill. Taking the blue pill would allow Neo to forget that the Matrix is a computer construct, to rejoin the blissfully ignorant. Taking the red pill would keep him aware of painful reality, but this awareness would allow him to do something about it. Connoisseurship, an innate feeling for art and authenticity, is the red pill that allows experts and passionate amateurs to feel the difference between art that emerged from a three-dimensional human hand, versus that spit out by a three-dimensional printer.

Subtract the post-apocalyptic warzone, and the parallel with The Matrix is apt. Experts and art lovers can tell the simulacrum from the authentic work. The rest of the world could, likewise, if they tried, but they may not care to. Perhaps they are just as happy with a Relievo Collection van Gogh on their walls? A danger arises when amateurs and bogus experts aren’t able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s reproduced. Worse, they might see the digital copy and decide that it is not worth the effort to see the original. They might not think that the work is better, but it is unarguably more convenient to access. All this talk of simulacra and The Matrix may bring to mind Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which he describes what humans perceive as akin to shadows dancing on the back wall of a cave in which humanity is chained, facing the back wall and unable to turn around. Light from outside shines on life passing by the mouth of the cave, but humans cannot see it directly, only by way of the shadows thrown by the light onto the back wall. Those accepting of the shadows as sufficient live in blissful ignorance inside the Matrix. Those who are convinced that a simulacrum is not enough struggle against those chains.

Back in the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, the tourists all look perfectly content. And perhaps they should be, for in this situation, it is literally not possible to visit the Chauvet cave itself, and this is the only option—a simulacrum, but a very good one, made with passion, though produced by digital technology and mechanics, by a human mind but not a human hand. This is less objectionable than, say, the tourist who visits The Venetian hotel and casino in Las Vegas—which includes a vast, elaborate reproduction of Venetian streets and canals—and then decides that he has already seen Venice, and doesn’t need to go to the real city. If this happens too often, with simulacra so much more convenient to experience, the real version can slump into disrepair and eventually become abandoned. Then we may be left with the body, but risk the loss of the most important thing to those who truly know and love art and history: the soul.

The post Are Replicas Changing the Way We Experience Art? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So while companies such as Google have built significant value as result of a well-considered mergers and acquisitions strategy, Yahoo seemed to squander its value. What role did merger-and-acquisition missteps play in Yahoo’s slow death?

There are three major reasons for M&A failure—flawed strategy, misguided valuation, and ineffective integration. And Yahoo is a classic case study in how these three factors can destroy company value.

The first reason for failure is flawed or unclear strategy. The strategic rationale for acquisitions must be soundly based on a company’s clear core competency. Growth opportunities should be centered in areas where a firm has distinct advantages, not on areas of overt weaknesses. Betting that a merger or acquisition will solve a company’s problems is like expecting a marriage to resolve the individual difficulties of two troubled people.

For instance, if a product is unable to obtain distribution by clearly providing value at its core, acquiring distribution will not be a solution. In 1987, during the early days of personal computing, Atari was struggling to convince retailers to sell its PCs. In an attempt to boost distribution, Jack Tramiel, then chairman of Atari, bought the Federated chain of consumer electronics stores. Tramiel reasoned that 65 Federated stores in California, Arizona, Texas, and Kansas would successfully hawk his computers. Using its newly obtained captive distribution, Atari could grant its computer line prime shelf space at Federated. But the Atari/Federated deal soon faltered as customers simply did not want Atari computers. As an old adage goes, “You won’t improve buoyancy by strapping together two leaky canoes.”

How effectively did Yahoo tie M&A activities to a core competency? Unfortunately, over the years of Yahoo’s existence, the company was tentative, if not schizophrenic, about what its core competency actually was. This not only made it difficult to define a clear M&A strategy throughout the company’s history, but also led to disastrous valuation judgments.

Yahoo began as a portal to organize the internet, using hundreds of employees to categorize requests for websites to be added to its directory. Other services such as news, sports, and email were added around the directory. But the sprawling web eventually defied complete classification, and Yahoo’s core started to collapse.

In 1999, Yahoo decided it would focus on becoming a digital media company and purchased Broadcast.com in a $5.7 billion acquisition. While the deal made Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban wealthy, Yahoo was years too early in moving to digital media and had radically overvalued the transaction.

In 2002, Yahoo decided it would become a search company and attempted to buy an upstart company named Google on the cheap. The companies could not agree on valuation, and the deal collapsed. This time Yahoo was too timid and had dramatically undervalued Google by billions of dollars.

Yahoo was determined to move ahead with search and spent a more modest $2 billion to acquire targets that included Inktomi and Overture. But Yahoo found it tough to compete with Google search algorithms. By 2007, Google’s revenues had easily lapped Yahoo’s.

Not to worry—the second coming of co-founder Jerry Yang was on the horizon. In 2005 Yang had orchestrated a brilliant deal for Yahoo to acquire 40 percent of Alibaba, now regarded by many as the best investment ever made by an American company in China. As Yang returned in 2007, perhaps he could discover a new core for Yahoo.

Although Yang did not make any multi-billion dollar acquisitions, he did turn one down. In 2008, Yang rejected a bid from Microsoft to buy Yahoo for about $45 billion even though the offer reflected a 60 percent premium. Yahoo investors, dismayed at Yang’s reluctance to part with the assets of Yahoo at Microsoft’s offer price, pressured him to step down as CEO.

When Marissa Mayer assumed control of Yahoo in 2012, she decided the company should pursue an aggressive M&A program patterned after what Mayer had learned during her long career at Google.

During Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo, the company spent more than $2 billion acquiring over 50 early-stage ventures. The goal was to achieve what I’ve dubbed “semi-organic growth,” which involves the creative blending of talent and technology of acquired firms with existing acquirer capabilities. While at Google, Mayer had seen the benefits of such a program and was determined to replicate the process at Yahoo.

However, the M&A playbook that worked so well for Google was not destined to thrive at Yahoo. Whereas Google’s hugely profitable digital advertising core provided an ample cushion for acquisitions to be successfully integrated, Yahoo was under turnaround pressure. The company lacked the time and management style necessary for creativity to flourish and new services to thrive. Layoffs were much more common than bonuses. And write-downs of acquisitions became a regular occurrence when Yahoo’s quarterly earnings were reported.

During its 22-year existence as an independent company, Yahoo had not been able to base M&A activities on a core identity, and that cast a pall on many of its major deals. It’s perhaps why there was no Yahoo analog to other companies’ highly successful deals—such as eBay’s purchase of PayPal, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, or Google’s purchase of YouTube. Rather, due to unclear acquisition strategy, valuation miscues, and an inability to foster healthy integration, Yahoo will now become just another piece of Verizon’s effort to join Google and Facebook as a digital advertising powerhouse.

Yahoo’s long history as a tech industry pioneer has ended in the graveyard of independent companies.

The post How Yahoo Destroyed Its Value appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To better understand the Osher Library’s work, I spoke to Ian Fowler, the facility’s director. Fowler told me about the advanced imaging technology that the library uses, including a 60-megapixel camera used to capture especially large maps, and a new 3D camera that allows the library to render globes. “The hardest part,” Fowler told me, “is getting a 100 percent accurate digital representation of the coloring. That involves recalibrating our camera for each shot.” Accordingly, properly digitizing a single map can take half a day or more. So far, it has scanned somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent of its flat maps and 10 percent of the atlases in its collection.

Creatio Universe, 1720.

This isn’t a purely technical endeavor—old-fashioned research still plays an important part. Once an item from the library has been scanned, catalogers carefully examine it, working to add as much metadata as possible, from basic facts about provenance and size to subtler details about notes scribbled in the margins or advertising materials on the reverse. Thanks to this work, the library has sometimes uncovered details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, as when a cataloger working on an atlas recently discovered unusual notations such as poems that a past owner of the volume had added.

Digitization also presents scholars with a new way of looking at maps, since, according to Fowler, “you can get a lot more detail than you could even looking through a magnifying glass.” As Matthew Edney, Osher professor in the history of cartography, points out, you can also dwell on an image longer than you could while studying a physical item under controlled conditions. “Rare book rooms kick you out,” he told me, but you can take your time with digital copies.

In some cases, that’s allowed Edney to discover new features of maps that he thought he already knew well. He points in particular to an 18th-century map of New England that was once owned by Hugh Percy, a British army officer who was a key player during the battles of Lexington and Concord. “Staring at it on screen, you realize there are these faint pencil lines, possibly indicating tentative knowledge,” Edney said. As he explains in a recent paper on the topic, such observations helped him better understand how Percy likely used the map—offering a picture of what the map meant at the time, and not just what it shows.

A map of the most inhabited part of New England, 1755–1768.

It’s this quality of digital maps—their ability to help us recognize the practical dimensions of cartographic texts—that may be most important for historians, since a map does much more than provide us with a sense of place. “People always assume that a map is defined by the part of the world it shows,” Edney told me. “It’s actually clear that cultural conventions, social conventions, define the nature of the map far more.” Looking at different maps from a single era can reveal competing ways of acting on and making sense of the world, much as comparing the cartography of different eras can help reveal how those ideologies and attitudes change. Digitization can make it easier to think through such issues, in part because it allows you to set archival items—which may be housed in different libraries located far apart—beside one another.

Paradoxically, however, digitization may also make it more difficult to parse the larger context of a map—or any archival object. “As soon as you turn a primary source into an image, you start to lose something,” Edney suggests. Citing the rare books scholar Michael Suarez, he points out that the first thing to go is the larger bibliographic context that comes with an object: All of those details about where it was printed and who owned it that typically accompany an entry in an archival database. Though such information ultimately accompanies a digital record, it’s easier to neglect it, thanks to the relative simplicity of access. Second (and more difficult to reconstitute on a computer screen) are the physical details of an object—its size, its smell, the grain of the paper. These are the features that can help us situate an object within its vanished lifeworld, showing us what it meant to those who made it, along with the ways it helped them make meaning from the world more generally.

Map of Seville in Spain, 1750–1760.

The Osher library strives to frame its virtual copies of maps as fully as possible. Sometimes that means photographing beyond the edges of the image, revealing how the paper crumbles its edges or the binding of the book in which it appears. But there’s only so much they can do—especially when it comes to scale. “Online, everything looks the same size. That’s one of the things that shocks people sometimes when they come in,” Fowler told me. Though the library indicates how large an item is, researchers are still sometimes shocked when they request an item only to find that “you have to put eight tables together to unroll it.”

When all that context drops out, you’re left with the mere content of the map, which can make it harder to understand in truly historical terms. Jonathan Senchyne, director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and a graduate school colleague of mine), says that this can sand down the historical texture of an object. “There’s always a temptation to think about something that’s been [digitized] in presentist terms,” Senchyne told me. In other words, it’s challenging to break free from our own ways of understanding and moving through space when we only access the past through a digital lens.

Map of the state of Maine. By Moses Greenleaf Esq. 1820.

There’s still a great deal to be found in such images, especially for those who appreciate the aesthetics of cartographic form. Look through some of the featured items on the Osher Library’s website, and you’ll come across an 1820 map of Maine, richly colored by hand; a gorgeously detailed Dutch map of the world from a century before on which shipping routes radiate out of islands like mercantile stars; a hand drawn diagram of a German river’s course; and much more. Without additional information, however, some of the other items in the collection—its 1750 manuscript land survey autographed by George Washington, for example, on which that formidable signature could easily vanish into its relatively humble surroundings—might lose some of what makes them special.

“When digitization started, a lot of people thought that would replace looking at the maps in person,” Fowler said. Today however, he and other cartographic librarians advocate studying them beside the physical ones when we can, drawing on the mutual advantages of print and digital. Those who don’t have the luxury to make their way to Portland, Maine, can still learn a great deal from the library’s collections, however, so long as they think carefully about how to approach them.

The post What Disappears When Ancient Documents Get Digitized? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.