"A Historical Companion", or is a companion always a comrade? (Notes on the margins of the discussed the book)

Yumasheva Yuliya Yurijevna ORCID: 0000-0001-8353-5745 Doctor of History Deputy Director of "DIMI-CENTER" 105264, Russia, g. Moscow, bul. Izmailovskii, 43 Juliayu@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

This material is the detailed abstracts of a speech at the second meeting of the Discussion Club of the Association "History and Computer" and the journal "Historical Informatics", which took place on October 26, 2021 in the zoom-conference mode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otyl8HoP8WA ), during which the collection of articles "Information: A Historical Companion" was discussed ^[1], which, as the editors informed him in the very first sentence of the Introduction, it is devoted to the consideration of the history of how: "information was created, how it was formed by human society over the centuries, in the past and present. The collection offers readers views on history through the prism of information, and views on information through the prism of history" ^{[1, VII]}.

Obviously, such a tempting promise could not fail to "hook" any historian, source specialist, specialist in the field of historical informatics and research methods. In the end, INFORMATION is "our everything": what we encounter daily in life; what we try to extract from historical sources (in the broadest sense of the word), historical facts, historiographical works, etc.; what we "hunt" for in archives, museums, libraries, private collections and second-hand/ antique shops, harassing "a single word for the sake of a thousand words of verbal ore" (thank you, beloved Vladimir Vladimirovich (Mayakovsky) for the metaphor that so well characterizes not only the work of the poet, but also the works of the historian!). Therefore, regardless of the summer-examination-pandemic-vacation period, like my colleagues, I rushed to read 900 pages of English text…

However, the very first pages of this work discouraged the formulation of the problem and its interpretation in the proposed articles. In order not to spread the "thought over the 900-page tree" of this collection, I will present my comments according to the scheme of the abstract, omitting the question of relevance, which has already been described in the second paragraph.

Structure and content of the publication

The collection has a very unusual structure, which would be very good in electronic hypertext expression, but in the printing version and in the form of a pdf file is difficult to perceive and inconvenient to work with. Judge for yourself.

The book consists of two parts, the first of which includes 13 author's essays collected by the editors almost arbitrarily and united by the topic of information considered in a "historical context" ("the editors searched for articles covering different topics and places, and used different approaches to the topic of information" ^{[1, VIII]}.  When getting acquainted with the texts, it seemed that they were really poorly connected with each other and were prepared for other purposes (as a result of their own scientific research, detailed materials written based on the results of speeches at conferences, etc.), and the editors who collected them got into the collection "by the will" of the editors who collected them.

The authors of these essays were employees of universities and scientific institutions in Western Europe and the USA. Thus, the book presents in its entirety a Eurocentric, or more precisely, a European–American view of the problem under discussion, which can be conditionally attributed to the ideology of "Atlanticism" ("civilization of the marine environment, or coast"), the basis of which in the middle of the XX century in geopolitics was laid by such famous scientists as N. Speakman and D. Mening. In what it is expressed in this case – we will see in the future.

The second part of the book combines three parts.

The first is the thesaurus (Alfabetic Entries), consisting of 101 terms, discussed in one way or another in the body of 13 articles related to the topic of "information" and presenting in detailed definitions the author's vision of these terms and the "existence" of the objects and phenomena designated by them in the historical past. Each of the articles of the thesaurus is accompanied by a brief bibliographic reference, which also lists mainly the works of researchers of the "Atlantic" school, moreover, often not being specialists in information technology, but according to the authors of the thesaurus articles, formulating the most adequate approaches to the problem of information in its historical context.

The Glossary and Index sections have a pronounced service character: the first is an ordinary explanatory dictionary, the second is a page–by-page index of terms.

The problem is that both parts of the book are not physically connected to each other, i.e. the terms in the text are not highlighted, there are no direct links to the thesaurus, and the reader does not know whether he should "run" to the end of the book for explanations and definitions, or rely on his own idea of the content of a particular term. However, as it turns out in practice, the presentation of some concepts and terms by the authors of articles differs from those presented in the thesaurus and does not coincide with the generally accepted dictionary definitions given, and at least in the omniscient Wikipedia. As a result, you have to read the articles several times, correcting the first impression for the unexpectedly revealed nuances of the author's interpretations of familiar concepts…

Object and subject of research

Reflecting on information as an object of discussion in essay articles, the compilers of the collection do not define this concept anywhere, noting only that "information, of course, is an expansive term" ^{[1, VIII]}.

Of course, such uncertainty is understandable: the content of the universal concept of "information" at the moment can be most adequately explained, perhaps, only by mathematicians/computer scientists, physicists or philosophers, since even the father of cybernetics, Norbert Winner, gave one of the very "exhaustive" definitions: "Information is not matter and not energy. Information is information"^[2].

Another equally great and often quoted "father" of modern science – in particular, the theory of information and the theory of information transmission – Claude Shannon – in his famous 1948 article, which those who have not read it like to refer to, bypassed the content of the term "information" altogether, but noted that the category is measurable, and he gave the world a unit of measurement of information – "bit" ^[3].

Finding out what meaning each of the great scientists put into the concept of "information" can be continued indefinitely, necessarily mentioning the works of our compatriots Yu.A. Schrader ^{[4, 5, 6]}, A.A. Harkevich ^{[7, 8]}, A.N. Kolmogorov ^[9] and the point of view of academician N.N.. Moiseev, who also believed that "there is no strict and sufficiently universal definition of information and there cannot be. This concept is too complicated" ^[10]. However, this does not bring us any closer to what the compilers of the collection had in mind, since even among the terms of the Second part of the book (in the thesaurus and dictionary) there are no independent definitions of the concept of "information".

At the same time, distracting from philosophical heights and descending from heaven to the solid ground of specific scientific disciplines, it should be stated that in different fields of knowledge there are different approaches to determining the content of the term "information", interpretation of its essence: "from the complete denial of its (information – note Yu.Yu.) real existence to extreme apologetics; from philosophical understanding ("reflection of the real world") to practical, everyday ("all information that is the object of storage, transmission and processing") ^[11].

Despite such a range of opinions, the prevailing point of view in the domestic social and humanitarian sciences is the philosophical concept proposed by A.D. Ursul, in which information is understood as information, data, concepts reflected in human consciousness, changing our ideas about the real world and transmitted in human society ^{[12, 13]}.

In Soviet historiography at the turn of the 1970s-80s, this point of view was developed in the works of I.D. Kovalchenko, who pointed out that the source of information for a historian is a historical source ^[14]. Later, the same ideas were developed in his works by V.I. Bovykin ^{[15, 16]}. Thus, for many humanitarians (including me), it is obvious that historians study information objectified in a historical source in all its complexity, multidimensional and polysemantic, and attempts to study some abstract information "in general" in the context of historical development are doomed to failure, which, in fact, the authors of the collection under discussion proved excellently, forced in the absence of a definition of "information" set by the editors, independently formulate definitions of this term within their own articles.

The complexity and ambiguity of solving this problem is especially vividly presented in the second essay ("Realms of Information in the Medieval Islamic World"), dedicated to information in the medieval Islamic world, who spoke and wrote in Arabic or Persian, in which there was no universal concept of "information", but a huge number of terms describing all those phenomena and ways of dealing with information categories (with the help of five human senses!), now united by the international concept of "information" (knowledge, part of knowledge, notification, information, announcement, news, news, hearing, intelligence, wealth (khabar), narration, report, interrogation, etc.) ^{[1, 21-26]}. I perfectly understand the difficulty experienced by the author of this article (Elias Muhanna, Brown University), forced to come up with a way out of the current paradoxical situation, and I admire his heroic efforts to aggregate a variety of terminology!

Surprisingly, the authors of other articles (except the last two) they "did not notice" this problem, although the absence in the lexicon of different countries, peoples and epochs (except, perhaps, Ancient Rome and some Renaissance authors (Dante, for example)) the term "information" (from the Latin inform?ti? "explanation, representation, concept of something" - informare "to give shape, form, teach; to think, to imagine") it is well and thoroughly described and analyzed in the specialized literature. In particular, considering this phenomenon, many linguists and philosophers point out that until the middle of the XIX century. "information" was an exclusively philosophical category; in other scientific disciplines, as well as at the "everyday" level, this term was not used, since there was a wide range of specific objects and phenomena in which its content was expressed.

In the end, in the context of the collection of historical discourse set by the editors, all the authors of the essay predictably, historically accurately, and probably without knowing it, agreed on the analysis of one very specific, materialized form of the existence of information and the existence of this term in the last 5 thousand years – on written sources in all their diversity (state and business papers, private correspondence, books and newspapers, etc.) and their distribution mechanisms, which (mechanisms) by default are equated to "communication" and "information networks".

It is not difficult to notice that with such an approach, all other types and types of sources are completely "lost" – material (including archaeological), ethnographic, oral, linguistic, film/photo, audio sources (including oral), which are beyond the scope of consideration of the authors of the articles. It should be emphasized here that such a narrowing of the interpretation of "information" also causes great inconvenience to the authors themselves, in particular, the author of the fifth essay (John-Paul A. Ghobrial, University of Oxford – "Networks and the Making of a Connected World in the Sixth Century") is forced to admit that the exchange of information in the form of "movement people, goods and capital,... as well as biological exchange and the spread of religion ... played a key role in the emergence of global information networks in early Modern times" ^{[1, 88]}. However, the statement of this fact did not affect the general content vector of the articles at all – consideration only of the information recorded in written/printed form and ways of its dissemination.

And finally, in this regard, it is noteworthy that in the thesaurus there is an article entitled "Information, disinformation, unreliable information", the author of which considers "information" [in the XVIII-XIX centuries.] as "a type of communication that played a decisive role in public life" ^{[1, 496]}. Why only since this period, and why only as a type of communication, although such a form of information as "information-knowledge" was mentioned in the articles ^{[1, 61]}, remains a mystery.

Chronological framework and geographical scope of essay articles

Describing the chronological framework set for the articles that have been selected in the collection, its editors note that for the disclosure of the designated topic, "any starting point may seem arbitrary, and it is always possible to make convincing arguments in favor of starting with something else. But, given the inevitable limitations of space and time in the publishing enterprise, the editors preferred to focus mainly on the early Modern and modern periods, from about 1450 to the present. Nevertheless, the authors of the first articles and several subsequent ones are forced to turn to the analysis of earlier historical periods in order to present a continuous, sufficiently deep, information-oriented historical development of many issues and topics from antiquity to the present" ^{[1, VII-VIII]}.

This editorial warning raises a lot of questions and leaves the reader in a certain perplexity.

Firstly, the justification for limiting the chronological boundaries of research to the publishing process and the space /volume of the material looks, at least, not scientific.

Secondly, having such limitations, it might be worth choosing a different way of forming the content – writing a coherent analytical text "from the beginning of time to the present" instead of selecting articles that reveal certain aspects of the process.

Thirdly, the definition of the lower limit of consideration of the issue ("about 1450"), located closer to the very end of the chronology of the "written" period of human history (considering the beginning of this time the turn of the V-IV millennia BC, the era of the Tetric tablets, the first hieroglyphs of Ancient China and the cuneiform of the Sumerians), suggests strange reflections about the attempt to "leave out" the history of those civilizations that do not fit into the given Eurocentric picture of the world and the "worldwide educational role" of the inhabitants of the Old World.

In this regard, it is quite natural that the authors of many essays (especially the first four: "Premodern Regimes and Practices"; "Realms of Information in the Medieval Islamic World"; "Information in Early Modern East Asia"; "Information in Early Modern Europe") are forced to refer to earlier historical periods and events to explain the "information breakthrough" of Modern Times, which, being torn out of the historical process, has no support and hangs in the air. As a result, numerous appeals of essayists to previous events once again emphasize the conventionality, unreasonableness and vulnerability of the lower chronological boundary chosen by the editors.

Fourthly, the choice of a starting point coinciding with the time of the invention of the printing press in Europe (1440-1455), as well as with the beginning of the era of Great Geographical Discoveries (we emphasize the essential detail – discoveries made by Europeans) leaves no doubt that in these articles the "Atlantic" / Eurocentric approach to the analysis of ways of creating and dissemination (transmission) of information from the countries of the Old World throughout the newly opened world space. The implementation of these ideas in the texts of the collection leads to the emergence of unjustified lacunae, "figures of silence", outright falsifications of facts and distortion of objective historical reality. So, for some reason, the tragic loss of all the Maya codices as a result of Diego de Landa's auto-dafe in 1542 and the deciphering of the remaining texts by Yu.V. Knorozov ^[17] did not come to the attention of the authors; the history of the slave trade and its apogee in the XVI - first half of the XIX centuries ^[18], which fits well into the chronological framework of the collection and illustrates just the processes of globalization and information exchange, the result of which was the formation of a particularly mentality of the African-American population, expressed in the now well-known BLM movement.

Fifthly, giving the journey of Columbus and the discovery of America the significance of a "starting point" in the processes of globalization, which are the most important factor in the dissemination of information, and the absence of even mentions of other equally important geographical voyages and discoveries that preceded the voyage of Columbus (the development of the ecumene in the Ancient world and the fixation of these discoveries in the works of ancient Greek philosophers (for example, "Land descriptions" by Hecateus of Miletus ^[19]), in the conquests of Alexander the Great and the great military leaders of Rome, in ancient China ^{[20, 21]}, during the great migration of peoples, the travels of Marco Polo ^[22], Plano Carpini, the voyages of the ubiquitous Genoese ^[23], the discovery of Vasco de Gama, the Ottoman navigators ^{[24, 25, 26, 27]} and diplomats ^{[28, 29]} etc. In this case, it is not necessary to speak about the Russian Afanasy Nikitin at all), they seem to be another manifestation of "Atlanticism".

Sixth, geographically, the territory on which the authors are trying to trace the creation and dissemination of information in the designated historical period (after the middle of the XV century., extends from the Near East to the two Americas. China, India, the Seljuk Empire and the Ottomans are either on the periphery of consideration, or exclusively as the "forerunners" of the information explosion of the XV-XVI century, in which by the beginning of the early Modern period there was some "decline" in the field of information creation and dissemination. The complete "withdrawal" from the analysis of all the states of the Far East, Central Asia, Russia, the African continent, etc. generally casts doubt on the possibility of reasoning about "globalization" as a worldwide phenomenon accompanying the dissemination of information.

Source base and historiography

The articles included in the collection are to a large extent popular science, so the source base is not mentioned in all of them, and, as a rule, without references to modern publications.

Unfortunately, even in the matter of working with sources, the authors cannot do without rather strange attempts to interpret well-known works, attributing to them provisions not contained in them, and the informational role that they did not actually play. This can be most vividly illustrated by the example of the fifth essay ("Networks and the Making of a Connected World in the Sixteenth Century"), which mentions a work by a Turkish author called "Tarih-i hind-i Garb?" (History of Western India), written in the 1580s, and a book by Spanish-speaking author Enrique Martinez's "Repertorio de los tiempos e historia natural de Nueva Espa?a" (1606).

The author of the essay tries to convince readers that both works are intended to inform, respectively, the Turkish audience (presenting to it "the first-ever report on the discovery of the New World" ^{[1, 86]}) and Spanish-Mexican readers (with the aim of "satisfying the curiosity of readers in New Spain ...") and explaining to them "The origins of the Turkish Empire, the way of its growth and achievements of the current government" ^{[1, 87]}.

The paradox is that the goals of creating these two books have nothing in common with this statement.

The first of the works does mention the history of the discovery of America, but, besides and more than that, it also describes the successful military campaigns and raids of the Ottomans of the XV-XVI centuries on the Mediterranean states and India. At the same time, the introductory part of the book ends with a quite logical question for the High Port of that time: "If the brave men from the house of Osman could enter these lands (the Mediterranean and India – approx. Yu.Yu.) and bring Islam to these people, then why would they not go to the West Indies?". Thus, "Tarih-i hind-i Garb?" pursues not an educational, but quite an aggressive military goal, trying to incite Sultan Murad III's desire to organize a military expedition to newly discovered lands ^[30].

The second book, by Enrique Martinez "Repertorio de los tiempos e historia natural de Nueva Espa?a", is generally an adaptation of popular European astronomical/cosmological literature, which includes the first calendar calculated for the meridian of Mexico, and the countries and states of the Old World (including the Ottoman Empire) are mentioned in it exclusively in the context of solving navigation problems. tasks. Martinez used well-known and open sources published in Spain and Portugal of his time, and did not experience any problem in finding information, and the author's statement that Martinez "was able to get access from Mexico City to some of the most authoritative documents about life in the Ottoman Empire at that time" ^{[1, 87]}, to put it mildly, does not correspond to reality.

Describing this publication and characterizing Martinez, the author of the essay for some reason tries to intrigue the reader by telling that, in fact, Enrique Martinez is of German origin, and the name given to him at birth is Heinrich Martin. This concludes the narrative, leaving the reader at a loss – and what? In fact, the story that remained beyond the attention of the author of the essay is very indicative and historically specific: Henry's parents were staunch Catholics and fled to Spain from the German Reformation and the horrors of the wars associated with it (and not in order to "get a job in the center of a thriving printing trade" ^{[1, 87]}. At the age of 8, Henry Martin found himself in Catholic Spain, where his name was changed to Spanish. Under this name, Martinez is known all over the world as the author of the work already mentioned.

As it is not difficult to understand even from my comments, both described sources are well studied and have a detailed historiography. However, for example, the works of one of the most famous American Turkologists, Thomas Goodrich ^{[31, 32]}, who devoted his whole life to the study of "Tarih–i hind-i Garb?", are not even mentioned in the bibliographic reference at the end of the essay ^{[1, 103]} by the author of the essay.

And this is another unpleasant feature of the publication – the authors of the essay probably deliberately avoid historiography that is "inconvenient" for their concept, regardless of the scale of the scientific authorities of the scientists who authored these studies, and at the same time, try to verify (I note that in most cases - unsuccessfully) the conclusions of famous researchers made in classic works (not naming neither the authors of the research, nor the works themselves). The last thesis refers to an article on the rise of private correspondence in Western Europe in the XVII century ("Periodicals and the Commercialization of Information in the Early Modern Era"). The author of the essay, considering this topic, tries with enviable persistence to refute the conclusions of R. Merton ^[33], attributing this epistolary explosion exclusively to the development of trade relations and completely ignoring the change in ideology, in particular, the influence of the Reformation and the spread of puritanism.

Methodology

In principle, describing the collection in terms of methodology, one could do with one word – presentism.

I will focus only on one example - indeed, attempts to detect "information networks" in the XVI-XVII centuries in the development of trade routes, the formation of state clerical documentation (the sixth article-essay – "Records, Secretaries, and the European Information State, circa 1400-1700")), the increase in the volume of private correspondence, the beginning of the publication of newspapers and it is impossible to explain otherwise than by the most terrible occupational disease – presentism, i.e. modernization of the historical past.

A lot has been written about the development of trade routes as a means of communication at all times, government records have been well known since the days of Ancient Rome; and in the XII century. in Bologna, the "dictator" (the compiler of letters) Adalbert from Samaria (Adalbertus Samaritanus) compiled a textbook called "Rules for writing Letters" (Praecepta dictaminum) ^[34]; private correspondence has been a widespread phenomenon since the times of Sumer, Ancient Greece ^{[35, 36]} and our Veliky Novgorod ^{[37, 38]} (another question is that the letters themselves in due to the fragility of the carrier – tablets, papyrus, birch bark – have not been preserved in large volumes); all historians know about the first newspaper Acta Diurna, "published" in 59 BC by order of Gaius Julius Caesar, and the 400th anniversary of the Russian "Chimes" coincides with similar anniversaries of the Dutch and English ones of the same name newspapers; the first public library in the Middle Ages was not created by Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence, but about a century earlier by the French King Charles V, and the books transferred to it are still included in the collection of the National Library of France, and databases have not been created and used since the mid-1950s…

But all these historical facts have never been considered in historical science as confirmation of the existence of "information networks". So maybe it's not worth starting? After all, as a well-known Arabic proverb says: "A well-known Arabic proverb says: "A well-known Arabic proverb says: "A well-known Arabic proverb says: "A well-known Arabic proverb says: "A well-known Arabic proverb says: "A well-known Arabic proverb says: "A well-known Arabic proverb says: "A well-known Arabic proverb says:"A well-known Arabic proverb says:"A well-known Arabic proverb says:"A well-known Arabic proverb says:"A well-known Arabic proverb says:"

Factography

Perhaps this is the most unpleasant topic in the framework of reviewing this collection of articles.

Reading this work, on the first 180 pages I found 124 factual errors and distortions of the type "the Romans invented mail" (we are talking about courier mail. But what about ancient Greek hemerodromes? And Angarion – the postal service of the Persian Achaemenid Empire? – Yu.Yu.), "Muslims (meaning the first Muslims of the VII-VIII centuries – Yu.Yu.) mastered Arabic numerals" (I wonder who, from the point of view of the authors, were the first Muslims, and who invented numbers in general, called "Arabic" in European culture?), "paper came to Europe via the Silk Road" (it is curious, then why did the first paper manufactory in Europe arise around 1154 in southeastern Spain?), etc.

I tried to refute these and other absurdities at least somehow in the posts-notes published on my FaceBook page, but I quickly realized that the number and volume of such discoveries are so great that I will not have enough life to refute them.

And finally, the conclusions

In my opinion, this collection is a typical phenomenon of factoid historiography (where "factoid is unreliable information, an event that did not happen, but is widely known as a fact - approx. Yu.Yu.), based on selected and "convenient" factoids-facts, incorrect interpretations of historical sources and ignoring modern historiography.

Yes, unfortunately, there are a lot of such books. And they are not saved either by the title of the publishing house of a major scientific center (in this case, Princeton University), nor by the lofty goal of a comprehensive study of information in a historical context. Unfortunately, due to the "ease of thought", which marks many modern works made in the framework of such areas as Digital history and Digital humanities, there are many similar scientific works in our country...

To summarize:

- not everything that is written abroad is scientifically true (and Marxism has nothing to do with it. I am ahead of possible accusations against me of bias in the assessments formed by me as a result of upbringing within the framework of the Soviet "formation" school),

- scientific criticism of any (including) historiographical source has not been canceled, and this means that science ends where we stop critically perceiving sources. Historiographical including;

- inability to verify the information read/found/heard with FANTASTIC Internet capabilities is the death of a researcher, and knowledge of a foreign language without deep knowledge of the subject area is an extreme degree of unprofessionalism.

In conclusion, I would like to express the hope that representatives of the national school of historical informatics have a sufficient level of professionalism to be critical of any essays and not rely on the authorities of publishing houses or research centers only on the basis of their "brand".