Information overload is a fairly common problem these days and history is no less prone to it than any either field.* If one does any amount of work in historic preservation, one quickly encounters a Byzantine series of standards and guidelines designed to ensure that the information will be preserved in perpetuity.  Reams upon reams of paper, both real and digital, are collected.  As something of a cynic, I have to wonder…does any of this ever actually get read and used?*  Or, are we dragons upon a hoard?

The thing is, data, by itself, isn’t very useful.  It is what we, by our study of the data, create that is useful.  This goes beyond collation, it goes beyond even analysis, straight to creation.  All the information in the world, neatly collated, organized, and fully searchable will not tell us the meaning of life.  It will tell us What it is, but not how we should, as humans and not computers, relate to it. 

Information overload, of course, is the difficulty with a place such as this.  It is a mountain of data, but lacks either narrative or analysis.  It also lacks the organization.  The trick is to work on the narrative/analysis at the same time as the organization…sigh.  I don’t know about creation, though, I am not a terribly creative individual.

*At least it isn’t the environmental sciences, where the amount of money spent studying a problem rather than, you know, Fixing the problem often appears to be out of balance.

*I always remember a comment that would enrage most archeologists: ‘if the only thing left of a civilization is some smashed pottery, perhaps it wasn’t all that interesting of a civilization.’