>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC.
>> Jason Steinhauer:
Today's lecture is presented
by the John W Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
The Kluge Center is a vibrant
scholar center on Capital Hill
that brings together scholars and
researchers from around the world
to simulate and energize
one another.
To distill with them from
the Libraries rich resources
and to interact with policy
makers and the public.
The Center offers opportunities
for senior scholars,
postdoctoral fellows and PhD
candidates to conduct research
in the Library of Congress
collections.
We also offer free public
lectures, conferences and symposium
and other programs and we
administer the Kluge Prize.
Which recognizes outstanding
achievement
in the humanities and
social sciences.
For more information about the
Kluge Center, I encourage you
to visit our website loc.gov slash
kluge and I invite you to sign
up for our RSS email list to
learn about future programs
and opportunities for you to
conduct your own research here
at the Library.
Today's program is titled,
It from Bit, Cross-cultural
and Interdisciplinary
links in Modern Computing.
It features senior
librarian at the Library
of Congress Jennifer Baum Sevec.
Who is this years Kluge
Staff Fellow.
While at the Kluge Center Baum
Sevec has been using items
from the Library of
Congress collections in order
to identify cross-cultural
and interdisciplinary
contributions to modern computing.
Her work at the Library
primarily focuses on the areas
of access medidata, special
collections acquisitions, strategic
and digital initiatives,
business systems analysis
and web development.
She holds an MA in religion cultural
studies and is an MS candidate
in information technology
and informatics
at the University of Maryland.
Her work on the art exhibit,
the holy art of imperial
Russia continues to travel
as an art installment at
various museums throughout the
United States.
Jennifer's research is the
latest example of the work
that Kluge staff fellows
do in helping us
to understand the world around us.
The Library staff is full of
brilliant and esteemed colleagues
who are passionate about
the areas of expertise
and the staff fellowship
allows one or sometimes two
such staff members the
opportunity each year
to conduct independent research
using the Libraries collections
in pursuit of their scholarship.
Funded by the gift left
by the late John W Kluge
to found the Kluge Center,
the staff fellow is one
of the nearly 100 scholars who pass
through our walls each year
creating the vibrant scholar center
on Capital Hill that we know
as the John W Kluge Center.
It is been our great privilege
to have Jennifer with us
as this years Kluge Staff
Fellow for the past six months.
So without further ado please join
me in welcoming Jennifer Baum Sevec.
[ Applause ]
>> Jennifer Baum Sevec: Thank you
Jason for that very warm welcome.
This is an excellent crowd, I'm
pleased to see so many familiar
and some new faces as well,
so thank you for coming on a
such a gorgeous day in Washington.
I would be remiss to not
thank the [inaudible] people
who made this fellowship possible.
I'm very grateful to Mister John
W Kluge for his generous gift
and vision to ensure a staff
fellowship at the center,
the Kluge Center staff
welcomed me from the outset
and they have been wonderful.
I thank you all, inter director
Bob Gallucci, Mary Lou Reker,
Travis Hensley, Jason Steinhauer,
Joann Anastasia Dan [assumed
spelling], Emily, Denise,
all of you thank you
for your support.
The EB Director Beacher Wiggins,
USNC Chief Linda Geisler,
Associate Librarian of
Library Services Mark Sweeney
and the division staff particularly
of the US Anglo Division
and I would be absolutely remiss
if I did not thank
the US Monograph team
for carrying the load
while I was gone.
So I very much appreciate
your support.
I also need to thank Doctor Katrin
Weller she was a former digital
studies fellow at the center
and two of our former Library
of Congress colleagues
Doctor Trevor Owens
and Miss Bridgetta Jenkins whose
support provided me sufficient
courage to apply for the fellowship.
There's also unfailing
support from all
of the colleagues throughout the
Library, there's just to many of you
to name any of you are here right
now, it's been extraordinary.
To the Kluge Fellows, your
inspiring work, collegiality,
marvelous interdisciplinary
engagement has been incredibly
rewarding both professionally and
personally so thank you very much.
And last at the risk
of being braggadocios
and since you gave me a
podium I'm going to say it.
I'm clearly biased here, the Library
of Congress arguably has some
of the best, most resourceful
dedicated staff in the world.
The collections are unparalleled
to new acquisitions including
digital materials are continuously
being added for greater
public access.
The extensive work done out
front and behind the scenes,
provides an incredible
experience that's incomparable.
To engage in knowledge spanning
millennial and all formats
in nearly all subject matters
and over 470 languages.
For those of you who are considering
a fellowship here or are interested
in research at this great
Library, the worlds largest.
Consider this your
personal invitation.
We're open.
I have the great pleasure
today, to showcase some
of the Library's collections as
one of the really unique things
about these staff fellowship, cause
you really get to dig into the maze
of goodies here and feature
some of the treasures.
Some of these I helped acquire
and make accessible and I get
to do all this while
sharing a remarkable story.
So without further
ado let's get to it.
The title of the talk today as you
see is, It from Bit, Cross-cultural
and Interdisciplinary
links in modern computing.
Looking at modern cultural
isn't known
or well understood how our
digital world was created.
Do we understand how
various theories, practices,
innovations from different
cultures and disciplines informed
and helped others to flourish?
What does it mean to be
technically inspired?
Fields of research tend to be rather
isolated, mathematics, physics,
computer science, similar areas of
study are thought to be independent
of and not reliant on
other fields of study,
particularly the humanities.
While the Renaissance is
known for thinkers and doers,
adept in multiple fields
of research.
Mono scholarship has distanced
itself from such an approach.
Although some scholarship
addresses digital history
and interdisciplinary work, the
body of this scholarship is focused
on technological advancements in
the 20th and 21st centuries rather
than cultural and multiple
discipline contributions
to the understanding of how
our digital world formed prior
to and during this time.
The problem with this
difference is two-fold.
First.
Sorry about that, that was my fault.
Thank you, I'll stop
touching the knobs.
Okay. So first bits and bites have
ancient interdisciplinary roots
that are part of multiple
fields of study
and that story must inform
our present and future.
I didn't touch it, I swear.
Okay. So I'll just
keep going all right.
Second, the humanistic inquiry and
[inaudible] innovation may appear
to be independent of one
discipline to another.
Yet they weave a more
interconnected story as well
as demonstrate the pervasiveness
of digital technologies
in modern culture.
I'm going to stop reading here very
soon, but I wanted to get right.
Rather than shying away from the
interdisciplinary and intertwining
of ideas and interests of great
inspirations and innovations
over time, the research
celebrates the breath and depth
of their formulation in a story that
navigates from ancient foundations
to modern day technology.
The importance of this
study is more,
to more fully address the
how did we get here question.
Using Wheeler's observe a
participant concept is a lens
to examine It from Bit.
Which I'll explain momentarily.
The use of computers and other
digital technologies is growing
into a maturity,
while simultaneously catapulting
inter realms of advanced research
and use previously not encountered.
Misconceptions abound
and the complexity scale
and following information
add to the confusion.
We wouldn't know anything about that
here at the Library of Congress.
This research looks deeply
at the creative thinking
that enabled innovation for
calculation, storage, communication
and information with
digital technologies
that has substantive implications
for the present and the future.
For learning discovery, cultural
dynamics and human understanding.
The modern primary
research sources of today,
which range from podcasting
on social media to email
and satellite radio
must be understood
in the context of their
larger history.
The existing discourse and research
on digital history tends to leap
from the AdvoCast to Leibniz to
bull and Babbage and to Shannon
and Turing among many others.
I need to say that today,
you really need to take note
that there are going to be
key people and innovations
and contributions to computing
that will be missing
from the lecture today.
In fact, it was a little painful
to cut out so much due to time,
the point was not to cover
history comprehensively but to add
to the scholarly discourse in ways
that had not been well studied
beyond the known history.
The exploration of how these
ideas developed is demonstrated
by three themes.
Which is new research on
that lens of It from Bit.
First they're were, galvanizing
ideas from cross-cultural
and interdisciplinary
links at pivotal moments,
which we'll talk about
some of those.
That people from various cultures
and disciplines ask
similar questions
and actively observed those
questions and participated in work
for understanding what
those questions meant.
That these ideas in the work
on understandings form
a foundational concept
in modern computing.
So went about this asking
two research questions.
One, what cultural and topical
developments laid the ground work
for digital technology
is in the 20th
and 21st century, centuries
excuse me?
And what are some of the
pivotal theories, practices,
innovations from various
cultures and disciplines
that enable digital
technologies to flourish?
I'll eventually be able to speak.
Okay. So, getting into Wheeler.
In February 1990, there
was a preprint issued
from the physics department
of Princeton
at the University of Texas.
And John Archibald Wheeler wrote,
the title of it was, information,
physics, quantum and
search for links.
The phrase It from Bits
stems from this work,
asking the age old metaphysical
question, how come existence.
Wheeler offered an
information theory based
on Claude Elwood Shannon's work.
Which we'll get to in
a bit, pun intended.
So Wheeler theorized that
every it, every particle,
every field of force, even the space
time continuum itself derives it's
function, it's meaning, it's
very existence entirely.
Even if it's some context
indirectly,
from the apparatus
solicited answers to yes
or no questions, binary
choices or bits.
So you may be asking yourself
what is the apparatus solicited?
The way I'm interpreting that
is, this whole concept of binary,
the whole choice of yes or
no, zero, one it is or isn't.
Okay.
Now, I was struggling a little
bit to try to figure out a way
to graphically represent this
and I used the smart graphics
from PowerPoint which
may or may not work here
but in a way I think it does work.
When you look at Wheeler's theory,
the bit is sort of everything
in one thing, all at once.
But it's comprised
of all of its parts.
So you have all these cross-cultural
and interdisciplinary
influences that lead to this bit.
That is both its simultaneously
physical,
philosophical and cultural.
It'll make more sense as
we go through, hopefully.
The cross-cultural links that
I discovered in this research,
kind of surprised me, some of
these I really knew and then some
of them I didn't, you'll see here
that there's a lot of countries
and peoples that are involved,
these are just some that touch
on my research, but there are
others that I just didn't get to.
As far as the interdisciplinary
links,
you'll see it's pretty expansive
and some I even learned just a
few weeks ago, so it was kind
of interesting to have those
pop up towards the end.
And I think what's also
compelling here is that,
when all of these disciplines
work together,
sometimes they work together,
sometimes they were
working separately,
but they were informing one
another sometimes directly,
sometimes indirectly and then
it led to new disciplines.
Things like chaos theory,
computer science itself,
computer generated art with CGI in
many of you are familiar with that
with film, genetics,
information science and more.
So everyday for the past almost
six months when I would come
into this great building I would
look up at the Jefferson Building
and I would notice the architecture
and I just had to throw this
in cause it made me laugh every
single day I came to work.
And I did look for Carol High Smith
photo of this, I did not find one
to my surprise cause we have
almost every other picture
from her other than this.
I still didn't touch the button.
Okay. So, what made me laugh
at this picture I kept thinking
when I give this presentation
everyone is going to stare
at me going, what are
you talking about?
And as I would go to the cafeteria
people would say well make sure
whatever you're talking about
is something I can understand
and so this was sort
of the expression I thought people
would have out there in the audience
as I was talking, like
what is she saying.
So, if this very idea of binaries
and bits and bites gives you sort
of a glazed or dazed
facial expression,
just know you're not alone.
A lot of people who have that
thought, we're not really going
to go into the weeds so
to speak on some of that,
but there's some fundamental
concepts that are pretty easy
to understand and just
remember that you use binary
and bits every single day
if you have one of these,
one of your cell phones if you use
one of these, if you use a barcode
of any kind, there are
no librarians in here
that would be using barcodes I'm
sure, we use bits every single day.
Okay. So, moving on.
Because we're talking about bits
and we're talking about zero's
and ones I feel a little
obligated to go back in time here.
This is a really fantastic writeup
if you haven't had a chance to look
at it from the World
Digital Library,
which a lot of that
great work is done here
at the Library of Congress.
And there is a wonderful
description here
from a former distinguished visiting
scholar of the Kluge Center.
And here you'll see just there's
so markers here of understanding
when the zero came into being,
you have the 300 BCE
Mesopotamia you can see
where that is if you're
not familiar.
And the understanding when the
zero marker comes into place.
The idea of number shift and the
idea that one following zero,
really beginning in India.
And their number system and the
whole idea of one through nine,
being able, with the zero, being
able to represent any number,
infinite number combinations.
So then we move into around 846 and
I'm not going to attempt this name
because this not my
language of expertise
but it was Russian I'd have a
better shot at it, but I don't.
But it's important to
understand that this individual,
whose work was translated into
Latin at about that same time,
is really well understood to
have coined the terms algebra
and algorithm, which again we
use in everything with computing
but in almost everything else also.
So we jump then to 952 and I'm
going to attempt this one out,
Uqlidisi's invents the decimal
point in Damascus and that's a take
on basically what they think is
someone who was teaching Euclid
at the time so this
is the adopted name
of someone who was teaching Euclid.
Okay, so that's just getting
a little bit of our bearings.
But going back even
further, it was interesting
for me especially someone who
taught religion at the University
of Florida for several years
and taught religions of Asia.
Where you would learn about
the, about Yin Yang and Daoism
and you would talk about the
I Ching, the book of changes.
I was always taken with the
idea of trigrams, hexagrams
and then you can imagine my delight
when and during research I came
across something that was
in Scientific American
and it's dated 1885, excuse me
this is Popular Science Monthly.
Where they're looking at those
trigrams and basically any of the
on the lower part of your screen
where you have the lines going
either all the way across or part
of the way across, the ones
that go all the way
across, stand for the zero.
And then the ones that go
just part way across are ones
and it may be a little blurry on
yours but underneath each of those,
are actually the binary equivalent,
so it should say something like,
you know zero, zero, zero and then
zero, zero, zero, I actually said
that backwards, so the
short ones are zero
and then the long ones are one.
And then it goes and so on
so they're in binary order.
So even in 1885 people were
looking at this type of connection,
19th century well before
the 20th, 21st century.
I'm going to make just a
passing mention of this just
because it comes up a
lot in the literature.
And I don't know if our very
own John Hessler is here,
if he is he can tell you a lot
more about this than I can,
but I kept coming across
this concept of the Khipu,
during the Incan empire, the idea
of recording information
with strings and knots.
And there's a lot of discussion
particularly by Professor Gary Urton
of Harvard, he's got a
whole database on these.
See some knotting from our very
own anthropologist you know.
It's, it's tough to say
that this is a binary system
and I'll tell you why.
One we don't have what's the
equivalent of the Rosetta Stone,
we don't have something that
say's this is what this means,
there's no translation of
correlation necessarily set.
I think what we can say is that
whatever this ends up being,
we hope to find out one day.
It is clear that it
has binary opposition.
Kind of calling in a little
bit of Levie Strauss here.
But you know you have
different colors of string,
you either have a white string
or you have a colored
string, binary opposition.
You either have a knot or you don't.
The knot goes one direction or
it goes the other direction.
But because you have all of these
different parts it's not exactly
binary because it's
a lot of extra stuff.
So I throw it in there
because it's a concept
that was happening very early.
That is very similar to again
what we use in modern computing.
And one of the other ones I'll
talk about is from an Island
in French Polynesia, Mangareva.
I got a clap on that
one that's fantastic.
So it's really not imperative
to understand the math here
and I won't, I won't bore
you to death with that.
Not sure one would be
excited about that but,
what I think was compelling
for me about this was
that the population of people here.
Came in three different waves
and well before colonialism came.
And the research is pretty
clear that during the 2nd wave,
when you had people coming
from the southeast Marquesas.
That there was an interesting
mathematical system
that had a super position situation.
So you'd have a binary system
and you'd have a decimal system.
We need both of those in
order to use computers.
In order to make calculations
more efficient, to do addition
and not have to go in
depth with multiplication.
This system would allow you
to do that without notation,
without having to write
it down, without having
to have a calculating machine.
Very early, very complicated
and the concepts were there.
And these were all things
that Leibniz noted much
later, centuries later.
Okay so, speaking of Leibniz.
I thought it was really interesting
too to learn a little bit about him,
you know we hear a lot
about him if you study math
or if you study computer
science but I didn't know
that he was once a librarian.
And I learned that he was a
historian, he was a whole lot
of different things besides
philosopher and mathematician.
But, when you look at what's
next to his image here,
you'll see that this, a version of
his calculator, calculating machine.
And it's going to look very
reminiscent to what we fast forward
to in the 20th century with Claude
Elwood Shannon at Bell Labs.
What we find later on is that the
people who were most influential
in information theory, kept going
back to some of these greats
in mathematics and other fields,
they were going back to Bull,
they were going back to Babbage,
they were going back to Leibniz,
not necessarily in historical
order but you get the idea.
Another area where we have a real
connection and I'm kind of jumping
around just slightly,
but I wanted to make sure
that the I Ching got
it's due historically.
Leibniz was in contact with a lot of
people, he was traveling all around,
he was trying to defend the
claim to political structure
in his home country of Germany.
And he was in contact with a French
Jesuit Bouvet and one of the things
that this priest brought back was
this brilliant view of the I Ching.
And again the trigrams and then the
understanding of binary notation
and I don't know if you
can see it in the corners
but there are Arabic numbers,
there's I think it's 28 inverted
and then 27 down at
the bottom right.
Those are in Leibniz's
hands and his hand.
And basically what it did was allow
him to kind of have this concept
of universality with
binary number systems,
became a very important
concept for this understanding
of having a universal communication,
which is eventually what
happens with a computer.
So some of you may be
surprised to see Louis,
most of us in this country know it
as a Braille but I've been educated
to learn that it's actually Braille.
And I found this fascinating
to understand this is
yet another binary system,
you either have raised dots
or you don't have raised dots.
And that's kind of evident when
you look at it but as you think
about these systems and wonder
geez I don't really understand,
just think about how very straight
forward some of this really is.
There's a raised dot or there
isn't, there's a one or a zero.
Okay so moving into Charles Babbage.
Babbage is important for a lot of
different reasons and I'm not going
to go into all of this because
again the literature is pretty clear
on his contributions.
But, he kept trying to figure
out ways to improve calculation
and to do it faster, you had so many
people trying to memorize tables
of information, data tables and
it just seemed like there had
to be a way to automate this.
His collaboration with, she's
really well known as Ada Lovelace
but her full name is
there as you can read.
She was the daughter of Lord
Byron and her mother was terrified
that she would follow in
her fathers footsteps.
So she received a very astute
mathematical education,
something that was
very rare at the time.
Ada was a programer, before
programming was a thing.
In fact there's actually
programming language named for her.
It's very similar to Pascal for
any of those who like to program.
But she was able to articulate
Babbage's work in a way
that he wouldn't be able to do.
She was able to have people
understand that the algebra
that he was using, could
weave patterns as she says
so eloquently here, just like
the Jacquard-loom weaves,
flowers and leaves.
So it's the idea of taking this
processing, programming something
to record and transmit to
even calculate and share it.
Not just a process it but to
share it, it was something
that she only recently,
only in the last ten years
or so has really gotten credit for.
But really why I had to put all
of this in here was because I had
to get to this whole
concept of the Jacquard-loom.
So this is sort of
selfish on my part.
So here you, not a very
attractive photo or I mean image
of Mister Jacquard but what he
is important is his loom was the
beginning of where you really
started to see automation,
where you'd see punch
cards, automating a process
that was once a very manual
skilled craft work here,
there's no doubt about it.
And jumping further this is why
those three size proceeding are
there is to get to this.
The Library of Congress acquired
a book, this book, a few years ago
and it is one of the only,
it's actually the first book
to ever have been produced
with and I say automated,
automated in quotes
algorithm on a Jacquard-loom.
It's really a very unassuming
book, it's relatively small,
it's woven entirely out of silk
and it was programed
entirely using punch cards.
And you would never know it
when you look at it, the weave
and the weft is so tight it's,
it looks perfect even all
of these centuries later.
This was also presented to a
worlds fair shortly thereafter.
And this is important
because you're starting
to spread information globally in
ways that people hadn't really seen,
the idea that you could have a
book printed this way was just
unheard of.
So we're skipping ahead a
little bit here to Mister Morse,
Samuel Finley Breese Morse.
And some of the manuscript division
staff here we've had several
conversations about Mister Morse.
But I found it really interesting
that he was an accomplished artist.
He was actually, his parents really
wanted him to go into the book trade
and really just wasn't interested.
And there were a lot of
seminal moments in his career
but I think a few things
just to mention in passing,
since we are talking about
interdisciplinary kind
of contributions is that, you
know he was trained as a painter,
he was relatively good at it
because he received commissions,
the Marquis de Lafayette
would be one,
Noah Webster, there were others.
But he couldn't make
any money at it.
And so he had to come up
with something else to do.
Also interestingly enough,
he on a trip to France
I think actually going
to meet the Marquis de
Lafayette, met Louise Daguerre
and was the first person
essentially in the US
to learn about the daguerreotype.
Come back write it up,
about how do you do it
and then he taught Mathew Brady
who is probably the
most well known person
to have created daguerreotypes
in this country,
especially for his work
with the Civil War.
And so this is actually
daguerreotype,
the larger image is a daguerreotype
of Morse taken by Mathew Brady.
And then that's just an
example of one of his paintings.
But really what I'm
here to talk to you
about with Morse is just
his technical creations.
He had a unfortunate tragedy,
his wife died relatively young,
I mean by today standards anyway.
And he didn't know, he didn't
know until after he went back home
to visit and she not only had died
but they had already buried her,
it was kind of sad and so
there was really no way
to communicate information faster.
Whether or not this was the empatice
[assumed spelling] for his creation,
I'm not sure we know exactly but
I think that's pretty good cause.
So he started looking at ways
of doing it and there were a lot
of different innovations that led
up to him creating the
electromagnetic telegraph.
And it was a single wire system,
but I think what's really remarkable
about what he did was,
his system for Morse Code.
When you look at this image, what's
going to come back, what we're going
to back to here is, where
you see this yellow arrow.
It looks remarkably
like pulse modulation,
for anybody who studied
communications and again we're going
to get into Shannon
a little bit later
but you know how you communicate a
message across an electrical system,
you have to be able
to quantify that time.
In order to make that information
be communicated, keep it together
so you go from one point to the
other and have it received it
and have it all make sense.
For anybody who's familiar with
packet switching it's the same kind
of concept, you need to
keep it all together.
You have to control that
time and that speed.
And he was on to something
here, very early.
Again well before the 20th century,
well before the 21st century.
So, also just to give
you a sense one
of our resident experts
who's now retired,
Lynn Bruno did a really
interesting video that you can find
on the libraries website talking
about that first transmission
by telegraph, where he sent What
Had God Wrought, is that right?
Looking at the manuscript people.
From Washington to Baltimore.
But it's not just having
done the transmission,
it's also just how quickly
and how widely the ability
to transmit communication
through telegraph happened.
It was within ten years
that you had 50
or more different companies
putting up new poles and trying
to get the communications
to you know really reach
all across the country.
But then it gets really interesting
when he starts looking at the idea
of going across the Atlantic.
So here is Morse's sketch for
an Atlantic cable stretch.
And it's kind of ingenious again
when you start looking at it,
it looks a lot like a relay, it
starts to have aspects of a circuit.
You know it's pretty advanced for
the time of, for the time period.
And again you'll some examples
that are somewhat similar later.
Another thing that's
kind of compelling
with the telegraph
is it really starts
to take the imagination of people.
You know they, here you're seeing a
really beautiful image of a march,
that is the postal telegraph.
I mean, who regularly has an
invention that people want to set
to music, it's pretty incredible.
But there were a lot of them and a
lot of newspapers took their name,
the something or other telegraph.
We have the former chief
of the [inaudible] government
documents division is nodding saying
yes we really do, we
had tons of those.
So what really started to take
root in popular culture in the way
that we thought about
our communications.
So we're, in the same
kind of time period
and we have the worlds
Columbian Exposition
in Chicago Illinois in 1893.
So many people are familiar
with this but the thing that,
there's several things
that I thought were just
really interesting about this.
It was huge, I don't know of anybody
in here has studied this very much
but it was absolutely enormous,
they basically remade not only all
of the area close to the
shore, to Lake Michigan
but it was really suppose to create
this ideal city, this white city.
And the white city was not only
the idea of urban development
that hadn't quite managed to create
its social constructs the way
that people would like it to be but
it's also the idea of electricity.
Which we'll see in a few minutes
but one of other things you see,
especially with official guide to
the Midway Plaisance is this idea
of a highway through the nation, so
you don't just have this exposition
of hey here's our cool new invention
and here's what we're doing today
and aren't we a great country.
But it was to share cultures
throughout the world and you can see
in the next graphic
you have Uncle Sam
and Lady Liberty basically
welcoming everyone to the great city
of Chicago so that they could have
this kind of cultural exchange.
There were 46 nations that
participated in the exposition,
the cost was around 28
million, so it wasn't cheap.
They were for the admissions, they
were about 21 million and change
and the admission was 50 cents,
children under 12 paid 25 cents
and those who were under
six were admitted for free.
Prior to the opening there was
72,000 tons of exhibit materials
that were shipped to the grounds
and over 250,000 displays ranging
from milk sterilization
machines to works of art.
And there were over 70,000
individual exhibitors.
So it gives you a sense of the
magnitude and the grandeur.
It wasn't all fantastic
from the cultural standpoint
if we take our cultural
awareness of today.
And you can see this in the park
illustration here you have a very
tall Uncle Sam who was towering
over all of the other nations.
Who've been characterized in a way
that isn't maybe nice
by today's standards.
But it was, for its day the
idea was that we're trying
to you know be together
here and understand
where we are in the world, okay.
So moving on the electricity
building
which is again why I was really
getting you to this whole exposition
in the first place was it was
really amazing when I started to go
through the photographs and trying
to understand again what are some
of these seminal moments,
what are some of these themes
that are coming together.
You can see that this
is not a small building.
It's enormous, so the image on
the top was an artist rendering
from Harper's of what the
plan was suppose to be.
And then the image on the bottom was
an actual picture of what it looked
like once it had been built.
And they're just from
slightly different angles,
so that's one of the reasons
why they look so different but,
it was a grand and huge building.
And then what was also interesting
was that the entire place was lit
up at night with electricity.
For those of you who are familiar
the library has acquired a major PPS
collection WGBH and they did
a really great series on sort
of the waring battle of
electricity with Edison and Tesla.
And it was Westinghouse and Tesla
who lit the entire exposition,
it was really incredible.
But to give you an idea of the
competition and I laugh just
because branding was everywhere,
I mean I don't know how they
understood marketing as well
as they did back then,
but they nailed it.
You have, it's a little blurry
cause it's a lantern image,
but down in the front kind of
where you see the triangle you have
Westinghouse and Tesla and
polyphase system which was one
of the motors he was creating.
Behind that you have Edison.
And you see that it's so,
with GE and they have banners
and they have you know huge
signs and all the way at the back
of the building you have
the Westinghouse building
and so this was the 400th
anniversary of Columbus's discovery
of America, I mean it
was just everywhere.
You know here we are, we're
Westinghouse and we're Tesla,
here we are we're GE
and we're Edison.
It was just everywhere, so the
idea of these ideas being kept
between the two of these
gentlemen, battling it out
and their business supporters
really was not the case at all,
it was a global phenomenon that
a lot of people were aware of.
And I just had to talk
on to the side there,
the little flag, it's
kind of sad almost.
For Gray's telautograph.
You know by now we have the
telegraph has been kind of global
at this point and they didn't stop
with the inventions at that point,
it's not just looking
at the telegraph,
it's how do we make it better,
how do we make it print.
Well one of the annoying things
about the telegraph is you
either have to be there
to listen it do dots and dashes
or to sit there and write it down.
Gray's idea was to actually
have it do it for you,
so again it's gets it
this idea of automation.
Also at this time so we're looking
Tesla here again and I'm going
to read a little bit of this
newspaper article that's
from the Chronicling America site,
also supported here at the Library
of Congress program here.
And I really think it's important
even though it came a little bit
later, it was in 1915.
Because Tesla had some vision
that a lot of people just sort
of thought he was a little crazy and
there were some good reasons why.
I mean he would stand there and let
electricity radiate through his body
and it would go all over the place,
it was really kind of a site.
But he was arguably a genius
and ahead of his time in many,
many topics and many thoughts.
So, from this article.
Published in the Leavenworth Echo,
this is Leavenworth
Washington by the way.
It says wireless vision seen
by Tesla thinks world system
will allow many to talk
at once, end static disturbance.
We're going to come
back to disturbance here
in a just a little while.
The inventor also hopes to
transmit pictures by same medium
which carries the voice,
declares it will be possible
to hold secret conversation too.
In perfecting the devices
there are two kinds.
First, those serving to
control transmissions.
Second those magnifying
the received impulses,
so this should start
to sound familiar.
It is claimed that static
disturbances will fatally interfere
with the transmission, meaning that
it won't happen, it'll just cut off.
While as a matter of fact there's
no static disturbance possible
in properly designed transmission
and receiving circuits.
Another contingent is that
there can be no secrecy
in wireless telephone
conversation, I say that's absurd
and this is quoting Tesla here.
It is absurd to raise
this contingent
when it is positively
demonstrated by experiments
that the Earth is more
suitable for transmission
than any wire could ever
be, so he's referring
to the electromagnetic
qualities of the Earth.
A wireless telephone conversation
may be made a secret as a thought,
by the same means I've proposed
also to transmit pictures
and project images so that the
subscriber will not only hear the
voice but see the person
to whom he is talking.
Pictures transmitted over wires is a
perfectly simple art practice today,
many inventors have labored on it.
But the chief credit is due
to Professor Korn of Munich.
So again we have this
intercultural exchange.
Around this same time
you have a Yale alumnus
and Bell labs physicists Harry
Nyquist beginning to work
on a method for transmitting
pictures by wire.
Telephotography as early as 1918,
so this is only three years later.
And the company had a
working prototype by 1924.
So now we're getting into the,
into the heart of the matter,
information theory, I forgot my
little friends so sorry about that.
And really what this is, is we're
moving from the idea of digits,
how early cultures would
count on your fingers
and hands while we have a bait you
know, counting base ten as opposed
to base two it's just easier,
I mean if we use, we are crabs
or something, I live in Maryland.
We know about crabs.
Then there would be, two
would be easier but it's not,
we have five fingers on
each hand and you know kind
of seems to work pretty well.
But the idea of getting into
what we really considered digital
of today really starts to shape,
take shape in this period,
so it's just at the very
beginning of the 20th century.
But again keeping in mind
there was a lot of sea laying,
a lot of ground work that had been
laid leading up to this point.
So, I'm not going to go,
all of these things could
be their own research topic
and I just can't go into all of them
today but, I want you to have sort
of a mental picture, imagine
you're walking around places
like Princeton, at their
advanced institute.
And then not to long after
you're walking around Bell Labs
and you see the following
people in the hallway.
People who were the founding
faculty, you know you see Einstein,
you see Shannon, you see Turing.
I mean all of these names
that you come to mind,
you know Nyquist just incredible
people who were contributing to all
of these thoughts and
ideas over time.
When Shannon was at Bell, you
know it's not like in today,
where if you're research
candidate somewhere,
unless you're established
you're not getting published.
And Nyquist was in the same boat
as was Ralph Hartley and one
of the really cool things that
Bell Labs did is they had their
own journal.
Where there own staff
could publish in it.
It was called the Bell Systems
Technical Journal and it was there
that Claude Shannon learned
of Harry Nyquist work
to understanding the amount of data
and speed transmitted by telegraph.
So again we're having people of 20th
century going back to the telegraph,
going back to Bull and
understanding logic aides.
Going back to Babbage
and understanding all
of the calculations there.
He converted the continuous waves
into data, that was discreet.
It was digital, so a discreet
system, you have to contain it
to understand how it's going
to move through electricity.
Nyquist had devised a formula
for the speed transmission
of intelligence and a circuits
carried varying waves of frequencies
and their engineers, they
were referring to it as bands.
The range of frequency was
understood as bandwidth.
And would turn that measure in,
basically create a measure
for circuit capacity.
So, to transmit intelligence
at a certain speed,
a measurable channel was needed.
So again we're in the same period as
around 1927 and there's the sentinel
of volt is death and Ralph
Hartley who was known
for his engineering work with
radio and he was also at Bell,
wrote that information
is a very elastic term
and what was needed was a measure in
terms of purely physical quantities.
He wrote the equation as h
equals n log s or h is the amount
of information, n is the
number of symbols transmitted
and s is the size of the alphabet.
In 1945 Shannon wrote a report, a
mathematical theory of cryptography,
which was classified practical
immediately thereafter and is part
of the collection we
have here at the library
in the manuscript division.
But in that he makes several what
I think are astounding points,
that a secrecy system is almost
identical to a noisy system.
That information theory which
is a new phrase hadn't been used
until now.
And that term was needed in order
to get beyond the elastic
use of information.
And to define it physically and
that information is basically binary
digits or bits.
It's closely associated with
uncertainty which can be measured
by counting the possibility
of messages.
So again we get back into
like things packet switching
and understanding how to
measure a circuit and bandwidth
and all of those goodies.
It implies this surprise in
the sense of probabilities
so how do you work
all of that unknown,
you start looking at probabilities.
What is significant is and this is
again a quote from Shannon, is that,
the difficulty in transmitting
the messages from one point
to the other it's not
so much the message,
while the message eventually
becomes important in a lot of ways,
it's really how do you get
it there, how do you get
from one point to the other?
And this leads us to the idea of
entropy, which was his fourth point
that a measure, it's basically
information is a measure
of disorder, particularly with
heat and energy and thermodynamics,
so this then looks
forward to Wheeler
and this is why their ideas work
together, is how do you handle
that disorder, that
disruption, that noise,
that complexity, that entropy?
So, without going into a
ton of things about Shannon,
one of the things, Shannon was
kind of left alone at Bell to kind
of do research and development
in a lot of different ways,
occasionally the CIA would come
over and say, we need you to work
on this, your work is classified,
don't talk to anybody
including Turing.
But you know, you do good things.
But one of the things that I
felt was really funny when I came
across this in the manuscript
division in the Shannon papers
and I don't know if you can
really see it very well,
but right where the yellow
is pointing, this is a patent
for Warren Shannon, that was
patented and they were trying
to figure out how do you work
out all of this, this switching
with the circuits in the
logic aides and everything.
So in between you have closed and
open, so a circuit is either open
or closed, there is no in between.
So right in between is don't care.
He really didn't, he really didn't
care it had to be either opened
or closed, zero one
that's what it was.
So, I want you to think
back now just a little bit
to when we were looking
at Morse and Morse Code.
And if you look really hard it
needs to be a little bit bigger,
you can see that here
Shannon was really starting
to understand modulation, how do
you start to control that wavelength
which is the very top figure.
How do you break it down and then
how do you handle the slow down?
And what do you with
entropy, so what do you do
with that dissipation
of heat and energy?
You basically have it kick back
into the message which is what make,
part of what makes
packet switching work.
And so it was interesting to
see some of these things here.
I just threw this in mostly because,
well one we have the Lorenz papers
here at the library and I was dying
to get more into these
but time didn't permit.
But one of the things that Lorenz
is really well known for other
than being a meteorologist
is, chaos theory.
And information theory made chaos
theory possible, for those of you
who aren't really familiar with
chaos theory, Lorenz was known
for this idea of the
butterfly affect,
it basically there would be
one thing that would happen
and it would be really small
and it could have great
impact on a larger scale.
So if you think about a
butterfly flapping its wings,
could it cause a major storm
somewhere halfway around the world.
And at first that seemed
absolutely ridiculous.
But as he kept doing his work
as a meteorologist and trying
to understand climate and
patterns in climate he kept coming
into these things that reaped of
the uncertainty principle and trying
to understand patterns,
it just started coming
up with these patterns.
And that's really what ended
up happening with chaos theory,
is that you started to understand
patterns within something
that looked absolutely chaotic.
So, again kind of in this
same time period and now we're
in the 21st century obviously.
Again I just feel obligated to make
a mention of here of Mandelbrot.
Who is well known for
his fractal geometry
but also was an icon at IBM.
I'm going to explain this just
really in a brief way which is not
at all going to do it justice
but basically the idea is
that if you look at this graphic
here which is, paying homage to IBM
with the stripes, many
of us remember
that graphic from years ago.
In the middle you see fractals.
And you see this in biology
and botany and chemistry
and all different types
of things but,
the Mandelbrot set is visualized
in that thing that almost looks
like a heart but a really
fat heart turned on its side.
But what's really interesting
about that is, you can take this
which is a discreet finite set,
that whole image right there
and have infinite versions
of that all around the edges,
all the way to the middle
and it will never touch.
So you have basically
infinity within a finite set,
it's really incredible how
this would work but in order
to really understand that
and to make that known
and to make it understood, how
do you process all that data,
which in a way kind of fast
forwards to big data of today.
You needed to understand this type
of mathematics and it was done
in a place where computers thrived.
And we'll get back to
him in just a minute.
So if your brain is
starting to glaze
over because we've been talking
about a lot math and we talked
about circuits and
electricity and all this stuff
and I don't know what they'll say,
we'll look at something that's
kind of different from that.
So, Vasarely really was basically
the father of op art, optical art.
And the image you have that
is gray and white, we'll say.
Is here in the libraries
collections and this book is also
in the libraries collections,
actually a French poet
and he wrote an entire book on,
an entire book of poetry on code
and he choose Vasarely to
do the cover art for it
because you can see how
the mathematics lent itself
to a codification of art.
So again it's starting to
cross over to into disciplines,
it's starting to really
resonate in popular culture.
And I couldn't do this without
just talking a little bit
about the R Eames collection.
The image at the bottom is Ray
Eames, she's part of a design pair
of Charles and Ray Eames,
Charles was her husband.
The library did a really
wonderful exhibit,
I think predated my tenure here.
On them but we are
essentially they're archived
and while I can't prove correlation
here I think there is compelling
visual interest , between the
image you see up at the top there,
that has sort of the golden
background that's basically a
circuit board and it
was in the Eames's,
what they called the curiosity
cabinet, they would take pictures
and they were slides and just things
that would be inspiring to them,
things that they found interesting.
And then the larger image you
see is Ray's abstract drawing
for dot pattern and it is one
of her most famous works of art
and you see the fabric design
of it down at the bottom.
The Eames's were also known for
their, for a lot different things
and again we couldn't really
cover all of that today
but they were instrumental in
the IBM's world fair pavilion
in New York in 1964,
they designed it.
And so you see that there is
again this sort of crossover
of understanding of computer is art.
They also did a historical computer,
history of computers and computing
and really calculating machines
in IBM's headquarters as well.
And then they did some
fantastic exhibits
on mathematica throughout
the country
and I think their most
famous one was in California.
And then just one last
point about the Eames's
and I cut off their last name with
that big image, sorry about that.
Is just the understanding of
scale and again the idea of this.
In the Shannon papers, Shannon
takes out a pencil and paper,
starts to sketch out the idea
of measures of information
and so it forms this pyramid, right.
And so he starts form tens of
bits to then goes to trillions,
at the top of the pyramid was
his estimate for the Library
of Congress, it was ten to
the 14 or 100 trillion bits.
Whether or not that's correct
today I don't know I didn't want
to go there but, I thought it
was interesting that he thought
about it, that was largest container
storehouse he could think of.
If you compare that with the
Eames's work they were doing film,
they were doing all sorts of
things, photography, original art
and this is their poster
that has all of the stills
of what was called powers of ten
and dealing with the relative size
of things in the universe.
And the affect of adding in
another zero, powers of ten.
It was then put into motion
picture and it was used
for educational purposes, in
this country and elsewhere.
Okay home stretch, so just to
fast forward a little bit more,
we really can't omit the University
of Utah here and the Library
of Congress periodically announces
the National Film Registry
and I was excited, in fact
ecstatic when they announced the one
for a computer animated hand.
The image you see there
of the hand is a very,
it really is a short short,
but it was the first three
dimensional computer animated
graphic ever created and
what's particularly interesting
about this is that the people
who did it, Edwin Catmull
and Jeff Parke went
on to co-found Pixar.
Anybody know what Pixar is?
Yeah I see some people nodding.
So, you know they were backed by
George Lucas and Lucas Film and ILM
and then they eventually partnered
with Steve Jobs again to form Pixar.
And then around the same time,
only three years later you
had Martin Newell do the math
essentially for what's
called the Utah teapot,
which almost anybody doing graphic
design has to learn how to do.
It is painful and yet
educational all the same time.
So why I have the next two
movies on this slide is,
twofold again the Toy
Story is a nod to Catmull
because Pixar's very first full
length feature completely CGI,
completely computer generated
imagery was Toy Story and that was
in 1995, so it was you
know almost 20 years later.
But, more recently after
that short was Futureworld
and that was a series and I watched
over in the [inaudible]
reading room.
You know it's kind of like a
cult flick I would just say,
kind of have to be die hard to
sit through the whole thing,
really wasn't that
bad, it was Peter Fonda
and Blythe Danner and Yul Brynner.
Yul Byrnner had no speaking
parts in it whatsoever.
But this short film of the
computer animated hand,
was featured in that
full length feature film.
And it was kind of creepy and eerie
and kind of got into this whole idea
of robotics taking over
the world and I'm proud
to say the people eventually
saved the day
but you know you're
really seeing the advances,
even though they're slow, they're
also fast at the same time,
it's kind of it's own binary
opposition if you will.
Okay. So, where do this leave us?
Oh actually let me just make one
more mention of something here.
I would be remiss if I didn't
mention one other thing about Pixar.
So, you saw what Catmull
did with Parke in creating
that computer animated hand.
And he saw what they did with Pixar,
what we didn't show here was their
work in creating a new software
for computers that is, I
wasn't going to use the word,
but I basically have to at
this point, it's ubiquitous.
Most of the major films that
you see that have CGI involved
in them now, are utilizing
RenderMan.
RenderMan was created by Pixar and
all of those really great graphics
that looks so real, anybody
you know watch the Hobbit
and Gollum you know precious.
When you look at the mountains
and how realistic they
are, anybody Star Wars fan?
You know saw the graphics in that?
All of those graphics that looks
so detailed were using the fractal
geometry that Mandelbrot used.
So it comes full circle, you know it
really, what was originally created
as math and physics inspired art,
the art then inspired the
computer engineering essentially,
software engineering.
So where does this leave us?
I think that's up to you to decide
in many ways, from It from Bit
but I'm going to leave with
this note and sort of nod
and I don't know if our esteemed
chair Nathaniel Comfort [assumed
spelling] is here but not
to long ago we had a really
interesting presentation about the r
and a world and it was there some
of the, you know seminal people
who understood r and a mentioned
that DNA wasn't very interesting.
They might find that
this was interesting,
Francis Crick who left
physics for biology
and James Watson were the people
essentially discovered DNA and wrote
to Schroder and Gamow and
Hofstetter and others.
Making the connection that genetic
code was the information system
from which all continuity
of life stems.
So I thank you very much.
You have any questions,
I'd be happy to take them.
[ Applause ]
The question is about whether or not
the universe is essentially analog
or digital and what about fuzzy
logic and how it fits in there?
Fuzzy logic is weird, it's what
I can tell you about fuzzy logic.
I think you can do a lot of
different things with fuzzy logic
that would allow you to argue
both sides of this theory.
Whether it's analog or digital, I
don't think it's, if I answer this
from a Wheeler perspective, what I
think he might say is it's neither.
Because it's been most
granular for lack
of a better word, part of existence.
It is the very essence of the
whole and the part, so it can't be
because it's binary, because it's
two halves of a whole essentially.
It can't be analog and it can't
just be digital, it's It from Bit.
So the question was about you know
basically how information was being
shared at different parts throughout
their research project and if I look
at it back it's sort of the earlier
points where we had the I Ching
and we had you know the Mangarevan
Islands and those type of things.
You know, part of it is how
people move around the Earth,
right so you have people who
immigrated to a place and they had
to come up with a scheme, the
Mangarevans came up with their own
and it was kind of unique.
Even among French Polynesian
Islands.
And this predated colonialism,
but then when you had colonialism
coming, you had often times
in the cases that I was using,
priests that were sent
out to convert people.
But also were informed
of ideas of the cultures
in which they were living.
And so we saw that with
Bouvet, with Leibniz.
Then you know I think things change
because the world became more
globally aware and so I think one
of the things that we
saw with the telegraph is
that you had not just
your local town crier
and you didn't have
somebody on a horse back
and you didn't have lanterns,
one if by land, two if by sea.
You had something that
was much more immediate
and the definitely
became transcontinental.
And leading up to that and after
that you had these really fantastic
planned events, these world fairs
that really drew hoards of people.
And were fantastic
in their inspiration
of innovation and cultural exchange.
When you get into the
electronic time period,
you know moving a little bit forward
and where computers really start
to be connected, where
you have [inaudible]
and you actually have an internet.
It becomes a much different animal
about how information
is communicated
because it's much more immediate.
We all see it, we're all checking
our phones you know every five
seconds to see what little
ping was on our phone.
You have the advent of motion
pictures and that kind of thing,
so it's a very different type
of communication of information.
Thank you for your question.
So the question is, basically wonder
whether or not if there were sort
of dissenters about
this idea of binary
and whether it is impoverished in.
It really just didn't seem
like a good idea at all,
maybe a way characterize a skeptics.
Yeah I think you always have them,
you know you always have people
who say, this is not at
all the way we want to go
and frankly you saw the
writing Tesla was arguing
that in the newspaper
article saying, this is crazy,
people saying that this is
not possible, it's possible,
we've demonstrated it, we're
you know building examples of it
and three years later there was
another person working on it
and few years after that
there was a working prototype.
So, you know the proof was
in the pudding so to speak,
people were able to
create their inventions,
they were inspired by
some of these ideas.
And they were able to demonstrate
that they worked and they were able
to overcome the challenges of things
like entropy, complexity, noise,
you know the whole dynamical
system kind of concepts so.
Yeah I think you always
have those dissenters
but if you can prove it,
then more power to you.
>> Jason Steinhauer: I think
with that I'll stop there,
so please join me again
in thanking Jennifer.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
