A Figurine and a Scroll

Today we continue our tour through the first part of "The Best from Pen and Press" with two remaining items found in our first exhibit case: a figurine and a scroll.

Neither piece, upon their arrivals to the Library, carried much additional descriptive information, what librarians and others call "metadata," that is, data about data. We like to know such things as: Where did this item come from? What did we pay for it? Who previously owned it? What is its value? (However you wish to define value. The Society of American Archivists created and maintains an informative glossary, which includes at least nineteen narrower terms for the concept of value.) In the case of the figurine and the scroll, we know little else beyond what they are.

Additional information about an item can be immensely helpful. It can also be exceedingly distracting. Even the word "data" can divert one away from a task (such as writing this post) and lead down a rabbit hole, as we're about to demonstrate.

A recent article entitled "Data! Data! Data!" by D. L. Dusenbury, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leuven, in the Times Literary Supplement Online illustrates the point (made even easier as it involves one of our other interests: Sherlock Holmes). At the same time, Dusenbury provides a bit more data on the word "data."

Dusenbury begins by introducing a scene from the very first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet. 

In the scene I have in mind..., Dr John Watson, is seated beside Holmes in a hansom cab which is taking them to a vacant house on Brixton Road where the Metropolitan Police have identified the corpse of an American gentleman. Asked by Watson what he is thinking, Holmes snaps that he has “no data yet.” “You will have your data soon,” Watson says soothingly.

Watson’s reply now reads like a sort of prophecy. In the last decade, IBM has invested roughly $1 billion in a front-wave computing platform called Watson. Whatever IBM’s Watson may lack – a mind, or at least, a blood-suffused brain in a warm body – this “cognitive” entity can mine, and scan, and sift, and analyse titanic, oceanic amounts of data. Or, as IBM’s brand-consultants prefer to put it, “Watson can ingest, enrich and normalize a wide variety of data types”. And what are “data”?

Data is a plural form of the Latin word datum, which originally referred to a gift or a symbol of high office. In premodern terms, then, data were things given or attested. “Data” entered English in the middle of the seventeenth century, but only seems to settle into its current meaning – a “mass of information”, as Edgar Allen Poe writes in his true-crime tour de force, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” – towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Holmes canon signals the meteoric rise of “data” as a term, and a concept, in the years between 1890 and 1910.

It's nice to know that the Sherlockian canon (as the gathering of fifty-six short stories and four novels are collectively known) contributed to the term and use of data. The Google Books Ngram viewer provides additional insight on the appearance of "data" in texts.

But none of this gets us any closer to what these two items are, or how to describe them. All we know about the figurine--absent an ability to read hieroglyphics--is found on a small label: "Egypt, 11th Dynasty." The 11th Dynasty in ancient Egypt ruled from Thebes in Upper Egypt and reigned from about 2134 to1991 BCE. Obviously, there's more work to be done to pull out additional information on the figurine.

As to the scroll, we again were left with a simple label: Book of Esther, scroll, 18th century. A colleague, Kate Dietrick, archivist for the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives, provided additional information about this item in an email after viewing it in the exhibit. We quote:

The scroll is the Book of Esther, which is one of five megillahs (Hebrew word for scroll) read during Purim (Jewish holiday taking place in March). While there are five different megillahs read (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther) it is the book of Esther that is the core of the readings, and thus is most widely considered THE Megillah. It's also where the phrase "the whole megillah" comes from, referring to the lengthy and all-encompassing reading of all of these books.

This is useful data indeed, something we can add to the metadata for this item!

Part of what we do is similar to the enterprise of Mr. Holmes: we investigate, deduce, induce, or otherwise reason our way to fuller descriptions of items in our collections. We also use our networks of scholars, including those most useful and knowledgeable of colleagues--curators of collections around the globe. By obtaining and providing this additional information, we also provide new avenues of access to each item. It is one of the many joys and adventures in our work as academic librarians and curators of world-class collections. Or, as Holmes would say of our work: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”