Review and Discussion -- Memex at 60: Internet or iPod?

Richard H. Veith's Memex at 60: Internet or iPod? discusses a prescient 1945 article by MIT researcher Vannevar Bush entitled “As We May Think.” Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, Bush coined the term Memex to describe a mechanized private library. Since Bush’s publication, many of the features of the Memex have now been realized in a technology that indexes a vast interconnection of documents we know today as the internet – but not so fast.

According to Bush, the Memex was a device that could “file items by association and run through trails of associations at the touch of a button.” Is this something different than the internet? Are we engaging in textual eisegesis – importing a 21^st century perspective into a 1940s document? In part, yes, according to Veith. Veith points out that Memex was for personal use and not a way of indexing publicly available documents. It was envisioned to use vacuum tubes and a telephone-exchange model which seems to me to have more in common with the address system used in a database. But Veith says it did not envision a database either, merely a mechanized library to supplement and to extend the user’s own memory.

Eisegesis in Textual Documents

This brings up a more generic problem, and here, I wish to digress to a discussion of eisegesis in general. This is a great problem in the analysis of any ancient text, but as the Veith article shows, even writing removed barely a generation from its readership is prone to this kind of misunderstanding. I shall make my point with two brief examples.

Thomas Will, an early diabetes researcher, noted that the urine of diabetics tastes “wonderfully sweet.” “Yuk!” is no doubt, the reader’s first reaction. But is the text really saying what we think it is saying?

In the 17^th century, when Will made his observation, researchers had a paucity of scientific devices. They were forced to use their five senses. As a matter of historical fact, Will’s observation is very fortunate in the history of diagnosis and treatment of diabetes.“Okay, fine,” the reader may think, “but why does Will describe the flavor as wonderful?” The answer may surprise you. In the 17^th century, “wonderful” was used in a more etymologically correct way, meaning “full of wonder or amazement.” Will is not describing something delicious. He is describing something unexpected, amazing, or baffling. If Will were alive today he would have likely said that the urine of diabetics is “unexpectedly sweet.”

In another example from the not-too-distant past, John Adams, the United States’ second president and a lifelong protestant, says his first Catholic Mass was both “wonderful and awful.” Well, which was it? Actually, as historian David McCullough noted on page 84 of his biography of Adams, the word “awful” meant “‘full of awe,’ or ‘that which strikes with awe, or fills with reverence.’” In other words, the Catholic Mass was amazing and awe-inspiring, to use modern textual equivalents.

History and context are the key tenets of hermeneutics – the science of textual interpretation. Can we really understand ancient works like Homer’s Iliad, the Bible, or Egyptian hieroglyphics? These works have the additional complication that the target and receptor languages are different (e.g., from ancient Greek to modern English). Notwithstanding, the same principles apply. So long as the text is translated with diligent consideration of history and context we shall not go awry.