Sunday, October 25, 2015

Agincourt, Information Architecture and the Apache


Today is the 600th anniversary of the battle of Agincourt and, somewhat to my surprise, I find my feelings and thoughts surprisingly complex.  It’s not the facts of the event themselves, or the facts of the literary and cultural consquences,

 “…Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-…”

Nor is it a desire to pass some kind of superfluous judgment.  Rather, it’s a desire to see all of it, and correctly understand the connections.  At its root is the basic human will to reason out how the world, how the universe, works.

Some days ago I found myself standing on a small remote promontory in the Southwest overlooking a quiet pastoral valley, almost a glen that was subtly, autumnally beautiful.  It was also, not so long ago, the site of a massacre, in which two dozen men and women and fifty children were ruthlessly killed early one evening.  It’s an event I know very little about.  Yet, I found myself deeply emotionally affected.  It was as if there was something now in the place itself.

I still don’t know what to make of my reaction.  I’d had such experiences a very few times before, at Omaha Beach and at the Dachau Concentration Camp for example, but on each of those occasions I was more than conversant with the history.

Near the end of a fireside conversation in Chaco Canyon a week or so before, Philip Tuwaletstiwa recommended I search out a book by the cultural and linguistic anthropologist, Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits In Places.  Steve Lekson, who was sitting with us, strongly concurred.  Though my “to read” list is particularly full at the moment, (mostly with Arthuriana), I made a note to do so.  Their combined and strong recommendation was something I couldn’t resist.

Basso’s book begins as a narrative of an innocuous project to develop a map of Apache place-names in the area around Cibecue, Arizona during late summer months when he traveled with three occasionally recalcitrant and ironic but always witty Apache guides.  It soon becomes apparent that both they and he are after much more elusive and dangerous game than a sheet of paper with a large scatter of phonetically accurate aboriginal labels.  He is studying and they are trying to teach him how different kinds of narrative, including history are developed, recorded and used in Apache culture.  Not surprisingly, it is very different from the traditional western post-Enlightenment traditions.  What is surprising, to me, is how pragmatic, efficient and rational it is.

As I read Basso, I couldn’t help but think about his ideas in an entirely different context:  computer science.  Here is a trivial, inaccurate but sufficient model of a modern computer for my sequel:  a computer is large sequentially numbered set of mailboxes (memory locations) and a robot (the CPU) who can retrieve information from those mailboxes and do a limited set of things with the contents, such as move it to another mailbox or perform an arithmetic operation on it.  Of course, almost none of the information we use in life fits that structure, therefore so much of the work of any computer program (the recipe which the robot follows to continue the metaphor) is mapping, structuring and manipulating data.  These days, after decades of research and experimentation, people generally follow a set of reasonably good practices, however, there was a time when the world was a bit wilder, when deep, philosophical questions, such as the difference between a thing and the symbol which stands for it found concrete expression in the way a computer program worked.  Sometimes the most pragmatic of computer programs could also be seen, quite reasonably, as a philosophical experiment.  More often than not, the core issue was “referencing:”  when should one block of information point to another.  At one extreme, one might try to avoid referencing all together: imagine putting everything there is to know about a place or a subject into its name.  At the opposite end the information could be so fragmented that the information becomes apparently invisible:  all you see are pointers, or pointers to other pointers even pointers to other recipes to construct the information you need.

One narrow, but useful way to look at Apache narrative, history and place-naming is through the formalism of information architecture.  Almost immediately, it’s apparent how well-designed it is, how naturally it suits the culture’s needs.

Most interesting is how the information is structured to make culturally productive use of the imaginations of its individual members.  Obviously, I find myself wondering how the western historical tradition can and should be informed by its model.

Which brings me back to that sodden Friday in 1415 and its manifold references and pointers.  We know so much.  We remember so much.  We have the words of the greatest dramatist in the language to help us see his vision of it.  But I’m not sure our rich, unruly set of pointers, and the implicit values therein make best use of our understanding and imaginations.

“…We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”


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