[lbo-talk] conversations with Orion (was: Socialim etc.)

[Dennis Claxton]

Chuck asked:


>Does this technology work for people who use
>it? People do have different ways of looking for information.

For a pleasant (and short) essay about just this 
read Carlo Ginzburg's "Conversations with 
Orion"   Ginzburg is a marvelous historian and a 
great storyteller who concentrates as much on method as results.

Conversations with Orion
by Carlo Ginzburg
(Translated from the original Italian by Giovanni Zanalda)

Some years ago I wrote an essay on Voltaire that 
has appeared in the journal Quaderni Storici. 
While conducting the research for that essay, I 
performed a little experiment. I chose at random 
a passage from the beginning of Voltaire's Traité 
de métaphysique. The voice is that of a visitor 
from outer space who has landed on earth:

Descendu sur ce petit amas de boue, et n'ayant 
pas plus de notion de l'homme que l'homme n'en a 
des habitants de Mars ou de Jupiter, je débarque 
vers les côtes de l'Océan, dans les pays de la 
Cafrerie, et d'abord je me mets à chercher un 
homme. Je vois des singes, des éléphants, des 
nègres, qui semblent tous avoir quelque lueur d'une raison imparfaite.

For Voltaire and his readers every word of this 
passage was part of a web of references and 
associations of which we have only an imperfect 
knowledge. Perhaps, I thought, Orion­the online 
catalog of the UCLA library­could be of some help 
in identifying, at least in a conjectural way, 
the lesser-known elements of this web.

I decided to focus my inquiry by starting with a 
name from the passage­the least obvious name, 
Cafrerie. Because the subject of my essay was 
tolerance, which included Voltaire's attitude 
towards slavery, someone might object that in 
placing my bets on the name of an African 
country, I was playing with partially loaded 
dice. I agree, although, as we shall see, the 
experiment was to lead me in an unexpected 
direction. I told Orion "fnt Cafrerie" and "fkw 
Cafrerie"­that is, I asked it to find in the UCLA 
catalog books with the word "Cafrerie" in "title" 
or "author" (the field codes "fnt" and "fkw" 
meaning, respectively, "find name and title" and 
"find keywords"). In both cases there was no 
match for my search. I tried again, this time 
using the keyword "Cafres." I got 13 hits.....

rest at:

http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2005/0505/0505arc1.cfm