March 27, 2005

Tomorrow was yesterday

Actually that's "Demain, c'etait hier" -- the headline under which Jacques Attali in L'Express on 3/14 tore into Jean-Noel Jeanneney and (implicitly) Jacques Chirac. The subhead:

Si la France avait suivi son plan de numérisation des livres, sa culture serait la plus présente sur la Toile.

If France had followed its plan for digitization of books, its culture would have the biggest web presence.

This is transparently a partisan attack, since Attali is a prominent "socialist" intellectual -- meaning, confusingly, that he's a leading advocate of neo-liberal capitalism, i.e. free-market economics. At least I think that's how he lines up. This is Language Log, and we're used to systematic irregularity (or should that be irregular systematicity?), but French politics is another thing entirely.

Anyhow, for Attali to attack Chirac is as expected as for Paul Krugman to attack Bush, but even if it's predictable, his op-ed piece is a fine specimen of its genre:

La colère que suscite, dans un petit milieu parisien, la décision de Google de numériser des millions de livres et de les rendre gratuitement accessibles serait seulement ridicule si elle n'était pas le reflet du consternant provincialisme de ce qui est nommé à tort nos «élites» et l'un des signes annonciateurs de la marginalisation de la France dans la formidable accélération de la mondialisation en cours.

The anger that is evoked, in a small Parisian milieu, by Google's decision to digitize millions of books and make them freely accessible would be ridiculous if it were not the reflection of the distressing provincialism of what are wrongly called our "elites", and one of the leading indicators of the marginalization of France in the extraordinary acceleration of globalization now underway.

(Skipping a bit about the history of Google...)

Quand Google a proposé à des bibliothèques non anglophones, et en particulier françaises, de se joindre au projet, certains ont crié au scandale: voilà que l'Amérique s'arrogeait le droit de hiérarchiser la littérature et la science, privilégiant nécessairement les écrivains anglo-saxons. Reproche absurde.

When Google proposed to the non-anglophone libraries, and especially the French ones, to join the project [of Google Library], some people cried scandal: there goes America arrogating to itself the right to organize literature and science into a hierarchy, necessarily privileging anglo-saxon writers. An absurd charge.

D'abord, parce que rien n'empêchait les Européens, notamment les Français, d'en faire autant. C'est en effet en France, en 1988, c'est-à-dire avant même l'apparition du nom d'Internet, qu'est née l'idée de numériser les livres et de les mettre gratuitement à disposition du public sur ordinateur. Et si, au lieu de construire, avec la Bibliothèque nationale de France, un bâtiment de plus de 1 milliard d'euros, on avait suivi le plan initial et consacré les 300 millions d'euros prévus à la numérisation des livres, la France serait aujourd'hui le pays à la culture la plus présente sur la Toile.

First, because there was nothing stopping the Europeans, and especially the French, from doing the same. In fact it was in France, in 1988, even before the appearance of the name "Internet", that the idea of digitizing books and putting them freely at the disposition of the public was born. And if, instead of constructing the French National Library, a building costing more than a billion euros, they had followed the initial plan and spent the 300 million euros planned for digitization of books, France would today be the country and the culture with the biggest web presence.

Actually, the word internet was coined in 1974, as documented by the OED:

1974 V. G. CERF et al. Request for Comments (Network Working Group) (Electronic text) No. 675. 1 (title) Specification of internet transmission control program.

and was used in the trade press at least since 1981, but perhaps Attali is confusing internet with world wide web, which was coined in 1990:

1990 T. BERNERS-LEE & R. CAILLIAU (title of electronic document) WorldWideWeb: proposal for a HyperText project.

Also, my memory of the French plan is that it called for the digitized books to be available only on the site of that billion-euro library, via purpose-built "computer-assisted reading environments" provided by a French computer company. But never mind that, let's go on with Attali's op-ed:

Ensuite, parce que c'est ne rien comprendre à Internet que de croire que Google pourrait ou voudrait hiérarchiser les cultures. D'ores et déjà, les moteurs de recherche en espagnol et en chinois connaissent une croissance supérieure aux moteurs anglophones. Et si nous avions aujourd'hui l'intelligence de numériser la culture francophone à grande vitesse et de la rendre disponible sur la Toile par tous les moteurs de recherche, y compris Google, nous l'inscririons dans le réseau de tous les savoirs, sans avoir à craindre de disparaître dans une hiérarchie: un réseau n'est pas une hiérarchie.

Next, because it shows a complete lack of understanding of the internet to believe that Google could or would organize cultures into a hierarchy. Already, the search engines in Spanish and in Chinese are growing faster than the anglophone engines are. And if we had today the intelligence to digitize francophone culture at a great speed, and to make it available on the web to all the search engines, Google included, we would inscribe it in the network of all knowledge, without having to fear disappearing in a hierarchy: a network is not a hierarchy.

Enfin, parce que le monde change et que ce qui est arrivé à la musique arrivera à la littérature: la gratuité des idées est inéluctable. Les auteurs y trouveront leur compte. Les bibliothèques s'y inventeront un nouveau rôle. Et les journaux seront là pour aider à distinguer l'essentiel de l'accessoire. Distinguer: décidément, l'un des plus beaux mots de la langue française.

Finally, because the world changes and what has happened to music will happen to literature: the freedom of ideas is unstoppable. Authors will find a new mode of payment. Libraries will invent a new role for themselves. And the newspapers will be there to help distinguish the essential from the secondary. Distinguish: definitely one of the most beautiful words in the French language.

Attali comes across as distinctly more clueful than Jeanneney, though that may be because he's a better debater, and his political opponents have dealt him a strong hand in this particular debate. But I think it's worth pointing out that the big BNF project was especially associated with Attali's patron Francois Mitterand. The usual tag for Attali (as in the blurb for his book Millennium; Winners and Losers in the Coming Order) is "President Mitterand's most trusted advisor", and Mitterand was in power during much of the period in question (from 1981 to 1995, specifically). So if the BNF project missed the mark so badly on something so important, why wait until now to complain about it?

I wonder, myself, whether the 300 million euros of digital library budget might in fact have been spent, over the course of the project's decade and a half. It wouldn't be the first big government software (and hardware) project that spent a comparable amount of money without producing much. And I'm thinking here of American projects, not French ones.

 

Posted by Mark Liberman at March 27, 2005 06:48 AM