Interview with the Author: Jim Cortada on Today’s Facts and the Evolution of Information

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. James Cortada about his forthcoming book Today’s Facts: Understanding the Current Evolution of Information. I believe special librarians will find the content insightful.  

Please introduce yourself to our readers. 

My name is Jim Cortada. I am a senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota in the Charles Babbage Institute, which is an organization that studies the history and use of information largely from an IT point of view. It has the largest archive in the United States on the history of computing. 

I have evolved from being a historian of business computing and computing in general to information, which is how we arrive at today. 

Additionally, I spent nearly 40 years working at IBM, in a regular business career.  

I also have a PhD in history and have been writing and researching the history of information and information technologies for over 40 years. 

Briefly summarize the book Today’s Facts: Understanding the Current Evolution of Information. 

Today’s Facts: Understanding the Current Evolution of Information is one of a series I have been writing. I have been studying how information evolved over the last 200 years, describing that evolution the way a historian would—but because I am also influenced by having been in the hardware sector for 40 years, using and selling computers, I am influenced by that as well. 

Therefore, this book deals with several issues. One is what lessons can we learn about how information has evolved over time…the lessons of history. 

Obviously, much of that is codified through the good work done by librarians in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the 19th century. Think back to the development of the Dewey system. Then, later on, the Library of Congress system, and others in Europe, for example. The struggle was that there was so much information being developed. How do you organize it? How do you access it in a timely fashion? 

There was a Harvard librarian in the 1850s who could remember where things were in the building, but ten years later, he needed a catalog of some sort because he could no longer remember where everything was. 

Of course, this is a problem that all librarians have had ever since. Librarians had to organize all the information and subsequently address the development of disciplines and topics, publications, and organizations and societies. All of that thinking governs how we use and build on the collection of information begun in the 19th century. 

Whether you are a librarian, a business professional, or a professor of history, etc., it is important to understand how information is created. 

It is not just simply through people going off and interviewing other people, or looking at manuscripts, or using computers to invent new information. There is a social process. There is a set of procedural processes. Those get used today just as they did in the 19th century, except today we also inject electricity and computing, and in the years to come, artificial intelligence. 

Understanding what we did in the past helps whether you are learning to use information or you are creating it. In this book, I want to make the point that we will create even more information as we proceed. 

There is a vast quantity of information continually created; we need to understand how that occurs and how it has occurred in the past. So let us begin with the lessons of history. That is what this book covers. 

How does understanding the history of information influence the work of today’s information professionals, including special librarians? 

Largely, it is a function of having created the paradigms. The way that you look at information today. 

Let’s go back to our Dewey decimal system. Dewey arbitrarily created 10 categories of information. Within each of those 10 categories, there are subcategories. You need to know that in order to create new paradigms or new cataloging systems. 

I don’t simply mean a librarian is creating all that. I mean you and me, at our daily work thinking about these new paradigms for organizing information: What kind of information do I need in order to do my job? Does it exist? If not, how do I create it? If it does already exist, how do I get to it?  

The ways we answer those questions change over time. Google violates all the norms about disciplinary boundaries. It will answer my question; moreover, it will compile that answer with information from economics, sociology, anthropology, etc. Yet we have all been taught to respect the boundaries of our respective discipline(s). 

If you are a businessperson, you may only look at business magazines. Yet most of the information you need today comes from the world of computing, sociology, or economics. Well, how do we navigate all that? 

 We are all going to need more information going forward. 

What are two things you wish everyone knew about the role of information in the United States? 

We are information junkies. We cannot get past an hour a day without consulting some organized body of information. 

The second thing is we produce more information than anybody else does. We started to organize ourselves in ways that allowed us to produce more, including the fact that people in the United States were really the earliest mega users of computers. 

Now, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, we have had very high levels of literacy in the United States since the 17th century. Second, we have had an economy that could afford to build, acquire, and use information. We are all knowledge workers. 

Does the evolution of information in the United States have similarities to the evolution of information in other parts of the world? 

Yes, at two levels, at the explicit level and the tacit level, to use C.P. Snow’s paradigm. 

What do you predict for the future role of information? 

As a historian, I hate to predict, but some things are obvious because they are already going on. One is that software has been creating more information than humans have. 

The other thing to look at is quantum computing, which has not quite come into its own yet. It allows people to do multiple types of activities simultaneously, each affecting the other. It generates orders of magnitude more information. 

We will also need to know more about how the brain works. Computers currently calculate step-by-step processes, but the human brain can perform tacit knowledge tasks (such as catching a baseball) without having to calculate the steps. 

Lastly, we are going to have to learn more in different disciplines; this will empower us to address issues of fake news, and enable us to synthesize different bodies of knowledge. 

How should information professionals respond to changes in the information landscape? 

Understand that no week will ever go by without them having learned about the nature of information. Second, understand how information has evolved to this point. Then, understand and apply those patterns. 

As you go forward, know that one of the things the brain does very well is understand patterns. Apply the patterns in how information has evolved and recognize when the patterns change. 

Is there anything else you would like to share? 

You will live forever with this topic. Learn about the brain and how it functions. Learn how you like to respond to information. Understand that you do not know as much about your subject area as you might think. So be curious. Be optimistic about it.