30 JUN 2013 by ideonexus

 The Past and Who Has Access to It

What we know about the past—and who has access to such knowledge—has changed dramatically with each such change. The changes run far deeper than the mere proliferation of data points. As written records of large estates held in monasteries in France achieved legal and social dominance, the role of women as the tellers of the past fell into decline (Geary, 1994): The technological and the social were deeply intertwined. The outcome was that different kinds of records were kept. With the in...
Folksonomies: history heirarchy
Folksonomies: history heirarchy
  1  notes

The past was once only available through memory, then only available to those who had access to records, and now available to everyone.

05 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 On Reading Chronology in Nature

I do ... humbly conceive (tho' some possibly may think there is too much notice taken of such a trivial thing as a rotten Shell, yet) that Men do generally rally too much slight and pass over without regard these Records of Antiquity which Nature have left as Monuments and Hieroglyphick Characters of preceding Transactions in the like duration or Transactions of the Body of the Earth, which are infinitely more evident and certain tokens than any thing of Antiquity that can be fetched out of C...
Folksonomies: geology
Folksonomies: geology
  1  notes

Hooke describes the difficulty and importance of establishing a chronology for mutations and catastrophes in the geological record.