May
18
Facing up to Father: The pleasures and pains of a Cotswold childhood
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New book by David Worlock. Pre-order now at Marble Hill Publishers or Amazon.
A small Cotswold farm is the setting for a classic struggle of wills. Robert Worlock, eccentric and demanding, resolutely maintains the old ways, determined above all to make his son into a farmer fit to take over the family acres. His son, David, is equally determined not to be bullied into something he neither wants nor likes. His childhood becomes a battleground: can he find a way to make his father love him without denying his right to determine his own life?
May
26
This is what it comes down to, and you can take my word for it. I have been commentating upon the marketplace for information for 40 years now and I know well enough that you no one listens unless you either anticipate the death of something or predict a revolution in something else. No half measures will do. Gradual evolution? Progressive change? These cut no ice with investors or their bankers, or with heritage or legacy businesses or startup entrepreneurs. And unless we have death or revolution, we do not get the angst-ridden, guilt-induced introversion that reflects the middle and senior management of successful, stable and progressive companies in slow changing markets. The threat of death or revolution makes them worried and keeps strategy consultants employed. I have been wonderfully indebted to death or revolution these 40 long years.
This system, so beneficial to consultants, works well as long as we call out the right deaths and name the right revolutions. If we get it wrong then harms far worse than a misguided strategy evaluation could be the result. And now, perhaps , we are in imminent danger of getting it very wrong. We seem to be concentrating upon the localised effects of the application of generative AI in particular to both publishing processes and to the use of AI in new product development. We are also, quite rightly, deeply concerned with data licensing and trying to prop up the copyright conventions that have underpinned the information marketplace for so long.. We do not seem to be looking at the effect of AI more broadly on the users of published information. The equivalent injunction to “follow the money“ in information markets used to be “follow the eyeballs“. Has AI, and what it does for us, had the effect of distracting us from paying total attention to what our users are actually doing – with AI?
Perhaps then we need to look beyond the way in which “death or revolution“ discussions have taken place in the past. surely this whole idea of an information based society in which information creators are served by intermediaries who are value and aggregation before creating commercial relationships with users seems like what it is – the last relic of the Gutenberg age. we need a new model that reflects the dynamic relationships of the network, the complete personalisation and customisation of content as data, and the ability of the ultimate user to add the ultimate values required.
Much of my past 40 years has been spent helping and advising, among others, the publishers of scholarly journals focused on scientific research and discovery. This sector has almost always been a belwether place where signs of the future may be detected. Early and intelligent users of new technologies abound. Big issues include integrity, where AI plays a role on both sides of the equation. Other concerns are focused on processing and it’s costs: AI will be influential here. Relatively fewer people are concerned with an issue which seems to me quite central: every year fewer and fewer researchers are reading original articles. AI summarisation, and the overall increases in article generation have meant that fewer researchers have time or energy to read the bulk of new material published in their discipline. The resulting paradox – more and more articles produced but less less human readers – seems to me to add up to a perfect“death of publishing“ argument. My view, for the past five years, has been that we will create a self publishing environment in which acts of verification, peer review and value estimation take place quite separately from the initial appearance of scholarly findings as self posted articles in pre-print servers, in blogs or in other postings. The commercial activity will not be in publishing, it will be in software and data services.
Another field in which I have found myself working regularly over these years has been in credit reporting and credit rating. Here is a world which seemingly depends upon standards, data frameworks and criteria and strict rules of verification. Companies working in this field have been at pains to build trusted brands which allow users to build faith in their ability to maintain the standards. Tem years ago at a conference in Hong Kong , I argued that intelligent software would one day replace branded services. Today I feel that door is being pushed open, though not yet to the point where trading companies are able to use their own evaluations to create trusted partnerships. But still, the question is now on the table – do we need an intermediary to establish trust between trading partners?
In 1979 I left what was then conventional publishing to start work in a legal information retrieval initiative. A start up in almost every sense of the word. We put the entirety of the laws and statutes, and the historical case law, of the United Kingdom onto a computer and lawyers searched it through a landline and modem. Things change. The world in which I once strived and struggled is no longer about information retrieval, but entirely concerned with the delivery of legal services and solutions. Today’s players make law practices and corporate counsel more effective, but, as has always been the threat, technological change may remove the intermediary. It is not surprising now to find London Magic Circle law practices whose technology is as advanced as that of their technology suppliers. AI does that. it removes the knowledge and power balance between the user and the supplier.
And didn’t it always do that? Is this not the Internet revolution at last coming home to roost? A network of relationships changes those relationships. A virtual network is very different from a real world network. In the late 1990s and in the early years of this century we spoke the language of “disintermediation“. Then we forgot to watch it happening. We see the network effect in our own lives every day. Very old people who clearly recall secretaries and typewriters, younger people who can remember going to see a bank manager, or any of the host of in-person services which have now collapsed into the network . intermediation is ending and a successful navigation of our world is increasingly are driven by the time and effort expended by the individual end user, enabled and increasingly supported by AI. I am not saying that this is wrong or bad: I just want to notice the difference and the way in which AI develops and expands to fit the needs and requirements of ultimate users. It is at least possible that, at some future date, one of the quality of life factors which may be vitally important to each individual, alongside clean air and water, access to electricity and Internet bandwidth, will be the quality of AI available and affordable to each of us.
Apr
21
John Milton, AI, Florence, blindness and scholarly communications
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Here is an abbreviated version of some closing remarks delivered at the 25th meeting of the FIESOLE RETREAT, held at the European University Institute , 7-10 April 2025.
John Milton came to Florence in the late spring of 1638. His back was sore from the unsprung post chaise that carried him up from Rome. He took a room at the Palazzo dei Gaddi and walked that evening in the cool gardens in front of his lodgings, nicknamed “Paradiso“. The poet, perfecting his Italian and Latin which served him well during his diplomatic service for the English republic in the coming years, was not yet troubled by the blindness that was to afflict him in later years. However, as I journied to Florence this week, one month after being registered blind in the UK, I reflected more on the eyesight condition of one of the people who Milton visited: Galileo Gallilei, the 77-year-old scientist who was not just partially blind at this time but also under an interdict from the Papal authorities not to reveal anything about his discoveries and observations. Milton had a letter of introduction and went to visit the great scientist on the hill where he made his observations here at Fiesole. He stared at the full moon through the old man’s telescope and recorded in his correspondence, his impressions of the shining orb with its strange patchwork of canals and craters.
The point of this anecdote is not to remind us of the huge impact that his five or six months in Florence made on the English poet. The valley of the river Arno becomes an image of paradise lost by Adam and Eve; when Satan is expelled from heaven, he sets foot at Vallambrosa (20 miles from Fiesole); and that mighty orb seen through the telescope becomes the image of the shield on Satan’s arm. More important for our current concerns is that one of Milton‘s many correspondents at this time was Samuel Hartleb. A man of Polish-Lithuanian birth, whose mother was the daughter of a rich English merchant in Gdansk, Hartlieb had settled in London and was a friend and neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard. From the late 1630s through to his death in 1662, Hartlieb wrote some 25,000 letters, addressing recipients all over Europe, enquiring into scientific investigation and the results of experimentation. From Kepler to to Galileo to Huygens to Comenius. In England he was an associate of Robert Boyle, corresponded with Newton, observed the experiments of Hooke. He was well known to Christopher Wren, and became a close associate of John Wilkins, the masterful Warden of Wadham College Oxford, whose circle was to transmogrify into the Royal Society after the restoration of the monarchy. These men knew Samuel Hartlieb as “the great intelligencer“ . The penetrating questions that he asked and his continual demand for detail of experiments, their methodology and their results lie directly behind the development of the Transactions of the Royal Society, as recorded, structured and formulated by his friend and associate, Henry Oldenburg. (It is important alsoto note that very similar developments were happening in France at exactly the same time).
The proceedings of the last three days demonstrate the same evolution still taking place. The world of Hartlieb and Oldenburg was of course made possible by the proliferation of the world of print then in its second century in Europe. Things move faster now. In our world, governed by network communications carrying digital data flows, some things have had to change. Samuel Hartlieb would have been the very first person to see the need for evolution in scholarly communication. He would have appreciated the movement from content to data and he would have seen the importance of metadata, links and linkages. While no doubt he would have admired his own work, his 25,000 letters, skilfully archived in a collection at the University of Sheffield, he would also have seen clearly that disassociated objects can be brought together in the network both to create new metadata and to create associations between data which did not exist in any form before. It does not take much to imagine a breathless letter to Milton celebrating the glorious ability granted by AI to associate information in entirely new ways so as to create fresh knowledge. Had he not spent his lifetime doing this? Interrupting the poet, during the writing of the Areopagitica, the great tract on free speech , he would have explained it all in that age before science was regarded as so distinctly different from the humanities. He would have said that just as he had striven to ensure that the scientific record contained everything that had taken place, now the scientist could have upon his screen the full fruits of the inquiry process of all relevant experimentation and thinking. All of the notes and the findings, the jottings and the formal statements , with the potential ability to examine every aspect of the knowledge base in the light of every other aspect. He would’ve known that in this process new knowledge could be revealed.
Samuel Hartlieb would have made a good time traveller. If his intelligence had chanced into our meeting rooms in these last three days, he would have admired the architecture, enjoyed many of the debates but might have been a little shocked by the narrowness of some attitudes towards data and information . He might have been saddened by the thought that science and the humanities were pulling apart to the extent that their methods of communication and analysis were becoming wholly different in the digital world. As an example, the world of the journal, beginning around the period of his own death, was diminishing in the digital age of the sciences, while it was still entrenched in the humanities. He might have wondered whether a people so clever as to use AI with growing success, seemingly ignored the value of so much of the other occasional exchanges in the scientific world and the wisdom contained therein. Where were the blogs, the letters, and the reviews, he might have asked? Where are the videos, and the seminar sessions and the discussions. from which you could now track and map so many significant inputs? Where is the coding? And above, why is the evidential data not securely attached to every article and available to every researcher?
I feel that he would have sat down impatiently and planned new ways of creating the record, safeguarding the record, and utilising the record, and that AI would have been his invaluable tool just as his quill pen on parchment was in the 1650s. I think that the thing which would have truly appalled him was our problems of integrity and data reliability. He had been a student at Cambridge, and I think he would have wondered why the great institutions and laboratories of our modern world did not publish their own research findings and the data, and validate them prior to release. He would surely have admired the brand values that his friends created at the Royal Society after his death. He might have wondered why, if any institution could rent access to publication software and peer review checking systems based on AI, it might not be possible to put peer reviewed articles direct from the lab onto a reliable server. open to access by all scholars?
Because my ignorance is greater than that of Samuel Hartlieb, I learned more from this Conference and I thank each and every contributor for their part in that. But the in particular I must thank Michele Casalini and his staff at Casalini Libri, the librarian of the European University Institute, Pep Torn Poch, and his staff, and the fine people at Charleston, led by Becky Lenzini and Ward Shaw , who created the agenda and invited me to sweep up at the end.
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