Comments on: “Library of Congress” is the “Tokyo Dome” of English journalism http://ginstrom.com/scribbles/2009/11/09/library-of-congress-is-the-tokyo-dome-of-english-journalism/ Random scribbling about programming, translation, and Japan Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:13:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Michael Turner http://ginstrom.com/scribbles/2009/11/09/library-of-congress-is-the-tokyo-dome-of-english-journalism/comment-page-1/#comment-12071 Michael Turner Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:19:42 +0000 http://ginstrom.com/scribbles/?p=1333#comment-12071 I think the parallel to a Tokyo Dome-area unit in English (or in America, anyway) is "football fields." It works reasonably well even in countries where "football" is "soccer", because the difference in size isn't very great. It's an area that people have a handle on, because they've usually seen it, at least on TV, and it's of comprehensible size. With Library of Congress comparisons, the idea is somewhat different. LoC is considered to hold all human knowledge worth knowing, encoded (mainly) as characters. Unlike a football field, that's an unthinkable amount. However the (decidedly ironic) use of LoC as if it were a "unit" of knowledge is more about expressing how much the storage capacity exceeds some accepted minimum for preserving all significant human knowledge. Any amount in excess of an LoC suggests frivolous uses -- that we're swimming in far more capacity than any purely knowlege-for-its-own-sake argument would suggest. There are, of course, scientific experiments that produce massive amounts of data. But even in those cases, the point is to eventually reduce the raw data to meaningful knowledge -- maps, equations, relations -- that would required only a tiny fraction of that bulk for digital storage. If you don't know how many terabytes the LoC holds, well, how much does it matter if you're off by a factor of 5 or 10? LoC is getting bigger all the time as the collection grows. So whatever you supply in the translation is eventually going to be wrong anyway. I think the parallel to a Tokyo Dome-area unit in English (or in America, anyway) is “football fields.” It works reasonably well even in countries where “football” is “soccer”, because the difference in size isn’t very great. It’s an area that people have a handle on, because they’ve usually seen it, at least on TV, and it’s of comprehensible size.

With Library of Congress comparisons, the idea is somewhat different. LoC is considered to hold all human knowledge worth knowing, encoded (mainly) as characters. Unlike a football field, that’s an unthinkable amount. However the (decidedly ironic) use of LoC as if it were a “unit” of knowledge is more about expressing how much the storage capacity exceeds some accepted minimum for preserving all significant human knowledge. Any amount in excess of an LoC suggests frivolous uses — that we’re swimming in far more capacity than any purely knowlege-for-its-own-sake argument would suggest.

There are, of course, scientific experiments that produce massive amounts of data. But even in those cases, the point is to eventually reduce the raw data to meaningful knowledge — maps, equations, relations — that would required only a tiny fraction of that bulk for digital storage.

If you don’t know how many terabytes the LoC holds, well, how much does it matter if you’re off by a factor of 5 or 10? LoC is getting bigger all the time as the collection grows. So whatever you supply in the translation is eventually going to be wrong anyway.

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