Increasingly, I think we’re saddled with what I’m calling the “hundred years” problem. By that, I mean that from at least 2000 forward, it’s fairly easy to compile degree, appointment, and publication information, since (nearly) all of it is published on the web (and sometimes even available in RSS, XML, or flat data formats). Some of this harvesting is complicated by nonstandard metadata, but web-wide standards like Dublin Core are emerging to address these worries.
So much for the future. Let’s consider the more distant past—namely, information before 1900. Much of this isn’t available at all for minor figures in the field (which probably makes up the greatest percentage of the field), and information on major figures is the province of specialized historians and archival efforts. Google Books and the Universal Digital Library are making some headway in archiving older materials, but the process is slow-going and it’s limited to books at the moment (we are, after all, interested in other records as well). Incidentally, UDL estimates that no more than 10 million of the 100 million books since recorded history were written before 1900. Those 10 million will be a huge task, but the bigger task is 1900-2000, at least by the numbers game.
And that’s where we’ve entered. In focusing on North American philosophy since the first dissertations in the 1880s, we’ve started off Phylo right in the middle of these hundred years of densest material. The problem, of course, is that it’s close enough to the present to obtain, yet time-consuming and costly enough to present a real deterrent. We will, of course, have plenty of this information from the start, given the longevity of the programs we’ve chosen to research. But complete saturation looks almost as difficult here as it does for pre-1900 data, where we often don’t know how much exists (and thus how complete our current records are).
Recognizing this problem has led us to think more about our longer short-term goals. Without a great chance of success in filling in 1900-2000 data, it might make sense to start expanding back further, to pre-1900 information that historians already have available. We’ve always know this will require some conceptual changes (e.g., ‘degree’ and ‘institution’ need to be understood more metaphorically as periods of study and places where philosophy happens). In light of the hundred years problem, though, it might be useful to make these changes sooner and start collecting more varied data from earlier periods in philosophy.
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