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the whole thing is built on a central and highly contingent cultural factor that never seems to get mentioned: the existence of a period, whose end mostly corresponded with the last decades (1900-1920 or so) from which sources made it into the public domain, in which a substantial fraction of the scholarly world thought it was worthwhile to contribute tiny bricks to the edifice of human knowledge. We today mostly think those people were naive; to assert that the notion of an edifice was incoherent in the first place is basically conventional wisdom. But if the historiographical enlightenment that eventually led to the demise of positivism had emerged in the 1890s instead of the 1930s, then Google Books wouldn’t be nearly as useful for us today. In a way, it turned out that those antiquarians were more right than they could have possibly imagined: with enormous book databases, indexing, and OCR, their bricks really did become part of an edifice that is looking more and more coherent every day.
