Marginalia Search: 1 Year

Marginalia Search: 1 Year
memex.marginalia.nu

Thankfully, I checked poster name. Grats!

Why it matters

One of the great American philosophical orators, Rick Roderick (a Texan cowboy philosopher and academic twin of Bill Hicks), spoke about the importance of "the margins":

Rick notices that in history certain people do not get a voice;

Women. The Poor. Old and young people. The "mad" and disabled. Race minorities within any group. Thinkers more than a decade ahead of their time.

There's even a thing called "marginal analysis" in hermeneutics - not the economic concept - the analysis of things that have been left out of history, and why, and by whom (victors writing and re-writing history etc). Erasure leaves a trace that tells its own tale.

These things have become the grist of social justice today (with all it's positive and negative sides). But "injustice" is not really Roderick's point. It hardly needs mentioning that most people get a bad deal, don't get heard, and their lives fade into obscure irrelevance.

What matters is the enormous value and importance of marginal contributions. These are lost. Almost every great discovery, it turns out on deeper analysis, was made by an (or often, simultaneously several) obscure nobody years earlier, who didn't provide a recognised proof in the right journal, or didn't patent the thing. In Plato and Shakespeare, Roderick says, "It is always the fool who delivers the important news". Things don't start at the center, they begin on the margins and diffuse in until they find legitimacy in an acceptable voice.

A marginal search engine engine is, almost by definition, acting counter to the status quo, as the Internet Archive stands in opposition to fickle entropy of bitrot and ephemeral culture.

Well done on this project and good luck.