About Vivarium: etymology and vivaria past and present, plus reflections on living knowledge

Vivarium in Latin literally means "a place for life," and is usually used to describe artificial microsystems like aquariums and terrariums created by people for the purpose of observation and research (see the wiki article). Cassiodorus' Vivarium on the Ionian Sea was named after the fishponds on his estate. In honor of the ancient Vivarium and its library, Saint John's University and the College of Saint Benedict have named their online digital collection Vivarium as well. (Saint John's is notable for its abbey, the setting of Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk, as well as its Liturgical Press and the St. John's Bible, a modern illuminated Bible whose exhibit I visited at the Library of Congress a couple of years ago.)

Naturally there is immense appeal to the image of the vivarium for the librarian. In addition to the importance of Cassiodorus' Vivarium itself to the mission of preserving classical texts for subsequent readers, there is the beauty of imagining collections of knowledge as living things. We treat information often as knowledge that was created or discovered before us and that will survive us, and the mission of preserving it as the mission to keep texts alive (I use the word "text" in a less limited sense than the verbal sense, although it is mostly with words that I am myself occupied), not only in a physical sense (i.e. these very pages) but in a less literal sense: texts only have meaning and value insofar as they are available too, and in fact read by, readers, and succeeding generations of them, we hope. Different readers will have different ways of reading texts--a modern reader of Homer will understand the Iliad differently, and find a different sort of value in it, than an ancient listener, to say nothing of the way that, say, the Bible is read and interpreted even now, and has been, by different readers in different communities in different religions. So the vivarium keeps texts alive not only by keeping them in existence and available and read, but by making it possible for those texts to be ever-reborn in different readings by different readers. (It is no different for art, music, and other sorts of collectible media; only the vehicle is different.) In that sense, even though the mission of the vivarium is preservation, the media it preserves are constantly changing.

Also constantly changing, especially in our times, is the vehicle of preservation. History has seen a slow change in the preservation of knowledge, from oral traditions (still strong in some cultures) to written forms of preservation, including cuneiform, wax and stone tablets, writing in ink on papyrus and paper, either on scrolls or bound in codices, then printing, and finally in our times in recordings of various sorts, film, and digital media. So even though the canon for, say, a classicist or patristics scholar is relatively finite, contained in a series of Oxford texts or the Patrologia or whatever, the medium for storing those canons is always being updated, although always with reference to the ancient manuscripts, such as they exist. So someone like me who is obsessed with ancient texts must nevertheless be proficient in using modern technologies to access them--which comes with the benefit of ease of use, searchability, and other advantages formerly unavailable. Searchability, hyperlinking, etc. also make the texts more alive by making them refer/speak to/with each other in much more tangible ways than previously--glosses on texts and juxtaposition of one text with another are instantaneous, perhaps taking some of the joy of research and making connections away from the reader but also increasing the possibility of new connections that were unseen before because they were difficult to make and because the reader had to be a repository unto himself (or herself, but we are talking generally about male readers in the long previous centuries I mean here) in order to be able to make them.

About Vivarium

In this introductory post I want to sketch out a few themes on which I will expand in future posts. For now I will just briefly explain what this blog is, why it is called Vivarium, and what directions I anticipate it taking over the course of the next two years and beyond, although I can't even begin to predict where I will go from here--such is the joy of life and especially of new beginnings.

I am beginning the masters program in library and information science at Syracuse University this summer as a distance student. (Due to program requirements and my upstate New York connections, my program will include occasional residencies.) My previous academic background is in classics and English as an undergraduate, and religious studies as a graduate student, with a particular interest in patristics, especially that slippery period called late antiquity, from the decline of the Roman empire to the early Middle Ages. This blog takes its name from the monastery founded by Cassiodorus late in his life on his estate in southern Italy. One of the missions of his monastery and the object of his writings was to found a library for the preservation of classical learning, both sacred and secular. I am interested in the interplay of preservation and innovation, as well as the transition from classical Roman culture to full-fledged Christendom, both of which the idea of Vivarium captures (and other concepts as well).

As my interests and background suggest, I am passionately attached to all things old, and of course this includes rare books, even the form of the book-as-codex itself, which may become obsolete within my lifetime. It is probably a healthy challenge for me to enter a program (not to mention a field) that is very technology-oriented. I hope I will be able to look back as well as forward, learning to handle old information in new ways.

More to come.