reviews.indd


Book Reviews 475 

research to fuel their economies—and 
then want the results documented and 
a system to preserve and access it after 
that level of investment—should come 
as no surprise. The old story of the 
delayed introduction of fax machines 
has been well learned. The research 
information has been bought and paid 
for and should be at the ready in case it 
has an eventual economic benefi t. This 
has as much explanatory power to ad-
dress the paradox with which Frohmann 
begins the book as the shifting sands of 
epistemic content shot through scientific 
documentation and its retrieval systems 
and theories. The work of Frank Webster 
(e.g., “Information: A Skeptical Account,” 
Advances in Librarianship, vol. 24, 2000) 
demonstrates the power of an analysis 
that follows the money, noting the dif-
ferent uses of the word information and 
its connection to economic trends. It is an 
abiding irony that deconstructive theories 
take a linguistic turn to att ack dominating 
universalisms and meta-narratives (in 
science, in social theory, etc.), bypassing 
the universal cultural and epistemological 
claims currently made on behalf of market 
economics. 

Last, Frohmann’s characterization and 
comparison of information studies and 
theories skitters around. For instance, 
reviewing the study of science informa-
tion systems and theories, he relies on 
the “best research” represented in the 
Annual Review of Information Science and 
Technology (ARIST). He doesn’t explain or 

Index to advertisers 
ACRL 455 
Annual Reviews 390 
Archival Products 416 
Choice 430 
Elsevier cover 2 
Idea Group Publishing 389 
Iimage Retrieval 393 
Intelex cover 3 
Libraries Unlimited cover 4 
TechBooks 406 

document why ARIST articles hold this 
status, and he found only eight such stud-
ies in nine years (1966–1974), then one 
more four years later. Later, he shift s to 
nonscientific information studies, noting 
that “little of the work reviewed in ARIST 
pertaining directly to science information 
systems is recent because … interest in 
other kinds of information users caught 
the discipline’s attention from the mid-
1980’s.” But the later studies reviewed 
were not published in ARIST, and it is 
unclear how they relate to problems 
in scientific information systems and 
documentation. Frohmann’s bibliogra-
phy is rich with more recent books on 
the rhetoric, practice, and documenta-
tion of science, but often as not these are 
outside library and information science 
research, so they cannot be said to be 
typical of the field Frohmann seeks to 
redirect. Again, the connections seem 
primarily rhetorical. The authority of 
science information systems and studies 
is invoked to validate the importance of 
the task of deflating information, but the 
book shifts between general and scientific 
information studies to validate critiques 
from one arena to the other. 

In sum, the book does have value in its 
pieces. To give another example, I think 
Frohmann’s explication of Otlet easily 
provides the basis to argue that Vannevar 
Bush doesn’t deserve the hallowed place 
he holds in our field. But the book is not 
likely to have the theoretical impact that 
was its main purpose. It is well indexed 
and edited. The combination of in-text 
citation, content notes at the back of the 
book with in-text citations, and a separate 
bibliography at the end serves to make 
that material difficult to track.—John 
Buschman, Rider University. 

Shaw, W. David. Babel and the Ivory Tower: 
The Scholar in the Age of Science. To-
ronto: Univ. of Toronto Pr., 2005. 288p. 
$60 (ISBN 0802079989). 

The literature about the proper role of 
academia boasts many passionate and 
eloquent contributors, including Abra-



476 College & Research Libraries 

ham Flexner, John Henry Newman, 
Robert Maynard Hutchins, Derek Bok, 
and Jaroslav Pelikan, to name only a few. 
With Babel and the Ivory Tower, W. David 
Shaw has earned an honored place in this 
genre’s pantheon. 

Shaw is professor emeritus in the 
Department of English at Victoria Col-
lege, University of Toronto, and a distin-
guished critic of Tennyson, Robert Brown-
ing, and other nineteenth-century poets. 
He completed Babel and the Ivory Tower at 
about the time he retired from teaching, 
and the book is his effort to address the 
increasing isolation of humanistic higher 
learning. Shaw believes the contemporary 
university has lost its way and is market 
driven and vocation oriented far beyond 
the real needs of modern society. 

Shaw contends the academy and 
society’s obsession with the practical has 
led to the scientific model of inquiry being 
valued almost exclusively. Humanistic 
scholars now feel pressured to super-
impose positivistic research paradigms 
over more appropriate methods in order 
to obtain funding and reputation. In 
response, Shaw upholds and expands 
on Wittgenstein’s distinction between 
embodying truths and logically dem-
onstrating them, or as Susanne Langer 
put it, between presentational forms of 
art and discursive forms of logic and sci-
ence. Shaw’s hope is to restore balance 
between these two paths to knowledge 
by enlarging “our stock of fresh ideas 
about the competing claims of maps and 
models, closed and opened capacities, in 
education.” 

Toward that end, he defines the true 
scholar as one who cultivates knowledge 
through a combination of scientifi c, con-
templative (or humane), and practical 
methodologies. That is, a true scholar 
understands the strengths of scientific, 
humanistic, and professional modes of 
investigation and employs them appro-
priately to the intellectual task at hand. 
However, it is just as important to un-
derstand the limits of each investigative 
method: “In a scientific age, it is a dan-

September 2005 

gerous mistake to assimilate all learning 
to the research model. All research is a 
form of scholarship—the scholarship of 
discovery, if you will—but not all scholar-
ship is research.” 

But Shaw is as concerned about the 
impoverishment of the individual’s in-
tellectual and spiritual growth as he is 
about methodological impoverishment. 
He contends that the university should 
provide the opportunity for cultivating 
personal knowledge, which means mas-
tering models of scholarship and science 
as personal possessions. “Unless the great 
organizing models of scholarship and 
science are appropriated as a living and 
personal possession, no knowledge is 
possible. And unless an inert body of facts 
is animated by an informing principle or 
model, the knowledge is not personal.” 
His hope is that the university can instill a 
belief in the value of science and humane 
learning. Shaw draws on Milton Kadish’s 
argument that “to be genuinely liberal, 
education must turn the information 
provided by a map into the knowledge 
conveyed by a model, which has both 
heuristic and predictive properties. The 
maps that are studied in a survey course 
chart the terrain and general contours of 
a subject. By contrast, a model initiates 
its users into the genres of discourse 
which scientists, philosophers, historians, 
or literary scholars habitually use and 
sometimes transform in the practice of 
their disciplines.” 

Beyond encouraging the cultivation of 
personal knowledge, Shaw argues that 
the university should be a haven and 
platform for the scholars who prod us 
to awaken from our dogmatic slumbers. 
Shaw defends the scholar’s role of being 
a cultural critic, a questioner of the status 
quo, a Socrates who challenges others to 
reexamine assumptions and values. Shaw 
urges academe to reject the utility and 
purpose society has thrust upon it: “the 
university will be most useful to society 
by refusing to be useful. It will achieve its 
purpose best if it disavows purpose in fa-
vor of the free play of a scholar’s contem-



plative inquiries or the more competitive, 
heuristic games of science.” 

Shaw’s exposition is wide-ranging 
and thought provoking. Ultimately, he is 
not sanguine about the future of liberal 
education, which he believes has been 
almost totally consumed by a vocational 
education model that simply feeds a con-
sumer economy. He shares Alvin Kernan’s 
sense that they have reached the end of a 
line, when an older generation no longer 
passes the torch to new scholars who will 
take up the search for truth. As one might 
expect from such a source, the writing is 
replete with literary examples and allu-
sions. True to his belief in the power of 
presentational art, Shaw’s views are often 
expressed aphoristically or poetically, 
rather than in tight, logical arguments. 
Some readers will find this frustrating, 
but many others will rejoice in Shaw’s 
erudition. Either way, Shaw’s challenges 
to the current trends in higher education 
deserve careful attention.—W. Bede Mitch-
ell, Georgia Southern University. 

The Future of the Page. Ed. Peter Stoicheff
and Andrew Taylor. Toronto: Univ. of 
Toronto Pr. (Studies in Book and Print 
Culture), 2004. 272p. cloth $65 (ISBN 
0802088023); paper $29.95 (ISBN 
0802085849). LC: 2005-391277 

If the title of this volume reminds you of 
conferences you attended in the 1990s, 
early issues of Wired magazine, “the 
Gutenberg elegies,” and the Age of Ir-
rational Exuberance, you will not be 
disappointed. It collects papers from a 
conference in Saskatoon in 2000 and duly 
reflects agendas that have largely been 
eclipsed in the interim. The optimism and 
anxieties that underlie many of the papers 
here have receded as we slowly adjust to 
the addition of yet one more medium of 
communication. The irony of this, given 
the topic, will surely not have been lost 
on the editors nor on the University of 
Toronto Press. Print culture may be slow, 
but it is dependably relentless. The explo-
sion of interest in the history of written 
and printed word that occurred in the 

Book Reviews 477 

1990s as a response to the arrival of the 
Internet and the Web was a great good 
thing and continues to yield an important 
and impressive harvest of articles and 
monographs. Had the Saskatoon confer-
ence focused on a retrospective look at the 
page, its proceedings would have stood 
up better. The page, like the codex in 
which it nestles, has been around for mil-
lennia, its architectonics remarkable for 
their permanence. Bett er understanding 
the history of its formation and mutations 
must surely remain a priority for students 
of the history of the book. However, 
musings from the past about the future 
are likely to be of limited interest in the 
present. Much better, I think, to fly at dusk 
with Hegel’s owl of Minerva. 

To the extent that the contributors did 
address the topic of the conference, their 
prognostications sounded some familiar 
themes. The space of the new electronic 
page was greeted by many as a zone of 
liberation from the multiple tyrannies of 
print culture and its regime of fi xity, its 
many straightjackets, orthodoxies, and 
hegemonies. How this will be accom-
plished and who will be liberated from 
what, however, remains largely implicit 
in the various soundings. The mutability 
of all texts was proclaimed, while authors 
killed once by critical theory are sacrificed 
again at the altar of new technology, as 
empowered readers claim texts by oth-
ers as their own. At the same time, this 
destabilizing electronic space was seen by 
many as a new communal space that will 
create new ecologies of textual producers 
and consumers. The few medievalists at 
the table saw all these trends at work 
long ago in manuscript culture, where 
the idiosyncrasies of scribes had always 
made the page an unstable terrain. Be-
cause most of the participants hail from 
North American English departments, 
their preoccupation with authors, readers, 
and texts is understandable. Among the 
contributors are accomplished scholars, 
cultural materialists, and late twentieth-
century Marxists. Contributions span a 
broad range from canonical texts to Na-