Father Figures: Renegotiating Preservation of Oral Tradition Through Four Forefathers

ABSTRACT

Oral tradition is a temporally contingent information medium predicated upon the present, which requires preservation efforts be predicated upon such as well. Despite being the oldest information sharing method in human history, its preservation remains dangerously overlooked, deprioritized, and misunderstood among information professionals. Since the advent of written language, oral tradition’s authority has been subjugated and eclipsed in favor of the stability availed by newer documentation methods, and as languages and cultures continue to go extinct, it is increasingly urgent to renegotiate the field’s approach to the medium and its preservation. By applying an interdisciplinary, narrative lens to the history of information, the means of ameliorating information science’s problematic relationship with oral tradition can be found in the same documents and ideologies that caused it, as written by four forefathers of modern thought. Through this, oral tradition’s significance is crystallized as the Father of Information – an essential pillar of the information field that if handled with care, holds great potential for communities, history, and information as it is known.

KEYWORDS:

• Oral tradition
• folklore
• gossip
• information theory
• cultural heritage

Acknowledgments

This article was originally written for Professor Irene Lopotovska’s Fall 2021 INFO 601: Foundations of Information course the Pratt Institute School of Information in New York City. The author thanks Professor Lopotovska for her encouragement, support, and invaluable insight in the preparation and publication of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

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