By Literary Hub | Created at 2026-06-24 10:59:23 | Updated at 2026-06-24 20:36:06
11 hours ago
Caked calcium to be strip-mined from Dad’s bathtub and sink. Thick snowdrifts of dust to plow from his bedside tables. Looming towers of credit card statements and tax documents to audit and shred. The sheer filth and paperwork that awaited me.
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As I mounted the stairs to my recently deceased father’s room, without sleep still, sirens began to wail, drawing power from a battery I didn’t know I was carrying around with me. Don’t move a thing, it blared. Don’t throw anything away—not yet. It was my training kicking in, time spent in all those archives, and thousands of hours with students on how to navigate primary sources. Draw a map of the room the way it is right now.
Archivists and historians have a term for this: original order, or respect des fonds, in French, we call it, “the principle of maintaining records according to their origin.” This most fundamental of archival concepts enjoins us to keep primary sources in whatever arrangement the researcher first found them. In the case of a published book this is easy, of course, because the pages themselves are bound together. But what about loose things—unbound notes, letters, slips of paper, unsleeved photographs—that can easily be scattered about or reshuffled? The very act of moving such items around, the dictum of original order tells us, can do irreversible damage to the interpretability of the materials, even if the items themselves remain undamaged.
FBI agents and archaeologists follow a similar code of conduct. When agents arrive at the scene of a crime, they’re not supposed to move shell casings around haphazardly, or drag bodies around hither and thither—not before the forensics team has documented the area. When archaeologists find something encased in the ground, they’re not supposed to pick it up and loll it about in their hands. Indeed, archaeologists heap scorn on those who disturb this original order: looters. More than any object in isolation, then, historians, archivists, detectives, and archaeologists all agree: the constellation of objects matters as much, often more, than the objects themselves. This constellation is the information we’re after.
The more natural or taken-for-granted something is for us in our everyday life, indeed, the harder it becomes for the historian to reconstruct.
Original order is a funny thing, though. It’s all around us, but virtually impossible to see. Only with the passage of time do we become aware of it, or when we try to make sense of someone else’s.
In my Stanford course “The History of Information,” one assignment tasks students with a seemingly simple project: choose a recipe from a nineteenth-century cookbook, prepare the dish, and bring it to class. The recipe need not be elaborate—something as basic as an apple tart will do. But students can’t just read the recipe and “reflect” upon it. They have to make the dish.
Students shuffle into class with their containers and Tupperware. There’s a kind of electricity to the room, generated by the strangeness perhaps of bringing not notes and laptops to class but teetering pots of soup, tins of egg custard, and pans of pudding. We pass the items around and try to stomach whatever has been prepared. Sometimes things are surprisingly palatable. Normally not.
Then students report back on the process. Without fail, within moments of setting out on their objective, the students begin to realize that, despite being equipped with detailed instructions, they still didn’t have all the information they needed to succeed in their task.
There was no time given, one student remarked. “Cook until done” was all the recipe said.
There was no temperature given, another chimed in. So I googled what stoves were like in the early 1800s.
The recipe called for “Rose Water,” another student commented. I ended up biking to a Middle Eastern market twenty minutes away…
A common theme emerged: these recipe books, despite in theory containing everything one might need to prepare a dish, were shockingly insufficient at the task. Most of the mission-critical information—details that would make or break the recipe—was not contained within this reference work. The question naturally became: If we assume that someone at some point could have used these cookbooks successfully, where exactly was all of this “missing information” encoded? The temperature of the fire? Cooking time? What “done” looked and tasted like?
Students began to speculate. Perhaps doneness was encoded in—for lack of a better word—family? Of repeated moments when mothers and uncles, grandfathers and sisters, turned to a sibling, child, niece, or grandchild and said, Taste this. Enough salt?
Or maybe this information was encoded in tools. Perhaps the stove itself tended toward a particular temperature just by virtue of its structure, or the way the pot tended to sit upon the rack. We know that thermometers and temperature control were late additions to kitchens, certainly, but this doesn’t mean that pre-electric cooking stoves didn’t tend toward some reliable, once-taken-for-granted temperature range. And if so, it would not be something a cook—or a recipe compiler—would need to concern themselves with writing down. It was inscribed in the wrought iron of the tool itself.
Could the missing information have been encoded in the marketplace? What’s an “apple”? one of my students suddenly blurted out, her eyes with a far-off look, as if peering through time. The question was both epistemological (how we know what we know) and ontological (that which we understand to exist). How big was an “average apple” in 1820? Or 1910? Might it have been a variety since bred out of existence? Are we sure we know what the typical sugar content of an “average apple” was then? How fibrous? How mealy or crisp? Its water content? All of these factors undoubtedly shaped the recipe. But the cookbook included no such information. And why would it? The cookbook author could simply let “apples” do that work.
With the passage of time, all of this “unwritten writing” disappears. Tools and appliances change, as does the average fat content of milk and butter, and the precise meaning of the measurement “one cup.” The size and consistency of fruits and vegetables do not remain stable.
When viewed through the eyes of history, I explained to the students, nearly every aspect of day-to-day life is born lost. I don’t mean lost in the material sense of degradation—that part comes later. I mean already detached. Unlinked and unattributable. Orphaned and adrift. And the reason for all this detachment is not because of any desire to conceal or withhold, obviously. To the contrary, it’s precisely those aspects of everyday life that are most obvious and taken-for granted that make them less likely to be explained or documented in their day and time. The more natural or taken-for-granted something is for us in our everyday life, indeed, the harder it becomes for the historian to reconstruct.
The present does not begin intact and “in the light,” then, only to break down and fade into the darkness of the past. For the historian, the present begins scattered and in the dark—dark in the sense of “dark matter” or the “Dark Ages.” The present stays in the dark, moreover, unless those traces are brought into the light of explicit attribution. Even when we set out to document our lives—to capture a family recipe in crisp, black-and-white text—we can still miss the fundamental elements of our original order.
I’m as guilty of this as the next person. Have I ever taken the time to label and date all my family photos? Not some of them. But all of them? Thousands of photographs are in my possession. Perhaps tens of thousands of digital ones. Have I ever painstakingly written out the full legal name of each person pictured, along with location information—making sure to record all these data points in permanent, archival-grade, inert ink? Have I developed a metadata protocol for all those digital images, moreover, encoding all relevant information in a detailed “readme” file?
Of course I haven’t. No one has. In everyday life, attribution is an afterthought.
Pick up a birthday card, a greeting card, a graduation card, and you will hardly ever find full names, dates, or geographic information. On any given day, some 20 million birthdays are celebrated worldwide. The overwhelming majority of birthday-card exchanges will read something to the effect of We love you, Robert and Happy birthday, Anushah. For a future historian, the only hope of temporal reconstruction would be forensic in nature: to submit the paper to chemical analysis, to study color, the dress and decor captured in the photograph. “The early twenty-first century,” a future historian would readily deduce. But exact year? Place? Person?
The omission of identifying information makes perfect sense, of course. I know when my birthday is, after all. When it comes to the information of everyday meaning, the situation of my life provides all the footnotes I need. In lieu of explicit identifiers, therefore, we rely on what is called deixis, a word meaning “pointing,” which derives from the same root as digit, meaning “finger.” We point to the world around us and utter that, those, her…We point toward ourselves and utter my, this, our…
Historians do the dirty work of necromancers, trading time spent with the living present for time spent with dead presents.
The kind of labeling that historians yearn for has virtually no value in our day-to-day lives. Deixis, by contrast, is of profound importance. As I write this sentence, the photograph on my wall is a photograph of my family. I know it’s my family because, well, I just know. And guests don’t require any explicit instructions to draw an equals sign between the little human being who is our son, spinning wooden discs on the floor, and the even littler human being whose likeness is captured in an image on the wall. Were it not for these specific arrangements, none of these photographs would be attributable to me; none of them, if found in isolation, would enable someone in the future to say something about how I was as a person, what I did, what I may have thought about.
Even the smallest and most modest of homes is an information technology of vast complexity: of putting things in formation for the purposes of fashioning and then maintaining meaning. Not for posterity, however. For the here and now. Car keys in a dish by the door. Shopping receipts tucked inside wallets, tucked inside jacket pockets, hung on hooks. Human beings “outsource” memory to immense and sprawling configurations of “loose” informations which, at their core, are improvised and fragile.
We do this for more than family photos, moreover. Take a book off your shelf—any book. Is the author’s name written out in full on every page, along with the full title, place and date of publication, publisher’s name, ISBN, and more? Of course not. We rely instead upon the same set of strategies, material and symbolic, refined over centuries and sometimes millennia. In a book’s front matter, that’s where the book’s “complete identity” is recorded in full. The author’s full legal name, the book’s full title, place of publication, date of publication, ISBN, edition number, Library of Congress subject category, and much more. How, then, do we keep “the book” together? In simple terms: with thread and glue, piercing and adhesion. Each book is a complex information unto itself, comprising bundles of pages known as signatures, bound together with string. These bundles are then glued together. This alone is what enables the 30th word on page 147 and the 120th word on page 391 to stay together as a single entity called a “book.”
It was one thing to teach these lessons of history to students, another to stand in my father’s bedroom surrounded by them on all sides. Unlabeled photographs, unsigned greeting cards, undated scribbles on the backs of undated envelopes. I was standing inside the information of a life that was now over.
What would it take to make all this fragility secure? To live our lives in a way that would make future historians grateful? To make their jobs easier by ensuring that every piece of information was entirely autonomous—if we did not let glue, staples, picture frames, bedside tables, stoves, and apples do the job of information for us? Could we make birthday cards and books utterly “self-sufficient” such that, no matter if they broke down into their constituent parts and no matter how much time passed, posterity would always be able to reconstruct its fragments back into a coherent whole? Could we make chains of attribution impossible to break?
On each and every photograph, and on each page of each book, we would need to include:
Time: Full indication of the year, month, and day of the object
Geography: Full location information about an object’s site of creation
Biographic identification: Full details of all individuals featured or pictured in the object, along with similar data for the person or persons who created the object
There’s much more than this to be recorded, of course, but let’s pause there. Even at this point, to ensure the autonomy of something as simple as a birthday card, let alone as complex as a book, would require so much metadata—“data about data,” such as Library of Congress subject categorizations, ISBN codes, and more—there would hardly be space left for the birthday wish itself. If one ever tried to make a perfectly self-sufficient book, all such a book could ever hope to be is a testament to its own bookness. A book about being a book.
Worse than this, labeling is morbid. Anti-life, even. After all, I know who my brother is. I know who my wife and son are. To spend time labeling such photos would be to painstakingly imagine a future in which some or all of us were not here to remember such things. To imagine them, or me, dead.
Why entertain the dark thought of their mortality for days and weeks on end, cataloging everything from beach outings to winter vacations, all with the rigor of a coroner or a forensic analyst? Do I really want to live my life in constant communion with death? Wouldn’t I prefer to live with the ones I love instead of about them? There’s a thin line that separates cataloging and the abyss. Faced with that abyss, instinct asserts itself: Life is short. History be damned. Continuity and coherence don’t come easy, and they don’t come cheap. A trade-off needs to be made: When the choice confronts us—to keep the present intact, or to keep the past intact—the present always wins.
Well, almost always.
Historians choose to spend their working hours with the dead. Dead people, dead institutions, dead concepts, dead events. When we’re on duty, historians do the dirty work of necromancers, trading time spent with the living present for time spent with dead presents.
And so, when I entered the house and climbed the stairs to my dad’s room, the alarm sounded. It sounded even amidst the calcium deposits and soap scum of life. It implored me to make a map.
Walking back down to the kitchen, I asked my mother, as gently as I could. I asked her to promise. Please, can we not move things around too much before we take note of where they are right now? Can we not throw things away until we’ve taken note that they existed?
Mom agreed. I would begin to draw a map of my father’s room.
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From How We Disappear A Personal History of Information by Thomas S. Mullaney. Copyright © 2026. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.
