By Nichole Nomura and Quinn Dombrowski

Introduction

“Computer, count some words”

“The computer” – a character unnamed save its technological form – is one of the most enduring characters of Star Trek, spanning multiple generations of hardware and software over a 250-year period ranging from Enterprise in the 2150s to Picard in 2399. The prominence of the computer as an information agent, and the repeated deployment of “the archive” as a mysterious space of potential discovery^[1] has the effect of overshadowing a more familiar figure from our own era: the librarian. In this article, we take the librarian as the starting point for understanding the information landscape of Star Trek. What, in the universes of Star Trek, do librarians do, and how do those activities relate to the scope of librarianship in the real 21st century? We find the visible librarian pushed into a stereotyped corner, where a large swath of activities associated in particular with modern data librarians simply disappear from view. In this future landscape, it is as if data organizes itself – or at least, we are led to assume as much. We see the utopian embodiment of this process through Data, who both has access to these vast knowledge stores, and a positronic brain to deploy that data and interact with the world at a level where he is deemed sentient. But another form that data takes is “the computer”, which is narratively relegated to the background as a service worker, however complex that service may be upon closer interrogation. As one of the services computers perform, often hyper-invisibly, in the Star Trek universe is translation, we conclude with a case study of how translation depends not only on advanced computation, but an enormous amount of data – including cultural and linguistic information we might assume resists datafication. We pair examples from a few novels with a corpus of 774 Star Trek novels, using digital humanities text analysis methods to draw together those examples – much as one might do by calling upon the computer.

Continue reading “The Librarian, The Computer, The Android, and Big Data” →