Comparative Literature As Core Need In Desk Research and AI As Tool

A year ago I read Libraries of the Mind by William Marx, and some of it is still very much on my mind ever since. Particularly what William Marx called ‘dark matter’ literature, which exists but you don’t have access to. E.g. because it’s in a language you can’t read, or material you don’t know how to search for. Material that is invisible from your own viewing position. Because that invisibility is easily accepted as proof of absence of such material, rather than proof of limitations on your own toolset and agency preventing you to find it, such resources will be generally ignored. Still, many questions have global aspects. Our information networks, our trade routes, our dependencies are truly global. Because of it many of our issues, including climate emergencies, are global in both their roots and consequences. We all suffer from small earth syndrome these days, as I phrased it in 2010 at the SHiFT Conference, where everything anyone of us does reverberates around the world because…