Duties of a Modern Scribe?

[CableCat]

Hello netizens,

I am working on a task. This task revolves around the question: If there were ancient scribes (like the priestly and royal and business class scribes), then what would a "modern scribe" do today?

For context, I act as a record-keeper/secretary/"scribe" for certain groups I'm part of. I've realized I have a calling for it and notating lots of details and dates. My task assigned to me was to ultimately find my sort of "calling" and to then work on expanding my knowledge base on it and ultimately make a master work and presentation on it.

I found this so interesting because of the amount of information available now. I have interests in data hoarding and FOSS and media archival. There's just so much available online. I think if someone were a "Scribe" or a knowledge holder and recorder nowadays, it would encompass far more than the classical physical mediums of writing, stone carvings, and clay tablets.

Anyway, I wanted to ask all of you for input!

What do you think a modern scribe would record? How would they record it? What would they record? How do you parse between what is worth recording and what isn't? Would scribing only include writing/typing, or do you think it could move into other mediums or software? Do you think there are certain modern equivalents or inheritors of the essence of the ancient scribe classes?

All ideas around this are good, so feel free to speculate!

[J. Soda]

This is such an interesting thing to think about. There are a lot of things to be said about the media we transcribe and what that means in today's age where so much is stored in so many ways. I think there's a case to be made about videotaping for the sake of recording moments, versus videotaping for the sake of art or content. To show what happened visually, it has its own pros and cons compared to actual written scripture. Such as leaving behind the thoughts of the recorder verbatim, instead they could be approximated through camera work, but that's really guessing at that point.

I'm sure there are careers and tasks like secretary and the recording of the minutes of meetings and court cases, but I'm not entirely familiar with the scope of that work. I like that the idea of journalism is acting as a scribe for your own experience, and that to be an artist is to record emotion and experience through a certain lens. In a more technical sense, I think speech-to-text is a huge medium for it, and I have a feeling AI will be taking charge in providing description to situations and data through its lens as well. I make research and notes for my local museum, and I think about that influencing other people's research and view on the past, off in the distant future. I think that's being a scribe in a certain way, but I think your post has inspired something for me. Even if they're not important events, maybe I want to make the moments I experience tangible and witness-able in a way. Personally, it feels like anything is worth recording, but obviously some things will be much more practically useful than others. Sciences, medical info, history and Anthropological influences, etc etc. I'm also interested in media preservation, and I believe an extension of that is being a scribe. To be someone who is creating the media to express an event or experience, to then be preserved for the good of the future.

[Memory]

First of all, focusing on a specific topic would be a good first filter. A topic for your groups? Your own topics? On the other hand, the generalist approach really has advantages... you could just take from all kinds of fields and keep, what seemed worth to you. That's your story, you could tell. Despite society making it hard for generalists to be honest (in my opinion)... but having a broader experience comes in handy in one way or another.

Where is our capacity limited? Limited by a cardbord box or a bookshelf, fitting only 20 books? That would make the decision much easier. A hard disks capacity? That's probably almost infinite (except for movies maybe) as filling 1 TB up takes a lifetime. So probably "time" is the limited ressource here.

How to tackle that...
Be happy that your task will always keep you busy? Certainly no end of sight in the process of learning.
Develop "taste"? Become moody and call 95% of all scrap / nonsense / trash. And there you have your 5% of what's worth archiving. Becoming the truffle pig of informations.

Here is a topic about "Should archivists get rid of 'unsavory' content?", maybe covering a couple of interesting points about the archivists questions:
https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=1726.0

Having CDs being less reliable than clay tablets, archivists are more important than ever.