L'invention de la mémoire: Écrire, enregistrer, numériser [The invention of memory: writing, recording, digitizing] by Michel Laguës, Denis Beaudouin and Georges Chapoutier (review)

In his preface to this lengthy book, Yves Quéré, a French physicist, describes the history of memories and recording as it is recounted in L'invention de la mémoire as

a continuous fresco that starts with the genome . . . and leads us to the conservation of big data and the evocation of memories of the future, after having depicted an amazing gallery of inventors, processes, apparatuses, writing systems, materials, etc., which have enabled people to preserve the trace of knowledge as they acquired it. There was a high risk here of submerging the reader in this flow. This risk is entirely avoided thanks to the approach selected: that of the story. All these chapters can be read as one reads a story, with its heroes, successes, failures, anecdotes and myths

[p. 7, our translation].

These sentences clearly indicate the book's approach: a vast, panoramic fresco going back to the origins of humans' relationship with recording, done from the point of view of three scientists. The subheading clearly indicates that this is about external memory, from rock paintings to clouds, via books, anemometers, and flight recorders. As Yves Quéré points out, the three authors adopt a storytelling approach that particularly emphasizes inventors and inventions and is accessible to both the academic community and the enlightened amateur public. Erudite and encyclopedic, this book is instructive and well illustrated, with eighty-nine figures focusing largely on machines, such as the Koenig vibroscope with recording cylinder, the bélinographe and the ENIAC, as well as diagrams and chronologies.

This vast panorama is organized into five thematic chapters, beginning with "Maps, writing, books," moving on to "The recording instrument or recording to understand," "The digital era," "Species of digital memories," and concluding with "Globalised information." Readers will encounter Scott de Martinville, Étienne-Jules Marey, Arthur Korn, Alan Turing, and Jack Kilby, along with a large inventory of inventions used to record writing, sound, images, wind, and data. They will appreciate the interdisciplinary ambition of the book. However, while the book fulfills the challenge of taking its reader through the ages and through several scientific fields—and it is no small task to have entwined so many facts and techniques in the longue durée—it does not raise many other historiographical issues apart than those of this thematic perspective. Little attention is paid to recent historiography in the field of history of technology and to the advances that have been made in the interpretation and writing of the history of technology and innovation. Social and cultural history, the appropriation and domestication of technologies and major industrial, economic, political, and ethical challenges are examined mainly from a contemporary perspective. The narrative also remains very focused on Europe and the United States, except in its first part, which opens with the history of writing and the materials and alphabets used for this endeavor. In this first part and throughout the book, we inevitably think about the challenge that Clarisse Herrenschmidt tackled in 2007 in her book, which has become a classic: The Three Scriptures: Language, Number, Code. As a linguist and anthropologist, she revisited the writing of languages, the language of numbers, and computer encoding, offering a wide temporal and spatial panorama that shares with The Invention of Memory the ambition of a long-term approach. Michel Laguës, Denis Beaudouin, and Georges Chapoutier offer a rich narrative, which provides accurate explanations and a fertile entry into the topic for students and scholars. The book should become a reference, while leaving the way open for historiographical approaches that, through the lens of co-construction, gender, users and maintainers, or transnational visions, for example, may revisit and offer new perspectives on the many milestones that have been established here.