Looking Back With IT

Looking Back : History and IT advances

Ambeth Ocampo aocampo@ateneo.edu
Inquirer News Service

TEACHING my favorite nephew to count is a delightful experience. His numerical world is limited by his little fingers. Sometimes as an excuse to tickle him, we extend the counting from 10 to 20 by going from his fingers to his toes. To go beyond one's hands and feet, one needs to use the brain or, at least, pen and paper. With a calculator, one can even go further and faster than we ever can on pen and paper. All this reminds me of the raging issue in grade school: Were we to continue doing Math with our heads, or would we be allowed the use of calculators?

One school of thought rightfully asserted that the calculators would dull the mind. Just go to any department store and watch sales personnel use a calculator for things as simple as 2 + 2. On the other hand, other teachers were of the opinion that a calculator would enable students to do very big and complicated computations. If one did not know the general principles of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, a calculator would remain useless. The impasse was broken when it was ruled that we could take Math tests with calculators provided every student in the class had a calculator.

The same can be said of computers, except that my computer use is limited to word processing. A desktop computer or a laptop is merely a typewriter to me, and I am humbled when people a fourth my age show me other things the machine can do. When I was in college, one of my professors refused to accept my term paper because it was printed with a dot matrix printer; she insisted that the paper be typewritten. Things have come a long way since then, and watching both sides of the political spectrum commenting on the "Hello Garci" tapes, armed with the expert opinion of audio experts, made me realize that in some ways technology has made the task of the historian more complicated.

One example is the use of OPAC -- Online Public Access Catalogs -- in most libraries today. When I give out an assignment, students will rush to the OPAC to do some research, and when the result is negative, they give up. Most students have to be told that there is such a thing called the Card Catalog, or certain published finding guides, on the shelves that will direct you to the book or manuscript being sought. Worse, some students only do research on the Internet. They make a Google search and if the result is negative, they have to be forced to physically seek out the source in a library or archive. When I give students a "bring me" quiz, I would let them look for something that is not yet on OPAC. Worse, if I know where on the shelf the book is, I would hide it just to see how far they would go in their research. What happens to research when there is no electricity?

Just recently I was reading a book that cited a source that I had used in an archive in Spain. The author was an armchair researcher who wrote the archive, requesting a copy, and was told what he was looking for did not exist. When I visited this same archive a decade after I had first done research there, the staff were bragging about their state of the art, modern search engines and their OPAC. I requested a document and got a negative reply.

I repeated the process and got the same answer. So I consulted an archivist who shrugged his shoulders and said: "Well. If it's not in the OPAC then it doesn't exist." I insisted that the document did exist because I saw it a decade earlier. The archivist just stared at me blankly. Fortunately, I had my notebook and showed him the call numbers. To humor me, he went in the stacks and came back red-faced and apologetic. The document did exist in the file, or "legajo," that I specified. Why did this escape the OPAC? This is very distressing to a historian because, if I didn't see the document earlier and relied solely on OPAC, I would never have seen this important 19th-century document.

More distressing is the news that some libraries and archives have restricted files that can only be accessed by the director or those with the appropriate clearance. What happens to researchers? What about materials that are on diskettes, on programs that are now extinct as dinosaurs? For example, if we didn't print all the files that were on earlier editions of Word or on the now-Jurassic Wordstar, wouldn't all those have been lost to us? What about materials that are on vinyl records or even on those early tape recorders or dictaphones? If you go to the Library of Congress and ask to listen to the famous Watergate tapes that got US President Nixon impeached, you will be told that these have to be run on the antiquated machines that were used to record them, and at the moment there are less than six of these machines in the universe, which are working.

History used to be simpler. You have a photograph that was good as a historical document; but with the advance of Photoshop you can manipulate, enhance or even invent photographs. A tape with a recognizable voice used to be enough to go on, but now we can edit and splice that.

The Internet is filled with a lot of unreliable information. So the historian still has to be armed with a critical and inquisitive mind. This pre-requisite has not changed no matter how advanced and complicated technology has made of the discipline.

History

Sense and Sensibility : Some notes on Manila

Bambi Harper
Inquirer News Service

THE EARLY Spanish colonizers and missionaries referred to the entire island of Luzon as Manila, according to Father Colin, who attributed that early baptism to the Chinese. The name referred in the language of the natives to the hammers or mortars that they used to de-husk the rice, the staple food in the entire archipelago. This instrument was carved from a great wooden trunk. In Isla de Manila, they dug into the very center of the wood creating a trough, well carved even on the outside almost like a chalice in shape. The trunk could measure up to five palms in height. The hammer was like a cylindrical walking cane also of wood but solid and heavy, a "vara" (1 vara = 0.84 meter) and a half in length.

With this, they de-husked the rice, grinding with the wooden hammer in that cavity in such a way that the grain came out cleared of its husk. It was then cleaned in closed sieves called "bilao" on which the rice was tossed and separated from the chaff.

In Isla de los Pintados, they opened two or more holes lengthwise on the trunk rather than vertically so that two or more persons could grind the rice together. Since it was the custom of the Luzones to keep these mortars under their houses or in front on the street may have been the reason strangers called the islands Luzon.

In the elbow of this island facing the southeast, a tumultuous river (would you believe the Pasig?) rushed to the sea and the earth opened into a beautiful bay (Manila's untreated waste wasn't disgorged into it nor did ships dump chemicals and plastic garbage overboard) measuring 30 leagues in its contours. The river descends from a lagoon that is quite large and is six leagues distant from the river bar. On the eastern part of this, the natives had their principal settlement, with up to 4,000 houses along both banks of the river and on the shores of the sea in its bend and where the land ended. At the back of the settlements were many swamps.

In general, it was said that even if the boundaries of its walls and the number of resident Spaniards were not so big, Manila could be considered one of the most important cities of the Indies as a colony and daughter of Mother Spain because of the numerous population composed of various nationalities "extra muros" (outside the walls). It had a silk market (alcaiceria) in San Fernando, Binondo, of 6,000 to 8,000 Chinese merchants with different officials and its own mayor. There was another municipality in Tondo with 14 or 15 settlements of Tagalogs as well as other nationalities with their own governor and justice ministers and captains of infantry who lived in the suburbs outside Manila.

Interlaced with these native villages and along the riverbanks up to the mouth of the lagoon were many pasturelands, vegetable gardens, farms and ranches of Spaniards with more than 2,000 Chinese laborers. A great number of boats traversed the river continually, and the neighborhoods, convents, fields and gardens made it such a pleasure to behold that those who had seen it said it had no equal in the Indies.

Visible from Manila at a distance of three leagues by sea and five or six by land on the southern part was the secluded port of Cavite, a land's end that jutted out to the sea. The natives called it Cauit, which means a hook or anchor, while the Spaniards called it Cavite. It was quite sheltered from the strong southeastern gales that formed the most dangerous storms of the bay. The port was shallow and the galleons could not enter well into it and needed many strong cables. Because of this, they risked being wrecked in port like the two galleons that were ready to leave for Mexico in 1589, which were lost on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

The population of Cavite consisted mainly of soldiers since the presidio with its bulwarks and redoubts was there as well as the arsenal, shipyard and the wharf that served the galleons. The important residents were ship pilots, foremen, crew heads and other galleon officials. There was a parish church and four convents; after Manila, Cavite had the largest Spanish contingent.

Ships could cast anchor anywhere on the bay that was clean, abundant with good fish and lined with thick tree groves.

Fronting Manila, some eight leagues distant toward the middle of the bay was Mariveles, considered a small but elevated isle that served as a lookout. There was a sentinel there who, upon sighting foreign ships, would go out to meet them and send alarm flares to Manila.

Leaving the bay and navigating to the left 14 leagues from Cavite was the cove of Balayan, once known as de Bombon because of the lagoon of the same name at its back. Leaving Balayan and turning toward the east where you entered the cove of Batangas was Punta de Azufre, so called because of the sulfur in its surroundings. In front of the isle of Azufre was another islet called Caza because of the abundance of game; it was uninhabited. Between this isle and the land's end was another port called Malacaban whose name used to conjure sad memories for the Spaniards because in those parts Governor Perez Dasmariñas and his officials were killed by the Chinese crew members on the expedition to recover the fort at Ternate.

(Data from P. Francisco Colin, "Labor Evangelica," 1660, edited by P. Pablo Pastells, 1904)

Post Gloria-Garci

There's life after Gloria and 'Hello Garci' tapes

Amando Doronila
Inquirer News Service

DESPITE their ideological predilections, academics at the University of the Philippines, during moments of grave political crises, have seldom failed to assert their intellectual responsibility to intervene in setting the national agenda and rescuing it from the muddle of corrosive political conflict.

One such recent intervention was the launching on Aug. 8 at the UP Third World Study Center of a "Blueprint for a viable Philippines." The blueprint was drafted by a group of academics led by former UP president Francisco Nemenzo after 20 roundtable discussions with nonpartisan civil society groups.

The blueprint seeks to serve as "a comprehensive and coherent strategy to address the crisis, arrest public cynicism, and reverse the rapid decline of the State as an instrument for achieving the collective goals of the national community."

It follows the intervention several months earlier of the 11 UP School of Economics academics who issued a paper warning that the country was headed toward financial collapse unless the administration undertook tough reforms to attack the fiscal deficit crisis. The paper scored the Arroyo administration for not exercising enough political will to implement reforms to avert the deficit.

What is remarkable about the "blueprint" of the Nemenzo group is that it represents a fresh attempt to refocus national discourse from the sterile and sordid debate over the tapes that have provoked demands for the resignation of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and over proposals calling for constitutional revision as way to end the current political crisis.

Above partisan fray

It stayed above the partisan fray over the tapes which have dominated the political debate during the past few weeks following their disclosure last month. It avoided reference to the scandals rocking the Arroyo administration.

By doing so, the blueprint refocused national attention to the more fundamental issues that it considered were at the root of the decline of the Philippine State and the current crisis.

The fact that the blueprint was drafted by a group associated with the nationalist-left tendency at the UP -- among them Nemenzo, Randy David and Renato Constantino Jr., none of whom is a great fan of Ms Arroyo -- puts it above suspicion the initiative was intended to divert attention from the scandals buffeting the Arroyo administration and threatening its survival.

Nemenzo et. al did the unexpected and unpredictable. Given their ideological perspective and their history of political activism, they would have been expected to get into the center of the "great debate" on constitutional revision and to put their intellectual weight behind any of the sides in the conflict that has deeply divided the nation.

Their academic detachment from the issues fueling the scandals allows them to redirect the agenda toward a vista that offers some hope to the nation, away from the demoralizing state of politics and the debate that is feeding on a frenzy of misinformation and unverified accusations.

The blueprint only makes indirect reference to the scandals. "Unbridled corruption and cynicism are rampant both in the public and private sectors," the document says.

Diminishing credibility

"The credibility of our electoral process is fast diminishing because of massive vote buying and electoral fraud," it says. "Our confidence is declining in the ability of the present political leadership to lead the country out of the rut."

From this perspective, the blueprint comes as a much-needed relief from the poisonous atmosphere generated by the intensely partisan debate over the tapes and other perceived faults and shortcomings of the Arroyo administration.

It offers fresh perspectives through which solutions for the crisis may come. It seems to send the message that while it is true that the nation has now sunk into a deep crisis, and that the survival of the Arroyo regime remains in doubts, there is life after Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the tapes, no matter what is the outcome of the impeachment proceedings against the President.

The blueprint describes the current situation, offering an alternative analysis of national problems, and outlines a set to approaches to these problems.

"The best way to present the blueprint's distinctive features is to contrasts analysis and recommendations with those offered the present government and/or conventional frameworks," says the paper.

Highlights

The paper highlights the elements of a "nation in crisis," tracing them to more structural causes. These include:

The economy "is not growing fast enough to meet the needs of a rapid multiplying population," an issue that is being avoided by the Arroyo administration in the face of the Catholic Church's opposition to population control programs.

The economy is "extremely vulnerable to external conditions because of its excessive dependence on earnings from overseas workers and on foreign loans and investments."

Political stability "remains elusive because of mass poverty and the exclusion of a large number of our people from meaningful participation in the nation's life."

"The future of our young people is bleak because of the deterioration in the quality of public and private education."

The government is increasingly unable to make ends meet, as indicated by chronic budget deficits. It is also increasingly unable to service the public debt without having to take out new loans.

Public infrastructure is deteriorating. The national environment is being degraded.

Contrasting view

Coming after the President's State of the Nation Address on July 25, the blueprint offers a contrasting view of the state of the nation. It reduces the SONA to a hackneyed reprint of old programs, except for the call to fast-track constitutional revision. It contradicts the President's vision of a "strong Republic."

The blueprint says that the establishment of a "strong Developmental State" is needed for its realization and implementation.

Contrasting it with the Arroyo mantra of a "strong Republic," the blueprint says that a Strong Developmental State "is strong not in the sense of being authoritarian or arbitrary, but in the sense of being willful in the enforcement of its laws and resolution in the pursuit of its programs."

The principal objective of such a state "is to toughen our institutions and restore public confidence in them, free them from captivity by vested interests, and enshrine the rule of law in our society. Such a state, says the blueprint, aims to establish the conditions for sustained and equitable economic growth, so that private enterprise may flourish hand in hand with, rather at the expense of, realization of the vital social objectives."

The blueprint "prioritizes the fulfillment of the people's minimum basic needs, the termination of patronage as a mode of governance, the curbing of corruption at all levels."

The constitutional revision call stands high on the list of the blueprint's critique of the "conventional approaches." It says constitutional revision is being undertaken in a time of cynicism.

The alternative approaches of the blueprint will be examined in forthcoming essays.