“The peasant of early modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed.The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
It's important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library. — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
In 2002, Google began an ambitious project to digitize every book in the world. It was intended as a search project: type in a… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history.… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought. — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
Thanks to modern technology, we now can deliver every text in every research library to every citizen in our country, and to everyone in… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
People think that when you use Google you're finding exactly what you need, but really, you need expert help. — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
I would not minimize the digital divide, which separates the computerized world from the rest, nor would I underestimate the importance of traditional books. — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
“By seeing the way a joke worked in the horseplay of a printing shop two centuries ago, we may be able to recapture that… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people… — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st. — Robert Darnton Copy Share Image
