Google Fingers

No, it’s not another amazing new piece of software from Google, which will type for you (though that would be nice). Just something that I’ve noticed while looking at many nineteenth-century books in Google’s massive digitization project. The following screenshot nicely reminds us that at the root of the word “digitization” is “digit,” which is from the Latin word “digitus,” meaning finger. It also reminds us that despite our perception of Google as a collection of computer geniuses, and despite their use of advanced scanning technology, their library project involves an almost unfathomable amount of physical labor. I’m glad that here and there, the people doing this difficult work (or at least their fingers) are being immortalized.

[The first page of a Victorian edition of Plato’s Euthyphron, a dialogue about the origin and nature of piety. Insert your own joke here about Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto.]