PERSON

Ann Blair

The Harvard historian of early modern information management whose study of the curation practices that scholars developed after the printing press—the florilegium, the commonplace book, the index, the encyclopedia—reveals that the AI transition is not an unprecedented crisis but the latest instance of a recurring structural challenge: abundance overwhelms existing filters, and the resolution depends on inventing new curatorial practices, not on reducing the supply.

In 1545 the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner published a catalog of every book ever printed and described the flood of new print as “confusing and harmful” to scholarship—a complaint that Ann Blair, the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard, has documented as one of a long series of structurally identical crises extending from ancient libraries through medieval monasteries through the Reformation explosion of pamphlets to the present day. Her 2010 landmark study Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age is the foundational text for understanding information overload as a recurring structural condition rather than a modern affliction, and it arrives in the AI moment with the force of prophecy. Her central finding is simple and counterintuitive: every major expansion of the information supply reduces the

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