Father Figures: Renegotiating Preservation of Oral Tradition Through Four Forefathers

ABSTRACT Oral tradition is a temporally contingent information medium predicated upon the present, which requires preservation efforts be predicated upon such as well. Despite being the oldest information sharing method in human history, its preservation remains dangerously overlooked, deprioritized, and misunderstood among information professionals. Since the advent of written language, oral tradition’s authority has been subjugated and eclipsed in favor of the stability availed by newer documentation methods, and as languages and cultures continue to go extinct, it is increasingly urgent to renegotiate the field’s approach to the medium and its preservation. By applying an interdisciplinary, narrative lens to the history of information, the means of ameliorating information science’s problematic relationship with oral tradition can be found in the same documents and ideologies that caused it, as written by four forefathers of modern thought. Through this, oral tradition’s significance is crystallized as the Father of Information – an essential pillar of the information field that if handled with care, holds great potential for communities, history, and information as it is known.