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Everybody’s heard the saying “one person, one vote,” right?  Deep down we all know better, far from it, through various notions of who qualifies as a "person” and who gets to vote and yet still we say it. Elections are the mechanism by which those persons — people — have their say, and, ultimately, speak. When all is said and done in the convoluted process of American presidential elections, hundreds speak for the tens of millions who vote — and in the end it’s a set of documents that speak for us all, for the record.

A document that changed the world: the set of materials produced in support of the work of the 59th Electoral College vote, 2020.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and if you’re looking to go into the deepest, darkest, nerdiest electoral weeds, you’ve come to the right place.  Our focus here is exclusively on the mechanics and the materials that make it all work.  I lived in New York state for my first election and remember being sternly advised that if I wanted to write in a presidential candidate, I would have to actually write in the names of all the electors for that candidate, and even though I really hadn’t been thinking about it that would’ve put me right off. We all probably know by now that there are only a few hundred people who get to directly vote for president and vice president of the United States, the electors who the rest of us vote for, knowingly or otherwise, who gather to cast their votes typically in state capitals a few weeks later.

Those sessions, when the electors put pen to paper and perform the true act of voting for president and vice president, are meant to be ceremonial, proscribed, almost ritualistic, but all those steps and all those documents play important roles.  So yes, there’s all the rigmarole and signing of very stiff looking pieces of paper — and I’m here to tell you, well then what happens, after the ceremonies, or for that matter before, what makes it work?  What do those papers say?  Into the weeds we go.

We’ve all grown accustomed to watching the election night returns like they were sporting events, where the score is always displayed on the TV screen and we wait for Al Michaels or Mary Carrillo to tell us the final score when the game is over.  (Fun fact, sports require final reports too.)  We all see the numbers pile up but the networks don’t get to decide or declare who wins, no matter how obvious it might be. The steps that follow and the papers that record those steps make it real, legal, permanent, in one of the most basic functions of a document: to document.

A great deal of what happens is spelled out in multiple provisions of the Constitution, starting with Article II, Section 1, later revised in ways small and large by no fewer than 10 subsequent amendments ranging from the 12th in 1804 creating separated votes for president and vice president, through a number of suffrage expansions by race, “servitude,” sex and age; additional details for filling vacancies; term limits; granting electoral votes to the District of Columbia, abolition of poll taxes; and the quite rococo processes of the 25th Amendment around vacancies and the disability of the president. No aspect of the Constitution has been amended more times than by which the office of the presidency is assumed. Furthermore, U.S. Code Title 3, Chapter 1 fleshes out more specifics, with precursor legislation that goes back to 1887, based largely on the still disputed electoral debacle of 1876.

While most people know the electoral college exists and more or less what it does, far fewer likely know critical roles played by the National Archives. As the keeper of the nation’s official records, the Archives facilitates coordination with all the states and the Congress. They produce and publish a handy guide for state officials, including a checklist of about two dozen steps from identifying a contact person for ongoing communication to keeping the tracking number when the appropriate certificates are sent out.

Each state is responsible for running its elections in its own way, subject to provisions of the Constitution and federal law.  Two sets of documents are required for presidential election, following state certification of the final results. The first are Certificates of Ascertainment, in which the governor lists the names of the electors chosen by the voters and the number of votes each of them has received. These must be hand signed by the governor and bear the state seal. Nine of the certificates are prepared, three sent as soon as possible to the Archives and six waiting for the actual vote of the electors.

Which is where the second set of documents come in, the Certificates of Vote. When the electors meet, they must each cast individual signed separate ballots for president and vice president.  The votes are tallied — typically a matter of no great suspense, though the issue of “faithless electors,” who go rogue and vote for somebody other than the winner of the state popular vote, has become sufficiently bothersome that a majority of states now have some law fining or disqualifying faithless electors. Once that’s all settled, each elector signs six Certificates of Vote listing all persons who received electoral votes for both offices and the number of votes.

There are no federal standards for how these certificates should look, though they may not include names of any people who did not receive votes and must all be signed by all electors. This leads to a quite charming range of examples from the deeply elaborate with lots of exotic gothic fonts and border frippery to straightforward and frankly disappointing word-processed documents that might just as easily be recording next year’s Rotary president.  They also feature closing phrases like “In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the State of Washington to be affixed” or some such exorbitant language; these are called “eschatochols,” descendants of medieval charters and are much the same as any notary public would use. Plain or fancy, they do the job.

These are paired with the remaining Certificates of Ascertainment, sealed up and distributed: two to the Archivist of the United States, two to the Secretary of State of the state, one to the chief judge of the Federal District Court where the electors have met, and the one that really matters, to the President of the Senate (the sitting vice president), by registered mail no less. If those certificates don’t get to the President of the Senate or the Archivist within about nine days they are then directed by law to request the relevant state’s Secretary of State to immediately send their copies and moreover to send a “special messenger” to the local federal district judge to fetch the ones they have by “the most expeditious method available,” and if that messenger neglects their duty there’s a $1,000 fine. Whew.

Presuming that all works out, there is then a joint session of Congress where the President of the Senate opens all the sealed certificates, in alphabetical order, reads them out and tellers — usually chairs and ranking members of Senate and House administrations committees — tally the final votes. This process is often expedited, with the envelopes being opened and passed in short order dispensing with a reading of the formal language. In 1997, this all took 24 minutes; in 2013, 23 minutes; in 2017, 41 minutes.

Federal law spells out several provisions regarding the Congressional session and disposition of any potential objections to one or more states’ votes. Nominally this could be as a result of questions of authenticity of the documents themselves including the possibility of multiple certificates from the same state, either by two different state authorities making different determinations, no determination by any state authority, or the receipt of some extraneous certificate not from the recognized system laid out in that state’s law. In practice this process, requiring objection from at least one member from each house, has been invoked only twice since the original 1887 federal law was enacted, in both cases by Democrats; in 1969, when an elector from North Carolina faithlessly but legally voted for George Wallace rather than Richard Nixon; and in 2005, when objections were made to voting irregularities in Ohio. In each case, the individual houses debated per the law and rejected the objections. 

The 1961 counting of the 1960 election, decided by a razor thin popular vote majority but a substantial electoral majority, provided the spectacle of then VP Nixon presiding over the count of the election he lost to John Kennedy.  In a gruesome twist of fate, Hawaii, voting in its first presidential election, was sufficiently close that two sets of electoral votes were submitted to meet the deadlines; the final count after Christmas showed Kennedy winning by 115 votes, and Nixon unilaterally suggested ruling in favor of the Democratic slate of electors, “so as not to delay the count,” which was agreed to by unanimous consent. That must have stung.

This is one of the simplest, if not necessarily the most straightforward, of document stories, or at least it should be and yet in times of stress or doubt or confusion, even or perhaps especially in a digital, streaming, cloud-based world, these pieces of paper, documents are there to provide clarity.  All the steps and signatures and seals and rules and laws and forms and ceremonies confer heft, seriousness, reality, officialness to the documents and to the process and results.  Those other five official backup copies are only required to be maintained for a year, though I suspect mostly they’re kept forever as an enduring record of one of the most pivotal decisions a democracy can make.

One often hears that “the system” has worked: the political system, the electoral system, the legal system, whatever.  True, but — those systems don’t, won’t, can’t work without information systems and more specifically documents and information objects to reinforce and bolster the processes and procedures. Otherwise, it’s all just talk, no matter how many other people try to have their say.

Sources:

Accessed January 3, 2021.

National Archives. November 14, 2019.

National Archives. July 27, 2020.

National Archives. July 27, 2020.

Neale, Thomas. Congressional Research Service, October 22, 2020.

Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration, July 2020.

Rybicki, Elizabeth. Congressional Research Service, December 8, 2020.

Shoenberger, Elisa. Library Journal. Accessed January 3, 2021.

Accessed January 3, 2021.

In Wikipedia, December 31, 2020.

Accessed January 3, 2021.

Let’s get metaphysical for a moment, shall we?  All physical objects are space-time phenomena; they occupy space and have a finite lifespan, big and small, long and short, from the Great Pyramid and the negative handprints in the Cueva de las Manos in Patagonia to last week’s grocery list I already recycled. 

All objects can also be “documents,” often unintentionally.  My grocery list is of minimal interest to me after I get home, of even less interest to you, but 100 years from now, it might provide insight into 21^st century shopping practices, eating habits, domestic life or my fondness for dark chocolate.  Mostly these objects’ lifespans take their own courses, but in some cases they can be prolonged by accident or design, including being put away and hopefully preserved, potentially to better and more purposefully inform an unimaginably distant future.

A document that changed the world: a time capsule, buried on the site of the New York World’s Fair by the Westinghouse Corporation, to be opened in 5,000 years, 1938.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and I acknowledge this episode is slightly premature; any “world changing” to be done here is mostly about 4,900 years in the future, so I’m taking my opportunity now.  Let’s also acknowledge that “time capsule” – a phrase originally coined for this project – is a misnomer.  It’s no more possible to encapsulate time than it is light or heat or life, it flows as it does and the best we can hope for is to overcome or compensate for its effects.  Which doesn’t stop people from being fascinated by the prospect, as we are with time itself.  By my count, the OED entry for “time” describes 40 primary and secondary senses of the word and over 350 phrases from “about time” to “with time.”

Objects survive in all kinds of ways; accidentally left in walls, attics, unused spaces, as well as unintended circumstances:  think Pompeii, Chernobyl, the Titanic.  They also survive in straightforward ways, collected and preserved in cultural heritage repositories like museums, archives and libraries, so they can be used, displayed, or studied. 

Putting together a bunch of stuff and sticking it away, hidden from view, is another matter.  That’s intentional too but now those objects are being re-characterized as exemplars of their time or society, meant to affect how a future world should remember, perceive and understand us.

Naturally, people argue over the earliest examples, apart from the ancient practices of sanctifying buildings by installing objects in foundations; a box placed in the cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House in 1795 by Samuel Adams, unearthed and added to in 1855 and reopened in 2015 contained a plaque and coins going back to 1652, though there was no specific time nor retrieval strategy in mind.  The Philadelphia Exhibition celebrated the American centennial in 1876 with a “Century Safe,” which was opened on schedule for the bicentennial, and that commemorative example continued in various cities after ever since.

Activity seemed to pick up in the 1930s. The Crypt of Civilization – quite grand if also morbid – is based at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, when their president mused, while researching ancient history, that preserving contemporary objects would be of great value to future historians.  At least in those days, university presidential whims were indulged, and the Crypt, a 20x20x10 former swimming pool underneath Pheobe Hearst Hall, came to fruition in 1940, and now the inevitable International Time Capsule Society is headquartered there as well.

The one, however, that stands out among the rest, was buried in the way such things are, with great fanfare and ceremony and the tolling of a Chinese gong – borrowed from Chinatown for the purpose – in front of what would be the Westinghouse Building of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, themed the World of Tomorrow, at high noon, the exact moment, give or take a minute, of the autumnal equinox, on September 23, 1938, on the day the New York Times front page bore the headline “Chamberlain Meets Hitler; Talks to Continue Today; New Government in Prague.”  Within the week, he will head home waving the Munich Declaration, proclaim “peace in our time,” Germany will march into the Sudetenland and the world will be plunged into yet another world war. 

The Times provided a predictably serious and respectful piece on the burial, while the Washington Post had a bit more fun in the runup, referring to the capsule as a “Tut-Like Tomb,” suggesting inclusions such as a horse racing program, a picture of a drug store window, an Irish Sweepstakes ticket, or a hamburger.  They might have been on to something.  We were also treated to a vignette of future archaeologists Owlf and Pipwir surveying and misunderstanding the contents, and another speculating on the likelihood that the 70^th century might not care about or need the capsule, as they might be able to “dial the proper light wave” to find out everything they wanted to know about 1938.  Hmmm.

But let’s stay in those last golden days of innocence.  As part of a long-standing campaign to spruce up their public image, Westinghouse PR man G. Edward Pendray while on vacation dreamt up the idea of building and burying a “time bomb” (or maybe “vessel” or “container” or “can”) at the laying of the cornerstone of their Fair building, and viewing it through a periscope became one of the key attractions of the Fair.  Ideas for miniature souvenir capsules to be sold to defray the $1,000 cost of the project somehow went nowhere, nor sadly the notion of marketing $30 versions to be buried with people in their caskets. 

As with any such project, they then had certain fundamental questions to answer:  what to put in, where to put it, how to keep it safe, and how to get it unput. 

The contents are lovingly enumerated in a little booklet, which also describes the painstaking processes of developing the new copper alloy to protect the torpedo-shaped capsule, 7½ feet long and 8 3/8” in diameter, buried 50 feet deep in marshy soil, covered in pitch and concrete to deter 45^th century tomb robbers who might want the slide rule or the can opener or the 1937 Yearbook of Dentistry.  It further extols all the technological wizardry of Pyrex and wax and nitrogen and whatnot to keep the contents intact.  The Time Capsule Committee assembled several dozen items of common use, samples of industrial materials, some certificates, and an extensive microfilm library and newsreels necessitating instructions on how to build devices to view those, along with a quite elaborate and quite impenetrable “guide to the English language” which I can’t imagine will leave our descendants much the wiser about how we talk. 

If they do, they’ll find some 10 million words: dictionaries, magazines, newspapers, lots of encyclopedia articles with a heavy emphasis on science and business, Gone With the Wind airline timetables, and the Sears Roebuck catalog. The only physical book is, inevitably, the Bible.  I imagine some of the other objects will be of more interest:  an alarm clock, nail file, telephone, toys (a car for boys and a doll for girls), a baseball, a toothbrush and tooth powder.

And a hat.  Much is made, in multiple places including press coverage at the time, of the inclusion of a ladies’ hat specially designed for the capsule and stuffed with surgical cotton to protect its shape, placed at the top so it doesn’t get crushed.  I hope to heaven that hat survives, because the only woman I can clearly identify as participating in any substantive way in this whole business is its designer, Lilly Daché. 

The point of the exercise, though, is to get it retrieved, 5,000 years on, so clearly something more than circling a date on a calendar will suffice.  Their solution was to create a Book of Record, specially printed using ultra high quality paper and ink and with specially designed type, hand sewn and all that; copies were distributed to “libraries, museums, monasteries, convents, lamaseries, temples and other safe repositories throughout the world.”  Currently, about 300 of the 3,650 copies can be found in library collections, as well as in the Internet Archive, though my money’s on the print ones for durability.  There’s several pages of intricate instructions, multiple dating systems, geopositioning information, planetary alignments and such to indicate the fated time and place and how to open it safely, which if they haven’t yet dug up the guide to understanding English one wonders how that will work but never mind – and besides, as they say, if it’s somehow forgotten, “we may depend on the perennial curiosity and the digging and burrowing habits of the human race, to unearth it sooner or later.”  I feel better already.

Even though much of this is comical now, there’s a remarkably optimistic high-mindedness throughout you can’t help admiring, especially in the face of what they must surely have known was coming.  Maybe? that explains it – in a world likely spinning out of control, there’s an appeal in the idea of sealing away a slice of today, in the hopes of getting through a bad tomorrow for a better day after tomorrow.

If you’re still undaunted, numerous guidelines and instructions, from professional associations, institutions, and companies selling do-it-yourself capsules, lay out the kinds of objects and materials to avoid – no food or plants understandably, rubber releases sulfur, wood gives off acid, textiles should be free of insects, electronics raise questions of power supply and the stability of media, and so on.  One author has described these as a posed portrait in contrast to the candid picture that might otherwise from random objects’ survival.  Decisions of what to include necessarily imply decisions of what not to include, and as ever who gets to make those decisions and how and why are an inextricable aspect of any such endeavor, saying at least as much about the society that produces a time capsule as do the contents. 

Why put it away, in a container?  Why bury it?  (Hint:  You shouldn’t.)  Why not put these things out in the open for people to see and learn from every day?  Well, sure, but where’s the fun in that?  That’s a museum case or a diorama, those are a dime a dozen.  A time capsule provides the thrill of concealment and mystery, the kind of birthday-present surprise which adds that little frisson of excitement to putting away a box for a generation or two and hoping for the best.

So what’s the end of the story?  Well, like with any good time capsule, we don’t know and we won’t know for something like 1.8 million days and yes, it’s still there, under what is now Flushing Meadows Park, waiting.  Just about any time capsule story hinges on one simple word:  if.  If it survives intact, if it’s remembered, if it’s found and successfully opened.  Sadly, because this was buried a year early, they couldn’t include one of the signature keepsakes from the 1939 Fair, small pins from the General Motors Futurama exhibit of a utopian 1960 America that read, simply, “I have seen the future.”  Time capsules are intended to go the other way around – so that if they work, the future can see us.

Where is the law, anyway?  That’s a surprising question – more typically you might ask what the law is, or perhaps who says so, why it is how it is, how we might change it, but “where”?  I mean, Google it, or ask a lawyer, or go to a courthouse or library if necessary, but it’s got to be around here somewhere, right?

Even those of us with keen senses of direction can get turned around in complicated spaces, and they don’t come any more complicated than a major museum, to wit the Louvre.  So when, after a brisk and toasty whirl through the major sights, our niece said she wanted to find one more thing – not included in our handy guidebook – off we went in search.  And search.  And search.  Maps, guides, apps, other visitors, all were happy to help, though without much effect, so with regret we decided to abandon the hunt and make for the “nearest” exit, apparently some 10 km away.  Naturally, when all hope was gone, voila: There it was. And so we ran smack into one of the seminal legal writings of all time, whose motivation and purpose are kinda murky and whose common name is probably misleading, and whose power and influence resonate more than 3 millennia later.

A document that changed the world: A basalt stela, engraved with what is today known as the Code of Hammurabi; now in the Louvre Museum in Paris, about 1754 BCE.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and I’m dedicating this episode to Annie Price, who inspired it. When she wanted to find this, naturally I was up for it, expecting – I dunno, tablets of some kind? – having never really given it much thought.  I was not expecting a 7+ foot high stela, free standing, tall and narrow, resembling let’s say, a finger, carved from top to bottom, in vertical lines – and not that many people around, compared to the hordes surrounding the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo, who’ve had better press.  It’s the longest known early Mesopotamian inscription, executed in cuneiform in the Akkadian language in a traditional, even archaic, format, likely calling back to times historic, though written in everyday language, perhaps so that it would be more readily understandable.  It was displayed in its time in the city of Sippar, then captured in the 12^th century BCE and moved to Susa, where it was rediscovered in 1901 by Gustave Jéquier, and moved to the Louvre, where it now resides in room 227.

I confess my prior knowledge of this was limited to hazy junior-high cradle-of-civilization, Tigris-and-Euphrates memories.  Hammurabi’s reign lies smack in the middle of the 300-year First Dynasty of Babylon, and he was involved in the requisite kingly military campaigns, political offensives and conquests.  There is much we don’t know about him, including how old he was when he ascended the throne in 1792 BCE, other than during his reign there was a move toward consolidation of city-states into larger political units.  He ruled for over 40 years, and this artifact comes from near the end of that reign, at roughly the time of pottery use in Peru, the extinction of the woolly mammoths in Siberia, the end of pyramid building in Egypt, the development of chariots, the composite bow, and tables for solving quadratic equations.

The current common name is somewhat of a misnomer.  We begin with a preface establishing the king’s authority and divine calling, “to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak…”  Nice thought, still a ways to go there.

Then follows not so much a code of laws in the modern sense as a codification, or recording, of what are often referred to as “edicts,” mostly if/then statements, like No. 22:  “If any one is committing a robbery and is caught, then he shall be put to death.”  Straightforward enough, though No. 21 is more intriguing:  ‘If any one break a hole into a house, he shall be put to death before that hole and be buried.”  This feels more specific, a response to an individual event, and there are lots of examples like this, lists of particular circumstances, not abstracted into higher principles, more like case law leading to speculation that these represent individual kingly judicial decisions, including some internal contradictions.  (And by the way, who wants an unsuccessful robber buried in your back yard?)

What we have is incomplete, missing Nos. 66-99 of 282 edicts, with erasures likely dating from about 500 years after its creation, perhaps for new inscriptions that were never made.  About half deal with contracts, and another chunk with what we would call family law – inheritance, divorce, paternity.  Others deal with theft, debt, medical malpractice, even the establishment of a minimum wage.  It’s best known, though, as a very early example of what is known as “lex talionis,” the law of retaliation or retribution: No. 195. If a son strike his father, his hands shall be hewn off. No. 196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out. No. 197. If he break another man's bone, his bone shall be broken. 

If that rings kind of Old Testament, you’re not wrong, though there’s no direct evidence of a link from here to there.  It’s worth noting that there are older collections of “laws” going back at least 300 years earlier, all of which share certain characteristics.  Some practices have fallen out of favor more recently; judges then who failed to reach a decision could refer the matter to the gods in a trial by ordeal in the river.  Hammurabi’s code is among the earliest, however, to incorporate a sense of the presumption of innocence of the accused, and the use of evidence in supporting a case. 

Those sound familiar – sadly, so does this: No. 198. If he put out the eye of a freed man, or break the bone of a freed man, he shall pay one gold mina. No. 199. If he put out the eye of a man's slave, or break the bone of a man's slave, he shall pay one-half of its value.   Throughout the Code, punishments are explicitly differentiated by social status; the word “wardum” is often translated as “slave” though more likely connotes something between a debtor and an indentured servant – while we can’t precisely transpose their social classes to anything familiar, you get the idea.  This class structure is overt and inescapable, as is differentiation by gender (men were permitted affairs with servants and slaves; unfaithful women were drowned in the Euphrates with their lovers).  In general, crimes again the state are punished more harshly than those against individuals. I suppose there’s something to be said for this kind of bias to be explicit and overt.  As with any society, insight into its legal systems and principles provides insight into broader social structures and norms, in ways later generations might find welcome or repellent. 

Other records from the time also suggest a larger legal system of judges, processes, the use of written evidence and witnesses, and a substantial documentary infrastructure:  The loser of a case had to give the winner a “tablet of non-complaining” confirming agreement with the decision, and that he won’t raise the issue again. 

So – where is the law?  It’s right here, in the middle of the town square carved into this giant stone thing, written down for everybody to see, because the king said so and the gods said he could say so.  Any other questions? 

Given the circumstances, likely not.  We don’t, probably can’t, fully know what this was meant to do, or to represent; theories range from an early attempt to lay out something like a constitution to a naked PR move to reinforce royal authority, and it also served as a rhetorical example, copied by scribes, for about 1,000 years.  It seems probable it was meant to make some version of “the law” public, written down, visible, literally carved in stone, rather than purely arbitrary or ambiguous, which can simultaneously extend and limit the power of a ruler who gets to make and publish the rules, but then once they’re out he has to abide by them, more or less.  Those rules and laws then also reinforce and reify the structures and roles of the society, with a permanence that only basalt, notoriously difficult to edit, can provide.

“Finding the law” is both easier and harder now; search engines pull things up in an instant – though the systems of codifying and organizing legal writing, created to ensure thoroughness, completeness, and authenticity of statutes at multiple governmental levels, court opinions, legal treatises and more, can be complex, especially across jurisdictions and international boundaries.  Other barriers can be raised, too; something like 20 US states copyright some part of their legal documentation; in a lawsuit against a public interest group that posted the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, the state referred to the group’s “strategy of terrorism.”  Even today, finding “the law” can be difficult, as finding justice still too often remains elusive as well.

Sources

Andrews, Evan. “8 Things You May Not Know About Hammurabi’s Code.” HISTORY. Accessed July 23, 2019. .

Arnold, Bill T. Who Were the Babylonians? Society of Biblical Literature / Archaeology and Biblical Studies ;; No. 10; Variation: Archaeology and Biblical Studies ;; No. 10. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.

Baker, Heather. “Hammurabi of Babylon.” Times Higher Education, no. 2063 (16): 44.

Charpin, Dominique. Hammurabi of Babylon. London ; New York : I.B. Tauris & Co. ; New York : Distributed in the U.S. and Canada exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

“Code of Hammurabi.” In Wikipedia, July 23, 2019. .

Driver, G. R., and King of Babylonia. The Babylonian Laws / Miles, John C.; Sir,; 1870-1963. ; (John Charles),. Ancient Codes and Laws of the near East; Variation: Ancient Codes and Laws of the Near East. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.

Glaubitz, H. “Hard-Boiled Hammurabi.” New York Times (1923-Current File). August 22, 1937.

“Gov.Uscourts.Gand.218354.1.0.Pdf.” Accessed July 23, 2019. .

“Hammurabi Again.” Outlook (1893-1924) 104, no. 17 (1913): 885.

Law Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon. 1750 avant J.-C 1792. Basalte, H. 2.25 m; W. 0.65 m. Louvre. .

Liptak, Adam. “Accused of ‘Terrorism’ for Putting Legal Materials Online.” The New York Times, May 13, 2019, sec. U.S. .

“The Avalon Project : Code of Hammurabi.” Accessed July 23, 2019. .

Van de Mieroop, Marc. King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography. Blackwell Ancient Lives; Variation: Blackwell Ancient Lives. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005.

Vincent, George E. “The Laws of Hammurabi.” American Journal of Sociology 9, no. 6 (May 1, 1904): 737–754. .

What do all of these have in common?  Russian grandmothers singing while baking bread, a Ukrainian man running in a hamster wheel, Polish women seductively churning butter, rapping astronauts from Montenegro, an Irish turkey puppet, Moldovans on unicycles wearing dunce caps, an Azerbaijani man contorting in a glass case full of blowing rose petals, and an Austrian drag queen with a beard.  And the pope.  If one or more of those – other than the pope – sounds familiar, you already know exactly where we’re going and if not, hoo are you in for a ride as we explore one of the most watched annual spectacles in the world that many of you have never heard of, grounded in a truly boring and absolutely necessary document that brings together, ever so briefly, a continent in constant change, in song.

A document that changed the world: statutes constituting the European Broadcast Union, better known as “Eurovision,” first adopted in Torquay, England, 1950.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and I freely admit this episode is completely self-indulgent, but I promise there’s a document story in here too.  The EBU is one of myriad international organizations that deal with all manner of things from the World Meteorological Association to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to the International Telecommunication Union, founded in 1865 to promote cooperation for the emerging telegraphy networks and now responsible for the technical standards that allow for communication interoperation.  Countries that don’t speak to or even recognize each other’s existence – 193 in all – are members, which tells us that even if you don’t talk, you want to be able to communicate.

The ITU divides the world into regions, and any public broadcaster – think the BBC - in the European Broadcasting Area, extending broadly as far south as Egypt and west to Azerbaijan, can join the EBU.  There are currently about 6 dozen member broadcasters representing over 50 countries and another 30 or so associates in other nations including all the major American TV networks, and National Public Radio, but not PBS.  It has no connection to the European Union or any other continental organizations, and membership provides access to shared content including licensing of sporting events like the World Cup, as well as participation in technical, lobbying, and other shared expertise. 

It followed an earlier similar group, the International Broadcasting Union, founded in the ‘20s to arbitrate matters of frequency interference for radio broadcasts, which collapsed in the wake of the Second World War.  In a postwar Europe full of high-mindedness, yearning for peace, stability, and security, the EBU was intended to “serve the cause of international understanding” even though discussions over the several years leading up to its establishment were marked by Cold War suspicion, politics, and concerns about control, and thus Eastern Europe wound up with its own parallel organization which got merged in in 1999.

The statutes that constituted the EBU were signed on February 12, 1950 in the English seaside resort of Torquay, 2 weeks after Harry Truman announced the intention to build a hydrogen bomb, 4 days after the founding of the East German Stasi secret police, 3 days after Joseph McCarthy’s first speech about Communists in the US State Department, and 3 days before Disney’s Cinderella is released.  Those statutes, since revised and updated most recently in 2015, are exactly what you think they are – a couple of dozen pages of turgid legalistic prose, establishing the organization, its structure, members, rules, officers, meetings, and so on, mind-numbing to almost everybody, and also critical for the functioning of any organization particularly when something goes wrong or a crisis emerges and then everybody dives for the founding document to see what the rules are to, say, kick out a member for misbehavior or not meeting their financial obligations.

The first broadcast was later that same year, in August using a temporary and experimental microwave transmission from Calais to England.  The first major coup, probably the first international broadcast of a live event, was in June of 1953 with a relay of the coronation of Elizabeth II to France, the Netherlands and Germany.  The first officially designated “Eurovision” transmission – the name coined by a British journalist in a newspaper article and it stuck – was a 1954 broadcast featuring the Montreux Narcissus Festival parade followed by a 90 minute tour of the Vatican culminating in a Latin homily from Pope Pius XII.

OK, now we’ve got that over with.  When you hear “Eurovision,” you might immediately think “kitschy song contest that you can’t imagine anybody liking”, or “kitschy song contest you can’t imagine not loving” or, if you’re from North America, “what?”.  I speak here of the Eurovision Song Contest, by far the best known, but by no means the only, product of the EBU.  (From here on, when I say “Eurovision” I mean the contest, because who pays attention to anything else?).  The first Contest was held in 1956, in Lugano; Lys Assia won for the host Switzerland despite forgetting the words mid-song.  That, and the fact the scores have never been revealed, are among the many, many aspects of Eurovision lore pored over by hordes of fanatical Euronerds.

How to describe today’s Eurovision to those poor unfortunates yet to experience it?  The basics:  participating countries can each select a 3-minute song and artist to represent them at each year’s contest in May, hosted by the country who won the previous year.  Two semi-finals winnow the field down to a somewhat manageable 26 or so entries in the Grand Final, broadcast across Europe and around the world to an audience of 200 million, one of the most reliable audiences in the world, greater than that for the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards combined.  Entries are judged by professional juries in each of the eligible nations as well as by public televoting.  A nation’s favorite song – you can’t vote for yourself – gets 12 points, the second favorite 10 points, then 8, 7, 6, all the way down to 1, and the most points wins.  Among the signature features of the show, after all the acts are completed and voting finished, is presenters from all 40-odd countries announcing their jury votes, often in front of landmarks, fountains, cityscapes, etc, usually with some bit of excruciating business and a perfunctory “congratulations on a great show” which gets really old really fast.  “Serbia gives its 12 points to …Croatia!”

Which isn’t surprising.  Greece gives points to Cyprus and vice versa, usually with little regard to the actual song involved.  Malta gives points to the UK.  Ditto Portugal and Spain, the Nordic states, the Balkans, the Baltics, the other former Soviet countries, all based partly on geography but also on immigrant and even refugee populations voting for their homelands from abroad.  The songs must be new and can’t be overtly political, an unevenly enforced rule.  Where Eurovision goes, though, politics and controversy inevitably follow:  the Finnish entrant kissing another woman to protest the country’s same-sex marriage ban, the barring of the Russian entry from competing in Kiev after having performed in occupied Crimea, the calls for a boycott of the 2019 contest in Tel Aviv, and so on.

The most internationally famous winner, by far, was ABBA in 1974 with “Waterloo”, Celine Dion won for Switzerland in 1988 and it tails off pretty fast from there.  For a while countries were required to sing in their national language; that was relaxed in 1999 and since then at least a few entries have been in invented or nonsense languages.  Australia began broadcasting the show in 1983, in the wee small hours of the morning, and were allowed to compete as a special event for the 60^th contest in 2015 and came 5th, and now they seem to be in permanently.

One of the few things practically every European can agree on is that they want the United States to have no part whatsoever in Eurovision.  I can put their minds to rest on that score, it engenders next to no interest here – but they’re right, we would ruin it.  It’s an interesting thought experiment, though, to imagine how this might operate in an American context, say state by state; undoubtedly it would rapidly get wound up in regionalism, football rivalries, red state/blue state nonsense and it’s already too painful to consider any further.  Let’s just stay out of it and let them have their fun.

There is something delightful about a competition where teensy San Marino and ginormous Russia can compete or more or less equal footing, even though everybody knows San Marino doesn’t stand a chance, and yet they have an equal voice in how it all comes out.  This is, in fact, the largest pan-European election.  Almost every European state is represented, far more than membership in the EU or the Euro Zone.  It’s had profound impact on the continent’s music industry and to some extent beyond, but it’s also lodged firmly in the popular consciousness.  The concept of “giving 12 points” (or “douze points” as it’s dutifully repeated) is now a metaphor for full support, and the awful prospect of scoring no points at all, a complete failure, is referred to with horror as “nul points” which isn’t good French but an object of dread nonetheless.

This has all made great fodder, in recent years, for analysis of Eurovision as not only an entertainment show but also an object of study from political, historic, sociological, gender and other perspectives.  Even the “postcards”, the minute-long wordless videos showing the next act frolicking in the countryside or exploring traditional foods and crafts, while the stage sets are rapidly changed, are an object of scrutiny.

And oh my god the batshit crazy stuff that has gone on.  Everything I described at the beginning has happened, as did the Italian satire on modern Western society that involved breakdancing with a guy in a gorilla suit, the Belarus act that started with a video of a naked man howling next to a holographic wolf, and a monster-makeup heavy metal band that won for Finland in 2006.  Why?  Because Eurovision.  To be fair, though, the aforementioned Austrian drag queen, stage name Conchita Wurst sang perhaps the best Bond-movie theme song ever to win in 2014, and the 2016 winner for Ukraine retold the sad story of the Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944. 

So let’s give Eurovision its due.  Each year’s contest has some meaningless, feel-good slogan like “building bridges” or “come together” which is fine though completely eye-rolling.  And yet, for a few hours each spring, much of Europe does just that, sharing an increasingly rare common experience.  From about the ‘20s on, a radio or TV broadcast would mostly be heard or seen simultaneously; our fragmented media world seems to indicate that that might have been a temporary phenomenon lasting only a few decades.  For all the sniping about vapid songs, political voting, overblown productions and whatnot, an apolitical organization, born in a deeply political way, in a Europe that continues to struggle with national and continental identities, runs a competition that nevertheless manages to be one of the last cultural communal moments.

You’ve heard the old joke, right?  Every time a proposed simplification of the tax code circulates, so does this:  Have you seen the new tax form?  Just 2 lines.  Line 1, how much money did you make?  Line 2, send it in.  Har.  It’s one of the American rites of spring – spending weeks and months not doing or even thinking about doing your taxes, followed by the mad rush to file. Even as most of us file online, the predictable annual news stories about people parachuting into post offices to get the precious midnight postmark still sprout like tulips on April 15, the date of loathing and doom.

And the centerpiece of all this anxiety is one of the dullest and most mundane of documents, a form – one of over 2,000 forms, schedules and publications in the tax arsenal — so deeply ingrained into the national psyche that the mere mention of its number evokes fear and dread. 

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School.  Taxation is ancient.  Duh.  Early accounts are haphazard, ranging from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt who would personally tour the countryside counting cattle and collecting a share, to oddities like taxes on urine in 1^st century Rome, bachelors in 13^th century France, window glass in England, even souls (try getting out of that one) by Peter the Great.  Assessments would be taken in the form of currency but mostly in grain, animals, finished goods and frequently labor, conscripted or enslaved. It feels a bit grandiose to refer to taxes as the “price of civilization” as one tax preparer’s website says – but probably not by all that much.

The earliest American example might have been a New England “faculty tax” imposed in 1646 which vaguely resembled an income tax.  A small disagreement over taxation and representation led to a minor tiff in the 1770s now known as the American Revolution, which understandably resulted in distrust of centralized taxing power, so under Confederation, the Congress had to request funding from the states as needed.  That didn’t work, and thus the Constitution provided congressional taxing authority – about which more shortly.

In the immediate post-revolutionary period, most taxes raised were from customs duties and excise taxes on goods from spirits to sugar to bonds to slaves, proposed and overseen by Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the treasury.  The first proposal for a national tax on income was made during the War of 1812, along with houses, land, and other property; all of these were dropped in 1816 and a high protective tariff imposed to raise revenue.  The first successful implementations of income tax came during the Civil War, after other sets of revenue measures including bonds, higher tariffs, the sale of public lands and so on; President Lincoln established the Internal Revenue Service (“internal” because the revenue is coming from inside the country) in 1862.  The first round was a straight 3 percent on all incomes greater than $800 net of unspecified deductions; in 1862 the progressive income tax was introduced, peaking at 5 percent based on an intent to apply higher rates to higher incomes.  More complexities, provisions, and special circumstances were added in 1864 (rent became deductible, for example), and all such taxes were repealed between 1867 and 1872.

The next serious attempt followed the economic panic of 1893.  A colorful and acrimonious debate featuring William Jennings Bryan among others yielded a 2 percent tax on incomes over $4,000.  This didn’t last long, as it fell afoul of language in the Constitution specifying that taxes had to be “direct” and “uniform.” interpreted as being in proportion to state population, and thus the individual income tax idea was dead.

Well, not for good, as we’re reminded each spring.  Over the next 15 years, discussion and debate continued, and a coalition of progressive Republicans, Democrats, and Populists gave rise to the push for a constitutional amendment to enable what we now know as the individual income tax.  A hardcore Senate majority leader held it back for as long as he could, but once it hit the floor it passed both houses of Congress with ease; ratification started slowly with Alabama first in 1909, then by other largely southern states, picking up steam in 1911, and crossing the finish line in February of 1913. 

What became the Sixteenth Amendment is remarkable not only for its content; if you set aside the trio ratified passed during Reconstruction as a direct result of the Civil War, it was the first constitutional amendment in over a century, and was quickly followed by those establishing direct elections of senators, prohibition, and women’s suffrage. This is arguably the only period of American history where amendments came primarily from the public will rather than technical fiddling around with governmental details.  Inevitably, there are people who argue that income taxes are still illegal because the amendment was never properly ratified.  They say various states passed versions with differences in spelling or punctuation, or that it doesn’t have a repeal clause for whatever reason, or – my favorite – that Ohio wasn’t really a state until 1953 and thus its ratification shouldn’t count. Which should come as something of a surprise to those of you who live there.

Congress wasted little time and a tax bill was passed later in 1913, like most major initiatives the product of compromises, political considerations, involvement of interest groups from business to labor to farmers, covering life insurance, bad debts, shipwrecks, stock dividends, and it understandably caused great stir and cry – for something that initially affected only about 2 percent of the labor force who had to file returns that first year.

As to that first form – it’s three pages long, accompanied by a page of instructions.  Line 1 asks for “gross income,” to be calculated on page 2, line 12; line 2 is “general deductions” from page 3, line 7 and already you feel in familiar territory.  More deductions and exemptions follow, including what’s now the standard deduction, and then a graduated scale from 1 percent on incomes up to $20,000 up to 6 percent on everything over a half million, a top rate that would rise briefly to 77 percent by 1918.  At the very top, right above where it says “INCOME TAX” and the prominent reminder of the penalty for not filing on time, is the number:  Form 1040, so numbered, in a stroke of bureaucratic inevitability, because that was the next number up in IRS forms.  If you believe in omens, 1040 was the year the historical Macbeth kills King Duncan and takes his throne.

Its introduction was a big enough deal that nearly all of page 3 of the New York Times on Jan. 6, 1914, is taken up with a reproduction of the form 1,040 (complete with comma) and reprinting of the instructions.  No form 1039 seems to have survived, though 1041 is the return for estates and trusts.  The original due date of March 1 has been extended twice, based on the complexity and difficulty of filling the thing out; it settled on April 15 in 1954.  In 2018, 154 million returns were filed, 135 million of them electronically.

So yes, it’s a “form.”  The word itself, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, enters English around 1300 meaning “shape or arrangement of parts” and that’s kind of it.  Filling out (or filling in, hmmm) a form, gives the information on it shape and organization, helps it to be managed or processed.  The use of “form” in the sense of a document with blanks is first cited in Dickens’ Little Dorrit of all things, but the idea goes back to form books of legal documents in 12^th century Britain.  The use of “return” is distantly related to the report of results of English parliamentary elections, and became a statement of income or wealth for tax purposes in the early 19^th century, and of course we “file” them because once upon a time the paper forms went into physical folders and became part of our “files.”

A “form” provides the recipient with what they want and expect to see, in the order they expect to see it, and that regularity and predictability is what keeps the wheels turning, and this is about keeping the wheels turning.  You can’t process that many tax returns, or credit card transactions or insurance claims or college applications without some consistency.  Lincoln’s lawyer’s handwritten “return” for 1863 might be charming, but that just doesn’t scale to tens of millions of us.  The alternative is chaos, huge amounts of labor, and even greater susceptibility to fraud, cheating, and evasion.

Every form you fill out comes from this same motivation and necessity.  This is decidedly not the stuff of myth nor legend; no sagas or epic poems have been composed about tax gatherers, or worse still designers of forms, nor are we dealing here with the deeper mysteries of the human experience, except we kinda are. 

We all appreciate, on some level, that forms and their associated processes and structures are important, are necessary, no matter how seemingly mundane, unpleasant or tedious they might be, in anything more complicated than a village barter economy.  And so here we are:  the “price of civilization” may be in some part taxes and taxation – as well as the means and mechanisms, and forms, needed to keep it running, and keep it all together.

Would you want to live forever?  Lots of stories warn against the perils of immortality from the Greek myth of Tithonus who was given eternal life but not eternal youth, to innumerable vampire stories and even Doctor Who, and yet the idea still fascinates; what if we could somehow go on?  In a sense, we can.  In one of the oldest stories known, Gilgamesh tries in vain to become immortal only to discover the only way he can is through his works, and his name lives on thousands of years later.  So maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance for us all.

A document that changed the world: Long-playing discs containing recorded sounds and images, attached to the Voyager 1 and 2 Probes and launched into outer space, known as the “Golden Records,” 1977.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School.  Gary Flandro is a graduate student working part time at the Jet Propulsion Lab in 1965, and runs across a curiosity:  for a few months in the late 1970s, the major planets would be aligned in such a way that a spacecraft could use their gravity one after the other to slingshot around the solar system much faster than would otherwise be possible.  He plots the course – with paper and pencil – and the Voyager missions are inadvertently born.  It takes a bit of subterfuge – JPL initially got Congressional approval for a mission just to Saturn, smiled pleasantly, and then went right on building something more ambitious, certain that nobody in Washington was smart enough to notice.  They were right.

The Voyager probes themselves, marvels of technology in their time, are quite modest.  Each is the size of a small car, five years and $200 million in the building, boasting onboard computers with an impressive 4K of memory using 8-track tapes.  They included instruments to measure mass, gravitation, magnetic fields, radiation and temperature as well as images, and discovered wonders not yet imagined, like volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and water ice on Europa.  They were launched within about 2 weeks of each other in the late summer of 1977, not long after the introduction of the Apple II and TRS-80 microcomputers, the New York City blackout, the first test flight of the space shuttle Enterprise, and mere days after Elvis Presley dies.  Or does he…?

They also carry a special cargo.  Attached to each probe is a 2-sided long-playing disc of gold-plated copper, 12” in diameter, with a stylus and directions on how to play the record, etched on an aluminum protective cover electroplated with uranium 238 to aid in dating them. These were the brainchild of the extraordinary physicist and public intellectual Carl Sagan, who led the group responsible for the construction and contents of a message from Earth to the universe.

OK great – now – what do you say?  And how?  It’s hard enough some days to tell your spouse or your kids what’s on your mind, let along beings who might have an entirely different sensorium.

Sagan recalled a childhood visit to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and the time capsule buried there to be opened in 5,000 years.  His group quickly decided the only guaranteed common means of communication with an alien species would be scientific, so the 116 images encoded start with scientific concepts and symbols to establish mathematical and physical bases, then the sun and solar system.  Chemistry, biology, human anatomy and, ahem, reproduction (the silhouette of a man and pregnant woman showing the fetus inside is just weird), pictures of Earth, nature, animals and plants.  Then, us: culture, dance, sport, school, farming and fishing, eating (including one poor guy munching on what appears to be a grilled cheese sandwich for all eternity), houses, transportation, ending with a sunset and a violin.  The first image, meant to help in the decoding process, is a circle, which I don’t think the designers ever fully appreciated for its beauty, simplicity, and unity.  Predictably, there was criticism, of the whole thing, of the fact that no negative images were included, even of the idea that we might give away our position completely missing the point that the most important, if not the only, audience is we ourselves.

Many people know the discs contain music – but which music to include?  Whole pieces?  Snippets?  Of what?  How do you pick, to represent an entire species and its entire musical history?  (Hint:  You can’t.)  They chose very fine grooves and a playing speed of 16 2/3 rpm rather than 33 1/3 to double the time available, none of which will make any sense to you if you’re under 40, sorry, so there’s about 90 minutes available for everything.  We start with a Bach Brandenberg concerto, then gamelan music, Senegalese percussion, a Pygmy girl’s initiation song, Australian Aboriginal songs, and so on.  Much attention was paid to the inclusion of “Johnny B. Goode” including a Saturday Night Live sketch predicting the answer we might someday get back would be “Send more Chuck Berry.”  The Beatles agreed to include “Here Comes the Sun” but their record company didn’t.  Anybody could quibble with their choices; I concede the appropriateness of the “Queen of the Night” aria from The Magic Flute, but seriously, why nothing from The Planets?  Too on the nose?

The spoken greetings are less discussed.  An initial notion to record each head of delegation to the UN saying howdy failed for a variety of reasons, not least a desire to represent both male and female voices equally; instead people from the foreign language departments at Cornell recorded in 55 languages, allowed to say whatever they liked.  In Cantonese:  “How’s everyone?”, in Arabic, “Greetings to our friends in the stars”, in Latin, “Salvete quicumque estis = Greetings to you, whoever you are”.  We also have “Dear Turkish-speaking friends, may the honors of the morning be on your heads”, and in the Amoy dialect, “Friends of space, how are you all?  Have you eaten yet?  Come visit us if you have time.”  The UN attempt, however, triggered the political necessity to include a message from the Secretary-General, then Kurt Waldheim, who only a few years later was discovered to have had a Nazi past, which is not at all embarrassing in front of the entire cosmos.  That in turn meant that President Carter had to have his say, which along with the song of the humpback whale might make up for Waldheim.  They also squeezed in a few sounds, of weather, of footsteps, heartbeats and what one journalist believes is Sagan laughing.  An hour of his future wife Ann Druyan’s brainwaves.  And a kiss.

Naturally, Congress had to horn in with 2 very poor quality images of typewritten lists of space and science committee members, including Barry Goldwater and a bright 29-year-old Al Gore, and out of dozens of names precisely 2 women. 

This all illustrates the unavoidably political, fraught, incomplete choices that were made, by a relatively small group largely composed of well-intentioned, Western, Caucasian men, impatient with bureaucratic cupidity and small-mindedness, with limited time and resources, a grandiose vision and their own sets of preferences, lenses and blinders, which could be said of us all.  Were this project to be replicated today, no doubt the process and choices would be far different, though you have to give them credit for a sincere and earnest attempt to do the best they could. 

So, you might be asking, what kind of “document” is this?  Manifestly and literally, it’s a “record,” in both senses of the word.  Sagan was originally inspired by a time capsule, that’s another possibility, it’s also been referred to as a mixtape or a love letter, though to my mind it shares characteristics with lots of other documentary forms too: it’s a letter of introduction, it’s a scrapbook or family album, an invitation, a map, an instruction manual, a primer, a work of art, an intelligence test, both for “them” and for us I think.   It may also be the last surviving human artifact and thus perhaps an ark.  It’s all these things and more, though for me the best metaphor is a message in a bottle, likely the ultimate message in the ultimate bottle.

The Voyagers still go on, still sending back data that takes nearly 20 hours to reach Earth.  Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause, the outermost fringes of the solar system, in 2012, and is over 20 billion km from Earth, the furthest object of human construction, traveling nearly 40,000 miles per hour.  The first exoplanet wasn’t discovered until a decade later, so it’s not aimed in any particular direction, and in around 100 million years (assuming the first Star Trek movie is wrong), it will have traveled 5,000 light years, about 1/6 the distance to the center of the galaxy.

One day, by about 2025, the power sources will give out, the signals will stop, and the probes will go silent, likely without the chance for a final farewell or bon voyage.  However - barring an unlikely collision or even less likely interception, the discs will go on, more or less forever, bearing our messages, our songs, ourselves. I can’t imagine Sagan and his colleagues truly believed either of these would ever be found, let alone decoded and if so, we’ll never know it. But - bound up in the attempt is one of the most basic of human desires, to be remembered and understood.  We were here, we mattered, and we have stories to tell.

A message in a bottle is typically an act of desperation, the only way you can conceive of to get a message out.  Here, however, it’s an act of hope – and as we learned from another Greek myth, of Pandora, when all else is gone, hope remains.

Sources:

“Contents of the Voyager Golden Record - Wikipedia.” Accessed August 20, 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_Voyager_Golden_Record.

Sagan, Carl. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. New York: Random House, 1998.

—�Ĕ�Ĕ. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979.

“The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe - The New York Times.” Accessed August 20, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html?_r=0.

“The Mix Tape of the Gods - The New York Times.” Accessed August 20, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/opinion/05ferris.html.

“Voyager - Making of the Golden Record.” Accessed August 20, 2017. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/golden-record/making-of-the-golden-record/.

“Voyager - The Golden Record.” Accessed August 20, 2017. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/golden-record/.

“Voyager - The Interstellar Mission.” Accessed August 20, 2017. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/.

“Voyager Golden Record - Wikipedia.” Accessed August 20, 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record.

“Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition by Ozma Records — Kickstarter.” Accessed August 20, 2017. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ozmarecords/voyager-golden-record-40th-anniversary-edition.

“Who Is Laughing on the Golden Record? - The Atlantic.” Accessed August 20, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/solving-the-mystery-of-whose-laughter-is-on-the-golden-record/532197/.

“Why NASA’s Interstellar Mission Almost Didn’t Happen.” Accessed August 20, 2017. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/08/explore-space-voyager-spacecraft-turns-40/.