Arthur: What does it say? Ford: Harmless. Arthur: What? Is that all it's got to say? One word! Ford: Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, a

Arthur: What does it say? Ford: Harmless. Arthur: What? Is that all it's got to say? One word! Ford: Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only so much space in the book, and no one knew much about the Earth of course. I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement. Arthur: What does it say now? Ford: Mostly harmless. I think this History Today essay by Alexander Lee is about "marginal discourse". Things start off recorded in excruciating detail, then refactored through history like Chinese whispers. Boiled down, eventually into a set of snappy aphorisms and sound-bites, at each stage something gets filtered. Some things get amplified, some get omitted, some get distorted. Marginal hermeneutics is analysis, much like the model in signal processing where if you know a source and final signal you can infer the parameters of the intervening filters [1]. Instead we ask, what kind of writers, societies and norms did this narrative pass through to end up this way? By doing so one might work out which voices were off-centre by observing which ideas get filtered. It is a more sophisticated version of "History is written by the victors", instead there's a long chain of victors, revisionists, reinterpretations and exaggerations. [1] this is how speech analysis and synthesis works