Just about than decades ago, historians had to fly for miles or spend large amount of time in libraries, going through mountains of archives in order to retrieve a single piece of information. However, today and at this exact moment, a historian or a non-scholar some where sitting on a bed and wearing pajamas can go through an unimaginable amount of historical archives; moreover, interact directly with other people who are sharing the same interest with him/her. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau.
Through the help of various web-search engines, a historian can get exactly what he/she wants by just typing a key word or sentence of the subject he/she want to get information about. “The way to make progress is to have more data.” Peter Norvig (video lecture). As the years are passing by, technology is getting more and more sophisticated, more and more data are being made available on the web every second. I believe that future historians and other scholars in general will be less likely to make effort in order to get information from primary sources documents. The abundance of data on the web will gradually keep on catching historians and scholars' attention and gradually redefine how future research will be conducted. Although, like Patrick Leary, I believe that digitized material will never replace the value, essence, and significance of actual historical materials. Nonetheless, those primary document will become less and less consulted because of their easy online accessibility. “This basic model for interacting with a text is simple enough, and so long as the number of online Victorian texts has been various but limited, most scholars have found this sort of searching and reading an occasional convenience, but hardly a fundamental challenge to their way of working with the period's primary sources. What will make that difference is not simply the ubiquity of the internet, or our students' (and our own) ingrained reliance upon it, but the sheer scale of what is coming online”(Leary, 2005, p77). Furthermore, “Search engines present, after all, a quite peculiar way of interacting with groups of texts; literal-minded, they bear out the old warning about being careful what you wish for” (Leary, 2005, p80). Historians and others scholars would have to keep in mind that more data could means more garbage. It is the historians' responsibility to deeply scrutinize their online material and strongly vet their sources. “The offline penumbra is that increasingly remote and unvisited shadowland into which even quite important texts fall if they cannot yet be explored, or perhaps even identified, by any electronic means”(Leary, 2005, p82).The new media is and will be the reason why many books and historical materials will go quite for a long time in some building's basement. It doesn't matter whether you advocate for the new media or not, but one reality is that, it changes us, our culture, “The conventional wisdom” , and above, the new media changes reality itself.
References
Leary, Patrick. 2005. "Googling the Victorians."Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 1: 72-86. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 3, 2010).
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&hid=8&sid=f271b9a3-896f-42c0-8501-1f087c66858a@sessionmgr12http://www.catonmat.net/blog/theorizing-from-data-by-peter-norvig-video-lecture/
American Council of Learned Societies (2006), Our Cultural Commonwealth.
http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/OurCulturalCommonwealth.pdf
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig; No Computer Left Behind; Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 24, 2006. http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=38
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I'd like to raise a point about your and Leary's concern/consignment that historians will increasingly no longer work with the primary documents. I believe what is the issue is that historians will no longer use these primary documents in the same way. They'll be able to prowl their contents for distinct phrases, locate repeated words or phrases in multiple works, compare various editions of histories/stories, etc, through the use of these digital databases. I've found, in my opinion, that the traditional "grunt-work" associated with historical research is becoming a thing of the past.
ReplyDeleteI concur that there is value in traditional archival/library research. However, I grow frustrated with this general assumption that it is inherently a superior method of research or irrevocably makes you a better historian. In my mind, I view this as the beginnings of a generational shift, a rite of passage slowly being left behind in the past. Certainly, I'm gazing into the crystal ball a bit here. Nevertheless, I fail to see the difference between pouring through boxes of correspondence in an archive and navigating search results from Google. Both activities require the same critical eye. Why is one considered inherently better than the other?
I love your image of the pajama clad researcher. It is a great portrayal of the ease and comfort that the Internet revolution has made in our lives. New tools expand the access of precious sources that wouldn't be able to be accessed otherwise.
ReplyDelete