A Brave New World History

“We are witnessing an explosive expansion in the reproduction and distribution of the public domain sector of our textual heritage”.

“Google and other search engines are not, therefore, merely the future of scholarly discovery: they are its present.”

“One result of the growing ubiquity of the online world that is already widely evident, particularly among our students, is a blindness to the limitations of the internet generally, an often disheartening credulity about the information to be found there, and a reluctance to do the serious work among print and manuscript sources in libraries and archives that remains essential to scholarship.”

*Sigh*

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to work with hard copies. Since beginning my graduate studies I have often found myself wondering why I couldn’t have entered the field 50 years earlier. Back then, all the work was done in the stacks, and a historian could still put out a monograph about battles and “great men”. These days it seems like the only thing that anyone is allowed to do is micro histories, and  to be noticed in the field, you have to do something sensational. (See my last post for an example). The above quotes by Patrick Leary, and the article from which they are pulled, show that historians have reached a new age in scholarship. While a great many good advances have come out of this thing we call the internet, Leary also laments the “offline penumbra” that which is quickly being lost: those texts not digitized, and therefore ignored in the course of  research. I too lament this advent, and as I have often found myself thinking during this semester, I wonder, why can’t we just stick with hard copy books?

But that is not why Clio Wired exists. We need to learn to use these electronic resources. Such advances allow for faster research and more complete information. As Leary goes on to say “the vast reach of online searching is connecting people, not merely with information, but with one another, often in the most unexpected and fruitful ways.” I have to say that despite my  longing for the good old days of before I graduated high school, the prospects that new media offers are too good to pass up.