Calculator of the Humanist response
Word processors are expanding our knowledge-base by opening up the opportunities for literary and visual exploration available to us.
In the past, we would look for specific information from specific literary sources. While this expanded our knowledge through collaboration and independent research activities, we were also limited simply by the amount of research that one person could do within a given time frame. As technologies have developed, the amount of time we have had to spend on the ‘search’ alone has decreased. The addition of indexes to printed books reduced research time; however, the simple act of adding an index is not only expected today, but seems almost insignificant in comparison to the incredible developments made in technologies in the past two decades.
“By offering multiplicity in place of a single order of paragraphs and pages, an index transforms a book from a tree into a network.” (Bolter, 2001). I continue to find an index extremely helpful when reading any number of books, including a grade 4 science or social studies textbook. I could spend an hour looking through a text for reference to a specific word or name, or I could flip to the index and find the page number(s) almost immediately. However, an index is limited to that particular text. When we look in an index, we are not given links to multiple webpages that are on the same or a similar topic. The associated text piece that is missing from paper-based texts is what the World Wide Web can offer us. “Because of its distributed architecture, the World Wide Web is highly associative.” (Bolter, 2001). Bolter points out that “…portal sites present a hierarchy of topics that is constantly changing as the Web itself changes” and at the same time, “…a search site…serves as an [sic] dynamic index for millions of web pages – an index that the user constructs on the fly by specifying a word or phrase as a ‘search string’” (Bolter, 2001). As technology develops, our entire research process is changing and we are able to access a hypertext that we could never have imagined in the past. It would be impossible to search through the number of resources that are displayed in one search engine result on a popular topic on the World Wide Web. We can be given hundreds of thousands, even millions of options, as far as search results go, and with every click of the mouse, we are given new links to follow to extend our research further and to take us in new and potentially exciting directions, “(i)f the reader chooses to follow the link, she expects that the second page will comment on, elaborate, or explain the first. (Bolter, 2001)
However, it is important to remember that not all of these search results represent legitimate sites, or reputable sources. What I like about library-based research is that there is a regulating body that controls the information coming in. In addition to this, in the past, we were forced to allow more time to research our topics thoroughly due to the fact that resources were not readily available. We had to search for texts, then search for information within those texts, then take notes on the information, organize those notes into ideas, and finally begin to write our papers on a chosen topic. Today, we are able to access information incredibly quickly and without the care and deliberation that we once researched with. In CBC’s, “The Great Library 2.0” Anthony Grafton comments during his interview that “(e)verybody is doing things at the last moment, me included, and the research we do, which was once done by piling neat stacks of copper-plate covered file cards in alphabetical order, notebooks full of handwritten pages, I have a 12 foot long shelf of notebooks which I have filled with my own handwriting in the early part of my career and that’s not how we do research anymore, and it’s not just that when I spend a summer in Europe doing research I’m sitting with a laptop typing rather than writing, it is also that though I do my main research the way I always did, reading sources systematically to find the contextual material, I can go at the last minute now and get a tremendous amount of material with a little web research…. I think there’s a tendancy for both students and faculty, and I don’t exempt myself from this at all, to do what Andrew Abbott, a sociologist at Chicago called ‘one-time research’ where you go…because the library is accessible 24/7, that’s to say it’s electronic – self is accessible that way… You fill in parts of your work very late in the process of research, compared to what you’d have done fifty years ago or twenty years ago. And this is not a good thing. I am absolutely convinced that you don’t do this as carefully and as thoughtfully as one did in the old days. If I really want to know a text, the best thing for me to do is to read it and copy most of it as I read. Think, copy, take notes, record my responses, look for sources; that’s a discipline which for me is not replaced by being able, for example, to search a text electronically.” (Kennedy, 2011).
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Maywah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved from: http://www.livemargin.com/socialbook/client/reader.html#bookId=53501759e4b091bb4f80d3db&groupId=55df0140e4b0be3444bb928b&mode=group&chunk=3&offset=1
Kennedy, P. (2011). “The great library 2.0” [Radio broadcast]. CBC. Retrieved from: http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Ideas/Full+Episodes/ID/1826242021/
Great post Mary, I totally agree. Coming back to academia after 20 years away I have found things, research included, much changed. And the intervening years have changed they way I work as well. As you say, you no longer take stacks of book out (for a limited time), or write notes on those the were “for library use only.” Notes had to be accurate, as well, as you really didn’t want to come back again. Writing essays, I used to get a poster board and stick on photocopied excerpts, notes, and pictures to represent my ideas in the order I thought they worked in, and then compose my essay. Now I do the equivalent, I guess, all on the word processor, but it is so easy to have a late idea, do a little more research, and insert something at the last minute.
On that last-minute note, I think part of the problem is that since we can do so much more electronically, we have filled our work and education lives with much more content and have higher expectations of output for ourselves and everybody else. Of course, I am as guilty as anyone of putting a project off because I know that getting the information will be easy.
Hi Mary and Mary!
For my “Histories of Comic Books” assignment for this course, I researched from the UBC library, from the Ontario College of Teachers library (uses ERIC, EBSCOhost, etc.), Google, and one afternoon I decided to go to the Toronto Reference Library and check out the stacks. I arrived, and typed in “history of comic books” into the computer and so far it felt like I was still at home on my computer. I took the elevator up to the 5th floor, found the number on the spine that I had written down and then came across several other books on my topic situated on the same shelf. I took four of 5 books and sat down at a table and began researching, and I don’t know whether it was nostalgia, but something about the process felt really good. It was also great to find texts confirming the research I had previously done online, coming across the same names (both those of the writers and of the figures in comic book history).
I don’t know if I agree that “As technologies have developed, the amount of time we have had to spend on the ‘search’ alone has decreased.” I think it has increased because there seems to be an infinite amount of information on any given topic on the Internet, where as the bookshelf is more finite. It was only after going to the library that I felt like my research was finished and I could actually start writing the thing.
Hi Mary! I really enjoyed reading your blog post! As I do with all the blog posts I read I skim until I find something that stands out to me or interests me… for this post it was your statement “As technologies have developed, the amount of time we have had to spend on the ‘search’ alone has decreased. “ At first I nodded my head in agreement, but then I actually paused to think about that for a minute to relate it to my own education experience. I went to high school in the 90’s and remember that at the beginning of high school we were still using the card catalogue to do our searches. I also remember being very frustrated when I would record a number incorrectly and then search only to find your error when you made it all the way to the stacks, or worse yet to find that the book you were looking for wasn’t there because it was already signed out. I remember when my school went digital and we could search via computer AND see whether a book was in the library or not. That was certainly a game changer in the amount of time I spent looking for resources. Throughout university I witnessed the shift of computer-based searches to online resources. And yes, for the most part searching has gotten easier and faster to a certain point. Sometimes I find that I spend more time searching through the lists that come up from a keyword search that isn’t quite what I am looking for. Is the searching easier? Perhaps, but at the same time we have access to so much more information that we have to sift through so much more in order to find what we need. I think I probably spend more time now doing searches and sifting than I did in my undergrad degree. Perhaps it is because I am looking for more specific information, or maybe I am getting pickier in what I determine to be a good source. I think maybe our efficiency in cataloguing information and our ability to access so much more information with the Internet, our time spent on “the search” has actually increased.