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I just looked at a good graduate essay on the antebellum United States. The high point was the student’s use of a 1950 Church History article by Ralph Gabriel on Christianity and romanticism. His thesis intrigued my student, who had a good time with it.
I actually don’t know how Tim found it. Perhaps it was a reference from one of his readings. Still, it struck me that one of the subtle but very real benefits of the shift from journals on shelves to journal databases like JSTOR is that students have the “wisdom of the ages” tossed at them in a manner that minimizes somewhat the tyranny of recent historiography. A 1950 article that seems strong gets a fairer hearing than I and most of my grad student colleagues would have given it back in the late 1980s.
Has anyone notice anything similar? Does database searching undermine the questionable sense that current history must be better than old history?
One of the problems associated with reading articles online rather than from serried ranks of bound volumes is that it is easy for students to ignore the way that debates and methods move over time. Every contribution to a field exists in an eternal now. This does allow old work to be rediscovered, but it also allows fundamental changes in a field to be obscured.
However, it is not clear that every successful historian believes that it is necessary to pay attention to changes in the writing of history, either in a particular field or in general methodology.
I recently read the first book of a historian who thought that Ranke was the most pertinent work on a field. In consequence, the author read diplomatic correspondence just as Ranke did, as though it was transparent and disinterested. No interpretation was required.
To my mind, this vitiated the entire argument, because the self-interested view of their own success that the ambassadors wanted to convey to their monarch was read as reality. A more critical reading of the reports as rhetorical would have produced a completely different story.
Some historians would hesitate to place a promising graduate student with someone who exhibited no interest in either theory or practice, and no familiarity or engagement with historical writings of recent decades. This might be a mistake. I note that the author now has tenure in a major department of history and won a prize for the book in question.
Rob MacDougall -
11/15/2005
Nothing will ever replace browsing the stacks, and it makes me sad the more places restrict that, but there may be possibilities for new kinds of digital serendipity as the technology gets better. Imagine if every time you checked out a (digital) article or book you got access to all the notes that other people took while using it and the ideas and sources it led them to. Or if every book linked to a blog/Wikipedia-like conversation about it?
I like to think that the level functionality we currently accept in digital searching will be looked upon by future generations as appalling.
David Weinberger, of Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, had a nice if very brief piece on the possibilities of metadata in the Boston Globe yesterday.
Rob MacDougall -
11/15/2005
One of the great things about my postdoc at the American Academy last year was the appreciation it gave me for old historians. We interacted with a lot of retired academics there, and it was funny how often we found ourselves in agreement with them. (Often the subject we agreed on was our disagreement with the generation of scholars directly between us, but I digress.)
Oscar Chamberlain -
11/15/2005
John,
I just emerged from a 3 hour class. Thanks for the laugh!
John H. Lederer -
11/14/2005
Google has been a Brobdingnagian time sink for me. Every search for even the simplest thing has ended up with many unexpected and alluring hits enticing one unendurably...
This weekend my wife made ginger snaps. She used a very old recipe and wondered whether the recipe meant ground, powdered, or fresh ginger. Google would find the answer easily I thought:
Did you know that you can make ginger ale at home?
Did you know that ginger is derived from a sanskrit word?
That ginger is the rhizome of a reed?
That Edward Ginger is an Australian artist who makes modern scuplture that evokes Indonesia
That "Ginger's Diary" has a first hand personal account of the bombing of Hickham field?
....
The problem is not a small one. Fortunately Karen went ahead on her best guess and the snaps were great.
Stephen Tootle -
11/14/2005
I am thumping my desk in agreement.
Rebecca Anne Goetz -
11/14/2005
The online card catalog at my alma mater (Bates College in Maine) had a "nearby on the shelf" feature. If you clicked, you got a graphic representation of books nearby on the shelf, duplicating digitally the serendipity of finding things on the shelf. It was a neat feature, but I don't think they kept it.
I've had plenty of web-based serendipity in my researches. An America: History and Life keyword search can lead on to the unexpected and the useful!
Lastly, I like older stuff. I like to say my dissertation began when I read Oscar and Mary Handlin's 1950 article "The Origins of the Souther Labor System."
Oscar Chamberlain -
11/14/2005
I agree that nothing replaces serendipity in the stacks. That's true for books, journals, everything. I do think that there are unique sources of serendipity in the online world--as you have noted--and that from their uniquness, something good can come.
Postscript: Back around 1990, I remember someone making a similar argument about the replacing of the card catalog with a computerized one. He suggested that there would a loss of the serendipity of seeing other titles near the one you were hunting for.
That's propbably true for some, but my thumbs always wanted to tumble cards in bunches. And while balancing note pad and over-stuffed card drawer on one of the pull-out shelves probably improved my dexterity and balance, it was at the cost of numerous sub-vocalized obscenities.
Oscar Chamberlain -
11/14/2005
I think Ralphj's point is a good one. In some fields one really wants the latest schoarlship. Native American history has been revolutionaized since the 1960s because of changes in methodology and in cultural assumptions. Because of the new archival material available, study of the Cold War has also changed radically. In both areas--the Cold War especially-- some earlier material retains utility, but all else being even the newer scholarship will be more solid.
On the other hand, there are some topics that have not received much recent attention and many historians fifty years back or more who were simply very good.
Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs -
11/14/2005
I don't think anything online can match the discovery that sometimes happens when you open a book that was near to the one you wanted, just because you wonder what's preserved behind the unlabelled 16th-century binding. (Generally you get a load of theology, but not all of that is trite and tedious, and sometimes there's something different and quite surprising.) But open stacks are harder and harder to find. The Amazon comments about what other people found interesting can be useful at a secondary level - nonetheless, someone else got there before you, rather recently, and your perception is limited by the mental jumps they already made. More useful is to do a topical search in the online catalogs of the Library of Congress, Harvard, and the British Library. The problem of too much material must make it difficult to find and identify significant earlier scholarship for people who study the 19th century and later (although in American social history one should expect a student to know whatever appeared in any journal of the standing of Church History, the example Oscar mentioned, just as is true for the American Historical Review and several others). I can't easily imagine that personally scanning bound sets of pre-1900 periodicals, such as Harper's or newspapers, for items contextually related to the matter being studied will be replaced by an online activity.
Ralph E. Luker -
11/14/2005
I would guess that it varies from field to field whether it is really professionally safe to ignore a body of historical literature prior to 1980, Manan. On the other hand, one of my reactions to Oscar's observation that mid-20th century American intellectual history was marked by a distinct divergence of quality in what it produced. I doubt that Perry Miller will be surpassed in what he published. On the other hand, my sense is that Ralph Gabriel and a number of others publishing at that time produced fairly superficial work that will be of only historiographical interest. We really don't any longer turn to Gabriel or Merle Curti to understand the pragmatists, for example.
John H. Lederer -
11/14/2005
Do you think that features that Amazon has ("readers who liked this also liked..," , "similar books", "goes better with","reader suggested lists" etc.) offers something akin to the propinquity experience of a paper library? Will these features, or something resembling them, make it into computerized academic resources?
What computer features might make "directed serendipity" work for research?
Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs -
11/14/2005
Of course Oscar's question has to do with use of online articles, whether or not this particular student did. I don't use the computer for the texts of articles; a good library is five minutes' walk from my house so I revisit the stacks. And much of what I work with is unpublished archival material. The computerization of library catalogues has been very helpful for identifying publications not available locally, but even so, the kind of loss that using a computerized catalog involves must also occur when online articles are located and used. That's the obvious loss of missing everything on either side of the item sought, whether books on the nearby shelves (or near in a card catalog), or articles in the same issue of a journal. It's a loss of broadening context. and not entirely random, since the books at least are sorted to be in generally related areas, unless the library is still shelving by size of binding or date of acquisition. The research advantages of online articles are obvious, in terms of convenience of availability especially if one doesn't have a good library nearby. But the disadvantage of restricting chance insight and discovery may be less noticeable yet still important.
Marc A. Comtois -
11/14/2005
Oscar, my tactic is actually the reverse of yours. I start from earliest and move forward to get a handle on the evolving historiography of the topic. Very structured, I know, but it works for me. JSTOR and electronic searching facilitates this method. Incidentally, it also makes me predisposed to accepting earlier interpretations and less "open" to "new" interpretations (say, from 1950!). In short, I guess I put myself in a postion where I have to be convinced that the newer take is indeed "better."
Oscar Chamberlain -
11/13/2005
Jeremy
Both good points. I had considered your first point as possible and actually suggested that in my posting. Nor would I rule out the second. He's a good student.
What motivated my posting was memories of my own article searches as a doctoral student--particularly when the search involved a topic new to me and I had little guidance. I simply assumed that the first priority was to know the most recent scholarship and then to work backwards as I could. So I moved from the present back. Generally, that was rewarded, though I have no reason now to think that another approach would not have been rewarded.
Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs -
11/13/2005
If you don't know how your student found a journal article from 1950, why do you assume he found it by computer and not by a footnote reference in a book that might have led him to the journal on the shelf? And why do you think your student didn't have the sense to look for relevant articles by standing in the stacks and reading at least the tables of contents of all the back issues of major journals in his field back to ca. 1900?
Manan Ahmed -
11/13/2005
i tend to not look at anything published since 1980. JSTOR is a lifesaver in that regard. :)
Grant W Jones -
11/13/2005
There is a lot of great stuff buried in the back issues of "old" journals.
The issue is also attitude. I just received a B.A. in history this last May. I was a "returning student," i.e. an old fart tired of working for living.
Many of my much younger peers in the history program seemed to have a prejudice against older works of scholarship. For them, anything written before the 1980s was "dated" and not worth bothering with.
I hope this isn't a common view of either undergrads or grad students.
