Over the summer of 2004, I took a class at the University of Pennsylvania on “The Indian Ocean in World Trade”. The bibliography of my final paper, on the Parsee minority of the city of Bombay during the early years of British colonial rule, lists eleven sources, only one of which was found online. During the spring 2008 semester at the University of Massachusetts, I took Sigrid Schmalzer’s ”History of Popular Science” course. The bibliography of my final paper, on the Ancient Astronaut theories of Erich von Daniken, lists twenty cited sources… ten of which I downloaded from the internet. A brief look through the files reveals notes from three other sources on the Parsees which did not make it into the paper, all copied from secondary works in the stacks of the UPenn library… and fifteen printouts of newspaper articles, JSTOR files, and webpages that did not make the cut for the Ancient Astronauts.
It also reveals that I have an unfortunate tendency not to ever throw anything away.
In just a few years, I seem to have adopted the internet as a primary research tool, in just the way that Patrick Leary outlines in the article “Googling the Victorians”– Google and JSTOR have become my “first port of call” when looking for information on any variety of topics, with Wikipedia not far behind for general ”common knowledge” information. I see this as the main effect the internet has had in the recent past, and probably will have in the near future– as a repository of source information, readily and speedily accessible. That is not to say that I dismiss other aspects of digital technologies we have discussed in weeks past, such as the use of the medium to foster “shared authorities”, or the ways in which the interaction of both amateur and professional historians serve to re-articulate academic and cultural heirarchies– just that I, personally, still view the internet as more a “tool” than an “epistemology”.
Some of this may be generational– I certainly never adopted the use of an electronic calculator in my early mathematics classes– in point of fact, I never had the chance, since I was mostly done with math before calculators became de rigeur. But I do question statements such as Rosenzweig and Cohen’s that “most people quickly realized that providing calculators to students freed them up to work on more complex and important aspects of mathematics.” My father, for example, who learned to perform higher-order functions using a slide rule in the 1950s, has a more natural understanding of the concept of “magnitude” than many younger engineers who have learned their mathematics calculator-in-hand. Because of examples like his, I tend to find the thought of automatic relational programming (such as outlined in the Norvig lecture) unsatisfactory in a pedagogical sense– if the relationships or translations are handed to you, will you really learn to make them yourselves? Will a student be able to make connections and relations on his own, if deprived of the technologies he has grown accustomed to? Adopting and using new technologies in our work is something we should do, certainly– but we should not let the technology drive the scholarship.