Michael Del Vecchio
September 21, 2009
When I think of how technology affects historians and their craft I am immediately reminded of a conversation I had with my father several years ago. Both of us graduated from Western, albeit several decades apart, with a degree in history. Even though we even had some of the same professors, our experiences as students of history were extremely different.
I was at home one weekend working on a paper. The paper was due on Monday, and when I arrived at home Friday afternoon I had not began research. My father was amazed, a little disappointed, but mostly confused. “How are you going to research your paper when the library is an hour a way?” he asked me. An hour later, I had a dozen journal articles on my topic printed off from the computer. In his day, he told me, such a task would have taken hours, if not days, of grinding in the basement of Weldon Library.
This story reveals a lot about how I view technology as a historian. Throughout my educational career, technology, and in particular the Internet, has acted as a facilitator. It has saved me countless hours of research time and gave me access to resources that I would have not otherwise even known existed. The story also reveals some of the potential harms the Internet can present. Far too many of my undergraduate papers were written based on resources I found based solely on availability instead of quality. This does not mean I never found quality resources online, but it does mean I overlooked potential resources because they were not available electronically. It is therefore of extreme importance that historians use the Internet to their benefit when they can, but not forget about more traditional resources that are still available.
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Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteThis is a good story that illustrates how research has changed. One thing to remember is that often with traditional resources as you call them often meant only have access to what was in print in your library. So you were often limited to the books and print journals that your library had. Which even for a place like Weldon was much fewer than today. Interlibrary loan was also a much more labourious and lengthy process. Nevertheless your point is accurate in that some students often overlook more traditional resources.