Digital sources and ‘doing history’…
As I’m piecing together the first chapter of my dissertation (on enthusiastic hobbyists and the user communities that they formed around the VCR and other technologies in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s), I’m struck by how much easier it is to get ahold of information from certain sources than others. With a DSL line, a computer and a Cornell network ID, I have at my fingertips access to essentially every newspaper/magazine article published in the past two decades (via Lexis/Nexis), and articles from many academic journals from the same time period.
Of course, note that I said “…the past two decades.” Earlier today, for example, I wanted to quickly grab an article published in 1972. No dice.
I’ve run up against this before – a consequence of doing a lot of research on the 1970’s and 1980’s is that my work sits right on the threshhold of when things started to be digitized, meaning that sometimes it’s really easy for me to find things online, and sometimes I need to hit the archives. While that’s not so much of a logistical problem (so long as I’m near a convenient library that will let me use their collections), I’ve got to admit that digitized sources are much more user-friendly. Think of the cost in time and effort of that trip into the archives, wading through paper indices or, even worse, having to scan through months of a given newspaper on microfiche just to find one article.
Now, as historians are trained more and more in the use of digital archives, it seems likely that the accessibility of sources is going to become more and more of a factor in their research. That’s not to say that the next generation of historians will be “sloppy” or “lazy”…rather, I’m thinking that historians may increasingly be trained in the use of certain tools, and that fact that some sources aren’t accessible via those tools will change the kind of history that is done, sort of a “digital divide” within the literature (both primary and secondary).
Right now, this divide is just an issue for those of us who are working on recent history, but considering the number of initiatives I’ve seen in digital archiving, it may become more and more relevant.
UPDATE: So that my advisors don’t panic…
…here’s documented proof that I’m not just writing this thing based on a few internet searches:
For added fun, play “Count the forms of media around Josh’s desk!”…