| | For the past few weeks I've been working to gather material for an upcoming post (and, dare I say, potential chapter) about Eisenhower's 'peaceful atom' initiative. The ease of gathering together articles and images led me to consider the evolving state of historical research.
It's been a whopping seven years now since I first started assembling the boxes and boxes of material now littering my office. In that early phase, my research methods were - for lack of a better word - traditional. If it was magazines I  wanted to check, it was off to the Readers' Guide. In accumulating my binders of New York Times articles, I started with the red-bound New York Times Index. From both of these catalogs, the next stop was the microfilm cabinet in the back of the first floor of Pikeville College's Allara Library, then to one of the several machines gathered in the research reading area.
It took multiple long evenings in the library to put together that first batch of research. Today, though, the same material (and actually more) can be had in just a few hours via various online databases. It's not that PC didn't have access to e-journals; indeed, I used J-Stor for almost all of my academic journal research, and ProQuest and other such services whenever paper copies of magazines could not be had. The online archives of The New York Times had yet to come into existence, so microfilm was the only option there. Having used both methods extensively, I feel qualified to point out that the online researcher is far more likely to miss some things than his or her traditional counterpart. For me at least, a big part of the fun of research lies in the discovery process. My hope is that undergraduate students (and even grad students, at this point -- jeez I feel old) will not rely solely on the new computer search tools and let the more traditional methods fall by the wayside.
Lest I sound like a porch-rocker at an assisted living facility, let me announce up front that I am pro technology. It's not as though I'm complaining about the ability to type in a few keywords and have my entire senior-year bibliography returned to me in nanoseconds. I can only imagine how much further along I would be had these capabilities existed from day one. So, I'm no Luddite. Rather, I feel the need to defend the older ways of doing things. History, after all, connects the reader and researcher with the past. This connection means much more if it is a tactile experience. Seeing an electronic transcription of a magazine article on a computer screen, for instance, pales in comparison to actually having the magaizine in its original state and being able to turn the pages. In this way, the researcher knows not only that he or she is seeing the source in unadulterated form (most online database services use OCR technology to convert old issues, and even the best OCR packages available still make the occasional mistake) but also that he or she is sharing an experience with people contemporary to the topic at hand. Since magazines and newspapers typically provide more background for research than hard data, being able to experience exactly what the original audience saw lends a far more authentic tone to the resulting history. The same holds for newspapers on microfilm vs. online texts. The online archive of The New York Times, for example, offers a wealth of information from the late 1800's forward. Researchers can type in keywords -- analogous to the red-bound indices mentioned previously -- and retrieve a list of essentially every article containing those terms. The NYT database even takes research a step further, allowing the user to access either a plain-text version of the article or an image of the original as it appeared in the paper. While this preserves some level of the experience, it still stops short of the veritable time machine of microfilm.  Yes, I just called microfilm a time machine. Microfilm takes a while to load properly, there are a number of knobs to master, and there's always the issue of bringing the screen into focus. Once those are accomplished, however, the researcher can be transported back across the decades. Why settle for just those columns containing the sought-after article when you can peruse the whole newspaper? Admittedly, this is a much slower process than pulling up the PDF file, printing it, and moving on. When it comes to establishing context, though, there is much that the PDF image of the article fails to convey. For instance, I often found in the early stages of my research that I gleaned as much information, if not more, from the stories and items surrounding whatever specific article I had originally set out to find. Seeing just that specific item gives the researcher tunnel vision of a sort. By having access to the entire newspaper, however, it was a simple matter to determine other events happening contemporaneous to the original article. This sort of information proved vital when the time came to set the stage for the historical narrative.
One last advantage lies in the process of research itself. Often, I found side-bar items or photo captions near the articles I sought that, while important and pertinent to my topic, did not contain any of the key words I had used in the index. Such finds were valuable in the obvious sense that they added to my final product, but also in providing me with additional research paths to explore. So, there you have what may be a lone voice in the wilderness amongst the current generation of historians. I certainly have yet to find the microfilm reading area of the University of Kentucky's William T. Young Library too crowded to use; in fact, I'm often the only researcher around. The computer labs are a far more popular spot. And when I do find I have company, it's often a colleague whose training dates to microfilm's heyday (note that I'm phrasing that as nicely as possible). I consider myself lucky to be among the select group whose academic career spans these two equally beneficial moments in research methodology. |
