Googling the Archive: Digital Tools and the Practice of History

Abstract

This article argues the digital tools and search environments that increasingly support historical scholarship in rhetoric and composition have material and epistemological implications for how we discover, access, and make sense of the past. In light of these changes, I suggest that more explicit reflection and discipline-specific conversation around the uses and shaping effects of these technologies is needed. Tracing my own digitally enabled search for information about an early-twentieth-century advice writer named Frances Maule, I describe how mass digitization has shifted conditions of findability. I conclude by outlining a heuristic for critical reflection—a “principle of proximity”—and urging rhetoric and composition historians to take a more active role in shaping the emerging landscape of digital research.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Donna LeCourt, Christa Olson, and Amy Wan for their feedback in response to drafts of this article at various stages, and Christa Olson once more for organizing the 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication panel that led to this special issue.

Notes

1. This number has been called into question by some critics. See Stokes (2010).

2. I mean physical reorientation in the quite literal sense: Digital research allows us to undertake types of inquiry while sitting before our computers that used to happen by other means. Although it's not possible to peer into our own brains, Nicholas Carr (2010) further suggests that routine activities (such as reading and conducting research in digital environments) may reshape the anatomy, the wiring, of the brain itself.

3. I am particularly thinking of Bruno Latour, for whom objects can be “participants in the course of action,” and social action can be “shifted or delegated to different types of [non-human] actors which are able to transport the action further” (2005, 70–71).

4. The use of computing in libraries and scholarly research is not a recent event; libraries have made use of databases since at least the 1960s or 1970s, and more routinely since the 1980s when the development of the microcomputer made it easier to make these databases more widely available to students and faculty. It has been only in the last decade, however, that developments in the area of mass digitization have enabled digital search on such an unprecedented scale. I will not attempt here to rehearse the many conversations about technology that have unfolded in the past 25 or so years, which we can learn from but which have tended to happen in other forums or other specializations, like those previously mentioned as well as library and information sciences, technical communication, and new media and hypertext studies.

5. More recently, Kirsch and Royster used the term strategic contemplation to similarly describe scholars’ reflections on their own research as a “lived process” (2010, 656–657).

6. The four books are She Strives to Conquer (1937, reprint of 1934 edition), The Road to Anywhere (1938), Girl with a Pay Check (1941), and Careers for the Home Economist (1943).

7. Heterodoxy was a radical New York–based luncheon and debate club for women whose members were mainly educated professional women, many of whom lived in New York City's Greenwich Village. The club was founded in 1912 by the suffragist and former-Unitarian minister Marie Jenney Howe, who chose the name “Heterodoxy” because the only requirement for being a member was that one's thinking not be orthodox.

8. As Latour explains, “black box” is a term “used by cyberneticians whenever a piece of machinery or a set of commands is too complex” (1987, 2–3). Rather than represent that complexity in all of its detail, they “draw a little box about which they need to know nothing but its input and output” (1987, 3). For Latour, a black box can be any technology or idea whose original complexities are covered over by familiarity and acceptance.

9. More information about the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) can be found at http://dublincore.org.

10. Two examples of well-known projects that involve data visualization are the Republic of Letters project at Stanford, which is suggestive of ways that we might think about studying circulation (https://republicofletters.stanford.edu), and the Google Ngram Viewer (http://books.google.com/ngrams) and culturomics projects (Bohannon 2011). For an introduction to “big data” projects in English studies, see Hayles (2009), particularly her discussion of “reading” and scale.

11. An earlier version of Nunberg's Chronicle article is posted at his own blog; the reader comments there are enlightening, particularly the lengthy response posted by Jon Orwant, manager of the Google Books metadata team.

12. Bizzell's discussion of emotion in feminist historical research (2000, 12) is relevant here.

13. I use terms like identify and select advisedly here: part of what my own experience with Frances Maule illustrates is that processes of identifying and selecting may require, and thus be distributed across, numerous interactions with the archive. In one sense, my “selection” of Maule happened when I found the 1944 bibliography and decided to request one of her books; in another, it happened when I finally decided I had enough information to make her worth writing about.

14. Dan Cohen is director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; he is well known for his work in digital history and digital humanities, which includes books (e.g., Digital History), articles, blogging, podcasts, and the development of digital tools for humanists (e.g., Omeka, Zotero).