Navigating world history is an ambitious but limited goal, one quite distinct from the unattainable aim of "mastering" the topic. No one can learn all of world history. Anyone who pursues such a goal is sure to become lost. To strike an analogy, all those who have attempted to conquer the world have failed, but many of those who have traveled the globe have gained pleasure and expanded their understanding. (x)
I originally intended this forewarning as a way of managing expectations. I figured the students wouldn't be so disappointed in me when they found out that one consequence of taking on the history of everything from the Big Bang to human extinction is that the sum of the prof's knowledge asymptotically approaches zero. The students, however, seem to be taking my relative ignorance in stride, and the quote has mostly served to console me when I have to leave some stuff out of my lectures.
I was reminded of navigation the other day when I met with a PhD student who is close to finishing her doctorate and thinking about her second project. She wants to do something with digital sources but is having a hard time getting her bearings. Our conversation made me realize that I didn't have a single-page "getting started" guide for people who have never seriously worked with online sources. So here it is.
1. You won't be able to read everything. In fact, new material on your topic will appear online faster than you can read it. The longer you work on a topic, the more behind you will get. It's OK, because everyone faces this problem whether they realize it or not.
2. The first tool you should master is the search engine. Most people think that typing a word or two into the Google or Yahoo! search box is all that you need to know. Not so! First of all, search engines have an advanced search page that lets you focus in on your topic, exclude search terms, weight some terms more than others, limit your results to particular kinds of document, to particular sites, to date ranges, and so on. Second, different search engines introduce different kinds of bias by ranking results differently. You get a better view when you routinely use more than one.
3. You should have a strategy for information trapping. An explicit search is something that you do once, but the web is constantly changing. By using RSS feeds it is possible to set up a number of searches that run automatically and provide you with a constantly updated view of your subject. You can learn more about the technique in Tara Calishain's Information Trapping.
4. You can organize citations right in your browser. Until you start doing advanced work in digital history, you will access almost all of your online sources through your web browser. If you use Zotero, you can keep track of those sources in your browser, too. It really speeds up the research process.
5. It is possible to automate the process of downloading sources. There are a number of tools that make it easy to grab large batches of online sources without having to download them one at a time. In the Firefox browser, for example, you can use something like DownThemAll. Another option is GNU Wget.
6. The web is not structured like a ball of spaghetti. A lot of the most interesting information to be gleaned from digital sources lies in the hyperlinks leading into and out of various nodes, whether personal pages, documents, archives, institutions, or what have you. Search engines provide some rudimentary tools for mapping these connections, but much more can be learned with more specialized tools.
7. Assume that what you want to know is out there, and go looking for it.
Tags: digital history | history education | pedagogy
