Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

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I ended up spending several days in the basement of the New York Academy of Medicine filling out the faculty data from the gargantuan collection of medical school announcements they had.

But remember, the humanities were subsequently vastly enriched by disassembling precisely that definitive text. Ces cookies partagent votre comportement sur notre site web avec des parties externes, afin que vous puissiez voir des publicités plus pertinentes de Club sur des plateformes externes.

But serious scholars, who want their work to stand the test of time, will appreciate Abbott’s unique, forthright approach and relish every page of Digital Paper .

I thought, ‘wow that’s brilliant’, but then I sadly also thought ‘he can do that because he’s Andrew Abbott’. They have no idea they need to comprehend Hobbes’s argument, and then respond to the argument, not to the bits from which it’s made. You show how a complex project would get rolling and feed and build and coalesce into a successful article or monograph. Every day he slogged through data on finches in the Galapagos, on the results of cattle-breeding, and so on.He’s also a fan of high-quality bibliographies, which can be out of date but still have a better signal to noise ratio than the Internetz.

But he’s also produced practical pieces about how students and professors develop ideas, and how to have new ones. That course, like this book, has immediate appeal across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. I can remember sitting in the second floor of the Regenstein Library for about three months, over on the east side, filling out a one-page form on every psychiatrist or neurologist I could locate in Who’s Who in American Medicine for 1925.And 450,000 items over 2,920 days means that more than 150 times a day some scholar found something he or she wanted to charge on the shelf—not in storage. The digital knowledge paradise is vulnerable to a thousand kinds of subversion that printed books—in multiple unalterable physical copies—are not. I don’t think Abbott completely sold me on paper files, but he did sell me on project-specific files.

My students [at the University of Chicago] today are completely overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that’s available to them on the internet, and they’re particularly overwhelmed because they don’t have any clues about how to make judgements of quality. You don’t need to memorize the entire Bible - but you do need to know the important names because then, if you’re reading it, the entire page will ‘turn blue’ like hyperlinks.And the experiential message of the internet is that everything has an address somewhere, you just need to find it, you just need an address. I proved this by looking at Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and showed that when the book first came out, about 17% of the references to it had page numbers - so not just Kuhn 1970, but Kuhn 1970, page 26. When you are doing brute force, actually doing the stuff, you can’t afford to let your theoretical mind run. Now it may very well be true that I would have gotten as many insights if I had only gone through half that much data. Well, that isn’t the way knowledge works, and we’re actually in a bigger crisis about this, than about libraries.