The creation of the World Wide Web thirty years ago led some of the walls of the ivory tower to start crumbling. At the time, doing serious reading in an academic field was almost impossible if you didn’t have an affiliation with a major research university, or live near a major public research library. In the early 1990’s, a woman I know got a job as an Assistant Professor teaching French history at the University of South Dakota. When she first walked into its library, she told me, she felt like bursting into tears. The entire French history section occupied less than an arm’s length of a single shelf. Today, however, thanks to Google Books and similar projects, everyone in the world with an internet connection has access to many times the number of books available in even the largest research libraries thirty years ago, including a very high percentage of the books in major Western languages that are now out of copyright. More and more archives are putting material online as well. Yes, the coverage is much less good in some non-Western areas, and yes, many important digital collections remain behind steep paywalls. But complaining about these very real and important problems without giving due appreciation to the miracle—yes, the miracle—of what digitization has already accomplished is a pretty spectacular form of purist carping.
A fascinating and thought provoking piece. AI, which is just entering the field, will likely complicate things further. Podcasts are great, but their sheer number is overwhelming. As for X and Tik Tok, not so sure. They can promote, but the meaning of number of views and shares is not good measure of impact, unless you can of course pick a fight with some celebrity.
Thanks, Doron! I agree!
A fascinating and thought provoking piece. AI, which is just entering the field, will likely complicate things further. Podcasts are great, but their sheer number is overwhelming. As for X and Tik Tok, not so sure. They can promote, but the meaning of number of views and shares is not good measure of impact, unless you can of course pick a fight with some celebrity.