Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Patrick Leary had a terrific article in Journal of Victorian Culture in 2005 that Alexander Macgillivray just pointed out to me. It's called "Googling the Victorians," and the premise is: "Fortuitous electronic connections, and the information that circulates through them, are emerging as hallmarks of humanities scholarship in the digital age. " He's got some great examples — tracking down the meaning of an 1858 cartoon's "Remember the grotto!" caption — to make the point that "What is most striking, and often quite useful, about this sort of fishing expedition is how often the sources in which one finds a ‘hit’ are utterly unexpected." Here's another example:

...when searching for additional instances, beyond those I had found in print sources, in which the Saturday Review had been referred to by its critics’ nickname, the Saturday Reviler. Google instantly located the phrase in the following: a biographical account of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, as a favourite epithet of his associates; the short-lived 1872 periodical, The Ladies; an 1864 book about the contemporary stage magicians the Brothers Davenport; an appendix, by Richard Burton, to his 1885 edition of Arabian Nights; and a magazine account of a conversation with Frank Harris about his tenure as editor in the 1890s.

Leahy goes on:

Such experiences reinforce the conviction that the very randomness with which much online material has been placed there, and the undiscriminating quality of the search procedure itself, gives it an advantage denied to more focused research. It has been often and rather piously proclaimed (by myself, among others) that googling around the internet cannot possibly substitute for good old-fashioned library research, and this is certainly true. But we are perhaps reaching a point in our relationship to the online world at which it is important to recognize that the reverse is equally true. No amount of time spent in the library stacks would have suggested to me that any of those sources would be an especially good place to look for instances of that particular phrase, and if it had, the likelihood of actually discovering the phrase in a printed edition of any of them would have been virtually nil.

This is an excellent argument for reversing the current momentum of copyright law. Our culture benefits from having as much of this stuff searchable and available as possible. Since 19th century stuff is generally out of copyright, the Victorian scholars are in good shape, as Leahy notes. But why should our ability to research, learn and understand suddenly come to a galloping halt towards the beginning of the 20th century?