eNemy At The Gates

If you want to see an entertainingly polarized debate among a lot of historians - or academics in general, but it seems historians in particular lately - you need do no more than invoke online sources. Particularly in the context of assignments, those two words tend to result in a couple of common reactions:

1. "It's an online source. So what? They're just as good as conventional ones."
2. "Online sources are intrinsically bad should never ever be used."

Of course there's others, but most of the time I've discussed the idea I've heard variants of those. I'll wax provocative for a moment and suggest that exhibiting either opinion likely shos a certain, perhaps conscious, lack of thought on the issue. Both views are highly problematic and not questioned often enough, which is where I'm going to try to come in tonight. I'm mainly going to focus on the latter claim with tonight's article - it is by far the more commonly-heard one. (Before doing so, I will cheerfully say that I consider automatic trust of Web sources to be at least as silly as automatic trust of AM talk radio, or perhaps the Weekly World News.)

There are usually a few, pretty predictable arguments presented when people argue for an automatic rejection or disdain of online sources. I'm going to address the most common ones I've run into, in order from most to least absurd. (I'm not going into arguments which go so far as to dismiss government or university sources for being online; that, I hope, is too self-evidently ridiculous to warrant refutation.)

Objection the First: "It's too difficult to track down references. You can't cite Web pages as specifically as you can books or other materials: there's no page numbers!" The crux of this argument is that online sources are not print sources - duh - and therefore are too difficult/unreliable/etc to source to bother citing, because of inconsistent layout and the fact that it may not be immediately obvious where one may get all the information needed to do a proper, full citation. A number of simple solutions exist here. If all the information isn't there, then that's fine; it's not your fault if the specific author or organization behind a Web site isn't explicit enough, for instance, provided most of the information (and the location itself) are there. As far as citing specific parts of a site, of course Web sites aren't going to have page numbers. They aren't books. I don't see a problem here. On the other hand, most sites out there - and all more static media like PDFs - are organized into small enough chunks that you can usually narrow down a cite to a moderately specific page. (They're also often equipped with anchors, which are great in properly-designed sites.) If one can't due to a large block of text, browsers come equipped with search functions for a reason, at least if one's simply concerned with confirming that the information's there.

There is a real problem with some aspects of online sources. "Deep Web" materials - material which is usually procedurally generated, only accessible in its specific form through cookies, searches or other forms of interaction, and so on, are considerably more difficult to get a hold of. As if that wasn't bad enough, they're growing: the Deep Web is hundreds of times larger than the "surface" one right now. There will have to be mechanisms to deal with this in time; handling them on a case-by-case basis is a bare minimum, however. I'm not convinced at the desirability of rejecting an entire field because of some slight inconvenience.


Objection the Second: "Just anyone can put up a Web page!" Oh ho! Yes, this is true - and so what? If you believe it's difficult to have a particularly absurd piece of work show up in book form - or, in the right circumstances, appear as a published article in an academic journal - then I have a bridge I'd like you to consider buying. This argument doesn't impress me at all, mainly because its main underlying assumptions - that "just anyone" can put something online, and that "real" repositories can effectively prevent people from getting their crackpottery in among them - are both flatly untrue.

Another implication of this claim bothers me considerably more. It is the claim, sometimes explicit but usually not, that the identity of a person making an argument has some bearing on the quality of the argument itself - or, indeed, is more important than said argument. This is a contemptible idea, built around a set of logical fallacies that all but the most sophistric freshmen are usually aware of. If we are talking about a world of debate and scholarship - and even amateurs can engage in either! - then these arguments should rise or fall on their own merits. An historical stance should be effective regardless of its creator, provided it stands up to scrutiny - but using its creators' identity as the sole point of that scrutiny is not an appropriate way to handle such things. The identity of a person can influence an argument to a point - after all, consistently good (or bad) arguments can imply more of either in the future - but in the end the effectiveness of a stance should be determined by, well, its effectiveness, and not its creator.

With that in mind, I also think it's fantastic that it's easier for people to put information up for all the world (or at least a specific subset of it) to see. The amount of lousy history - and economics, and science, and art, and recipes - will go way up as a result, but there's room for the good stuff as well. We shouldn't ignore the latter because of the presence of the former, any more than we should shun good archaeologists because von Daniken ostensibly published in the field. We're dealing with a medum here which allows people to do end runs around the gatekeepers for various fields. So what if things get somewhat nuts and over-varied as a result? Personally, I want to embrace the chaos.

Objection the Third: "Online material isn't peer-reviewed and therefore shouldn't be used." While this is often used synonymously with #2, above, it is a distinct complaint, and the only one of these three which I don't see as enirely without merit. While the first two complaints are ones of mere style or elitism, this is an issue of quality control. While the lack of (obvious) peer review - detailed criticism and corroboration by a handful of experts in a specific field - is indeed a problem, it is one which provides some good opportunities for the readers both lay and professional to hone some abilities.

A huge component of the discipline of history, on the research side of things, is the notion of critical examination of sources. Note that this is not the same as merely rejection them! We are taught to look with a careful, hopefully not too jaundiced, eye at any source or argument with which we are presented, keeping an eye out for both weaknesses and strengths. The things to which historians have applied this have diversified dramatically in the last several generations, moving out of libraries and national archives and accepting - sometimes grudgingly, sometimes not - everything from oral traditions to modern science to (as in public history) popular opinions and beliefs about the issues of the day or the past. It's a good skill, and probably a decent chunk of why people with history degrees tend to wind up just about everywhere despite the expected "learn history to teach history" cliche (which, of course, I plan to pursue, but hey!). Online sources shouldn't get a free pass from this - but they should not get the automatic fail so many seem to desire either.

To one point or another, we are all equipped with what Carl Sagan referred to in The Demon-Haunted World - find and read this - as baloney detection kits - a basic awareness of what may or may not be problematic, reliable, true or false about anything we run into in day-to-day affairs. There's semi-formal versions of it for different things, but to one level or another even the most credulous of us have thought processes along these lines. It's a kit which needs to be tuned and applied towards historical sources online - just like all other sources - and in a far more mature way than the rather kneejerk pseudoskepticism which is common these days.

(I compiled a sample BDK for evaluating online resources a couple of years ago as part of my TAing duties at SMU; once I'm back home for the holidays I intend to try to dig that up and I'll follow up with this post by sticking it here.)

The reflexive dismissal of sources of information based entirely on their media is not just an unfortunate practice. It involves a certain abdication of thought, of the responsibility to at least attempt to see some possibility in any source out there, even if it doesn't share the basic shape and style of academic standards. Besides, as I mentioned earlier, there are opportunities in this as well. The nature of online soruces isn't simply the "problem" that someone else didn't do our work for us, pre-screening them for our consumption ahead of time. Their nature is such that it underscores the fact that we need to be taking a more active role in this anyway. For the basic materials out there, it's far easier to vet for basic sanity than many might think - I did effectively show a room full of non-majors how to do it for historical sources in an hour, anyway - and giving everyone a little more practice in this sort of thing can't exactly hurt. In other words, we need to approach online sources with a genuine skepticism.

But guess what? This whole thing's just a smokescreen for a larger issue anyway. We're willing, indeed eager, to hold varying degrees of skepticism towards online sources, but why are we singling them out? Why the complacency as regards citations of interviews, of magazine articles, of books? If you're going to go swinging the questioning mallet, you should at least do so evenly, don't you think?


And on that note, I head off to be shoehorned into a thin metal tube and hurled hundreds of kilometers. I shall post at you next from Halifax!