On Haystacks

(Reports of my death, etc. Let's try taking that post-turned-gigantic-monster and convert it into a series rather than a single Epic Tome of a post!)

“Oh, they just look things up online now,” people often say of students (or maybe just undergraduates) these days. As loaded statements go, it’s a pretty good one. The implications are manifold. It implies that Kids These Days lack the work ethic of us Real Scholars - people who, of course, never had to scramble to fill the necessary sources on a paper or started anything at the last minute. It implies that this will hasten the Imminent Death of the Library, or that it necessarily requires a decline in the quality of the students’ scholarship. The idea that electronic sources are intrinsically bad or unreliable notwithstanding – a concept, it should be obvious by now, which I reject out of hand – there’s another implication about the above quote which matters rather more to me. The fact that people are willing to look beyond the world of monographs and journal articles, provided they don’t leave those behind entirely, is a good thing in my opinion. What does worry me is not the fact that students will “just look things up online” as much as the question of whether they can.

To say there’s a lot of material out there is something of an understatement on the order of saying “setting yourself on fire is often counterproductive.” A lot of this material is nothing short of fantastic for casual, professional or academic reference, and really ought to be more obvious or widely-used than it is, either for the purposes of casual browsing or for actual study. (This isn't even taking amateur culture into account, something I want to address in a future post.)

The difficulty arises from actually finding the stuff. A given resource, once found, may be laid out in an intuitive, accessible manner (or not), but getting there in the first place can often prove difficult. The Net as a whole is anarchic, indexed mainly in an ad-hoc manner when it is indexed at all, with the indices themselves usually hidden under the hoods of search engines (Google Directory and similar sites notwithstanding). The visible indices that do actually exist are often obscure, arcane or both. Much like another arcane system of managing information many of us use as scholars often without a second thought, these systems can be adjusted to and eventually mastered.

In searching for materials online, there’s usually a lot more involved than simply plugging a word or three into Google. This can often work – searching for Dalhousie University is not likely to be a challenge, and the first page of searches for nearly anything is going to bring up a Wikipedia article or two (although that does bother me, and I'll rant on it later). On the other hand, ambiguity or obscurity can cause otherwise simple searches to become annoyances – the first five hits when searching for Saint Mary’s University point to five separate universities. (Of course, in my entirely unbiased opinion, the One True SMU is the first hit.) Context makes it obvious which is which in cases like these, but that is not always going to be the case.

As part of a project I’m working on – actually, a piece I intended to write here but which has spiraled out of proportion like some kind of even-more-nightmarish katamari – I’ve got a small pile of books sitting on a shelf at home (or in my spine-ending backpack here). One of them is Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest’s Google Hacks, part of the vast horde of O’Reilly reference books. A lot of it is more or less what it sounds like – a series of ways to game Google’s search engine and its other applications to do various useful, entertaining, or malign things – but the main thing which interested me about it is the fact that it’s a 330-page book on the detailed use of an online tool which is so utterly ubiquitous at this point as to either be invisible or supposedly simple. Recognizing even a handful of the points raised by the book turn a “simple” search engine into a fairly complex and powerful tool whose capabilities aren’t recognized by the majority of people which use it on a day to day basis. Now, I believe that just about anything can be used in a variety of different, useful and creative ways, but as aware as I thought I was about what you could do with Google, quite a few things in this book managed to surprise me. It leaves me wondering what else is out there, either useful for its own sake or for direct application into my own fields of interest.

I don’t think the problem is the fact that people are simply looking things up online at all, but I do think a lot of them are probably doing so poorly, and lack the basic knowledge to fix that. Tempting as the “I feel lucky” button may be, a search for anything moderately obscure or ambiguous is going to have little success or yield problematic results unless the searcher knows how the game is supposed to work. Having an idea of what you’re looking for is by far the most important aspect of looking for anything, whether online or off. If that condition is satisfied, however, the next step of knowing how to find information can often be a challenge as well. People might scoff, but using something like Google is a skill, and not simply a form with a button attached, and I think it should be taken less for granted than it currently is. Despite the intimidating nature of books like Google Hacks, the basic gist of how to use it, or other forms of computer-assisted searching in general, is something that can be taught or learned readily enough. A little bit of getting one's head under the hood of how these engines operate, and a little bit of understanding about how the system they are meant to navigate works, can go a huge way.

I don’t see it as the Internet’s fault whenever someone uses it to receive shoddy information, any more than I believe a library is at fault when someone checks out a book by Erich von Daniken or Anatoly Fomenko and uncritically takes them at face value. Rather than dismiss the utility of using these kinds of resources at all – something which I consider futile at the very best – we really need to pay more attention to them, learn how they work (for Google at least, this is far easier than many may think), and teach others how to manage and interpret the results they find.