Resources for Students Writing Paper #1 on Digital Text, Networks, Reading and Writing, Part II

Resources for Students Writing the Midterm Paper on Digital Text, Networks, Reading and Writing, Part II

Students who are strongly interested in digital journalism, should compare Michael Massing's 2015 research, which we discussed Tuesday, with his earlier, 2009 article on the subject, also published in The New York Review of Books: "The News About the Internet," The New York Review of Books 56:13 (August 13, 2009). This survey of blogs, news aggregators, and other digital media is based on the way the Internet looked eight years ago. Much has changed. Try looking for Massing's 2009 sources to see how many no longer exist today. What does this attrition of sources mean to a culture based on the perhaps naive notion that certain kinds of "publications of record" (The Times of London, New York Times, even The New York Review of Books, itself!) would always be available as reliable and time-tested places to find commonly agreed-upon facts and opinion?
Students interested in search engines, especially Google's hegemony over most users' search practices, should visit and explore Google's Version of Its History. The following links lead to search portals other than Google: DuckDuckGo; Ask.com; Yahoo. How should we compare their search pages as visual displays, tools for finding specific information, entertainment devices, etc.?
If students are especially interested in digital archives, etc., they should read more in Batelle's The Search (2005), located in the Library print collection: John Battelle, The Search: The Inside Story of How Google and its Rivals Changed Everything. N.Y.: Portfolio, 2005, “The Database of Intentions,” “Who?, what?, where?, why?, when?, and how (much)?,” “Search before Google was born,” “Google.” 338.761 B335s 2005] If students are specifically interested in digital text archives, they can find further reading in these examples of Modern Literature Online Surrogate Sites. (Current examples include Rossetti, Blake, and a German Emblem Book aggregation. Please send me URLs for others!)
Visit and explore the following online archive sites: The Internet Archive (esp. "The WayBack Machine" search engine) Try entering the URL of some sites or pages you have known for a while. How old are they, and what did they look like in previous years? Students might start with http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/ or http://www.goucher.edu/ Note that the Archive "crawls" the Internet and takes periodic screen captures of what it sees, so months or years may go by between captures, and the page may have been changed many times between archiving intervals. Imaging a book with that many missing chapters. That is only one souce of information loss with which librarians must contend in the shift to digital text.
Science journals have migrated to online-only publication since the beginning of this century, and this change in access media was accompanied by an enormous increase in their access price. That is, Internet access made crucial information more expensive, not "free." Click here for "Shopping for Science Journals," a quick example of what happened to digital online scientific journals since 1990. Hint: the price went up, a lot.

Students interested in the Internet's effect on social coherence and reliable information definitely should read Cass Sunstein's 2001 article (a section of a book chapter), "Fragmentation and Cybercascades" in Writing Materials, pp. 453-66. In his introduction, Sunstein, writing eight years before the events, predicted the emergence of the "tea party" movement of 2009, and described the "cybercascades" of "fake news" that submerged the 2016 presidential election in debates about false or misleading charges that misled voters and encouraged low turnout.

WWW.Snopes.com is a generally reliable, politically independent fact-checking site. See their "Hot 50" for a sampling of the Web's current questionable or outright false rumors or "news" stories. What patterns do you see in the false reports they document?

Ways the materials stored in libraries change, libraries, themselves, change their structures moving from manuscript to print to digital. What is the "past," and what is the "future" of digital archives and digital documents?--First, let's see the near-past. Take a look at these two images of two famous scholars in their personal libraries: James Wilson Bright (Johns Hopkins University) and https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/when-my-father-met-gandalf-tolkien-s-time-as-an-external-examiner-at-ucg-1.3921043 an image of J. R. R. Tolkien in his office at Oxford University. They are sitting amid their "database" of print documents. Modern scholars now increasingly rely on digital texts. How might future libraries and students "inherit their libraries," as Goucher inherited (or at least bought) Professor Bright's?
Consider this visual representation of various types of library organization ranging from Medieval MS to early print to digital media work spaces. which was created to accompany the ACADIA 1998 International Design Competition for a Library for the Digital Age. Examine each library organization and be prepared to discuss how each reflects the kinds of texts and readers these libraries served. What constraints did the library builders work under and how has the modern library adapted previous libraries' information storage architecture?