Investigations of a Dog

It’s a truism that computers and the internet are changing the way we do research. This might have major implications for the academic publishing industry in the future. Books aren’t going to disappear completely. There will always be a market for books because people buy them for the aesthetic appeal of the object itself as well as for the content. Vinyl records haven’t been killed by MP3s or CDs, and have outlived tapes. While the major labels are whining about file sharing hurting their profits, sales of 7″ vinyl singles (a format particularly associated with small independent labels) are actually increasing in the UK, according to Artrocker magazine. Similarly, many people will continue to buy books because they like books more than alternative formats. However, for academic researchers for whom reading is a large part of their job, the printed book is starting to look like an outdated and inconvenient way of presenting and accessing research.

While reading a good book can be a pleasant experience, it’s not a particularly efficient way to access information. Searchable electronic texts can save time and make new approaches possible. For example, stylistic analysis depends quite heavily on digital text, because doing it manually would be very tedious and time consuming. A complete body of digitised works would make it easy to compare and quantify the words historians use to describe particular people or events, and to detect phrases which recur in the work of many historians. Whether you want to use this data as examples of intertextuality, memetics, or just lazy cliches, it would certainly give new insights into how history is written.

There have already been some exciting developments in this direction. Nearly all academic journals are now published electronically as well as in print, and JSTOR is building an archive of back issues (they’re difficult or impossible for non-academics to access, but that’s a separate problem; for now we can at least be pleased that digital versions exist). Books are still a long way behind journals. Some publishers are making some works available as e-texts, but not enough.

Electronic books would be more useful than printed books, but when it comes to academic research monographs, is the book format relevant? I’m coming round to thinking that books (whether printed or electronic) are an inherently bad way of presenting empirical data. Earlier this year I read Keith Lindley’s Politics and Popular Religion in Civil War London (1997; ISBN: 1859283438). This is a very important book, based on years of meticulous research, and packed with useful information. It’s also one of the most tedious books I’ve ever read. Perhaps trying to read the whole thing from cover to cover was a mistake, but the work is highly relevant to my own research interests and I was initially quite excited about it. The experience illustrates perfectly the problems of simultaneously having too much information and not enough information. The daunting quantity of data presented in the book obscures the argument and makes reading an arduous task. Some paragraphs are not much more than lists of names. However, the constraints of the book format mean that this information is almost certainly just a fraction of what Lindley collected in the course of his research. I can look in the index for the names of individuals (such as saddlers) I’m interested in, but if they don’t appear in the book that doesn’t automatically mean there is no surviving record of them.

There are other potential problems with the monograph format. We can try to delude ourselves about honesty and objectivity, but the main point of writing history is to make other people agree with you. This is likely to have an insidious effect, even on an obscure empirical monograph about a narrow and uncontroversial topic. Historians have to make subjective decisions about which evidence to accept and reject, and how to structure the evidence into a convincing argument. Works which seek to describe what happened in the past without making an argument about it are potentially even more misleading, because they still have to make arbitrary decisions about what is true and false, and what to include or leave out.

Websites are potentially a much better way to present empirical research without having to work within the limits of the book format. Putting empirical data into sentences and paragraphs makes for a tedious reading experience and makes the data less accessible and less complete. It would make more sense (to me at least) to publish the source material in its entirety on a website. This makes it more flexible and accessible. Anyone can use it in any way they can think of, with whatever methodology and theory they prefer. I think that the best way to carry out and present research in the future will be to digitise and XML tag complete bodies of source material and make them freely available on the web. Funding bodies should give priority to projects which create digital resources, particularly XML tagged text.

Making sources more widely available will not make analysis by academic historians redundant, but it will reduce the need to reproduce detailed evidence to support the argument because any reader will be able to check the original sources. Articles will continue to be an important way of presenting findings. I find articles both more effective and more honest than books: there is no room for masses of evidence and the focus is always on the argument, so you can never forget that the author is trying to persuade you. Length and style make articles easier to read and digest. Scholarly books won’t disappear completely, but they might well get shorter and easier to read. Some arguments will be too big and complex for an article, and there will still be a need for accessible works which synthesise recent research.

Above all there should be new opportunities for breaking down the barriers between “academic” and “popular”. If general readers have easy access to primary sources, they can get involved by doing research themselves. If academic historians aren’t writing dull monographs, they might have more scope to write accessible and entertaining works which can cross over to a popular audience. Diane Purkiss points out the paradox that while academic historians at the cutting edge are doing their best to recover the often fascinating stories which have been excluded from traditional history, popular books are too often conservative and unimaginative.

The Old Bailey Proceedings website shows how things could be, providing free access to the complete text of records of criminal trials with a powerful search engine and tools for statistical analysis. While providing the basis of new research by the project team, the information has also been used by many other people in imaginative and surprising ways. This project has led to exceptional books by Tim Hitchcock (Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London; 2004; ISBN: 185285281X) and Robert Shoemaker (The London Mob; 2004; ISBN: 1852853735), which combine a strong grasp of empirical analysis with more innovative literary and cultural approaches, and which are very enjoyable to read.

Bibliography

1. Tim Hitchcock, Down and out in eighteenth-century London (Hambledon: London, 2004).
2. Keith Lindley, Popular politics and religion in Civil War London (Scolar Press: Brookfield VT, 1997).
3. Robert Shoemaker, The London mob (Hambledon: London, 2004).