18.384 scholarship and Google

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 384.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
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   [1] From: Norman Hinton <hinton_at_springnet1.com> (3)
         Subject: Re: 18.382 Literary references to Alice in
                 Scholar.Google?

   [2] From: "Lisa L. Spangenberg" (16)
                 <lisa_at_digitalmedievalist.com>
         Subject: Re: 18.382 Literary references to Alice in
                 Scholar.Google?

   [3] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk> (26)
         Subject: scholarship on Google

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 08:51:53 +0000
         From: Norman Hinton <hinton_at_springnet1.com>
         Subject: Re: 18.382 Literary references to Alice in Scholar.Google?

Now, now, oe, don't let your feelings (which I share) about this useless
piece of trash display the way you feel threatened by something about
agnostic conceptual structure, or some such stuff.

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 08:52:21 +0000
         From: "Lisa L. Spangenberg" <lisa_at_digitalmedievalist.com>
         Subject: Re: 18.382 Literary references to Alice in Scholar.Google?

Joe Raben wrote:

>In preparing an adult seminar on "Alice in Wonderland as a Prism for Viewing
>Victorian Society." I have gone through 20 screens of Scholar.Google without
>find a single reference to this work as a piece of literature. Has anyone
>found really scholarly material through this resource?

Yes. I'm writing about Sir Orfeo, an anonymous Middle English romance, in
my dissertation. I've a fairly thorough bibliography, and have consulted
the usual printed bibliographies, as wells as a number of online databases.

I found not only a number of the journal articles and dissertations I knew
of, I also found a useful and previously unknown article from a scholarly
music history journal.

Lisa

--
Lisa L. Spangenberg           |  Digital Medievalist
Celtic Studies Resources  |  http://www.digitalmedievalist.com
My opinions are my own. |  Who else would want them?
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 08:52:56 +0000
         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
         Subject: scholarship on Google
Joe Raben's question, about scholarly material on Alice in Wonderland on
Google Scholar, raises three issues that, I think, are very closely
related. The first is whether one needs a streamlined Google-for-scholars
at all if one exercises one's skills in searching. The second is whether
scholarly interests can be defined by characteristics of the source
material. The third is what we, as scholars, are expecting.
I have no difficulty whatever finding, via vanilla Google, material that I
would think useful were I doing a project on Alice for a critical audience.
If I were to hold each resource to the highest scholarly standards, the
material that I have seen would mostly fail to meet them, but I would not
be expecting any such thing. I would be expecting to find clues that would
eventually lead me to the good stuff, which I might find online but
probably would find at least partly in a library of printed books. In other
words, I think what's at issue here, as far as searching strategies are
concerned, is an attitude toward the online material. This is why I tell
students that the task is not to evaluate what they find but to attempt to
discover what sort of knowledge it has for them and what they can do with
this knowledge to get them where they need to go.
Comments?
Yours,
WM
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