This issue of whether the internet and the related digital resources make literary research faster comes up in conversation with our new MA students and with a doctoral student, now finishing her dissertation. Actually, I seem to have pretty much forgotten what it was like to do research before the internet although I wrote my own PhD dissertation at a transitional period (1994-6), when the net was finding its feet in Spain (see, about its fascinating history, the web of the Asociación de Usuarios de Internet, http://www.aui.es/index.php?body=histo_seccion&id_rubrique=255). Today PhD dissertations are published almost automatically on university websites, whereas mine belongs to the time when they were published by the UAB as microfiches, which sounds now as something vaguely out of old-fashioned Cold War spy fiction. That the UAB is now re-issuing those 20th century dissertations as .pdf documents available on the net, says it all about the obsolescence of microfiches.
A colleague in the Spanish Department, dazzled by his discovery of the main resources we use in English (the MLA database, among others), enthused about how anyone could get hold of the basic bibliography in any field –and even pretend s/he is a specialist. In a way, he’s right. The availability of databases and catalogues devoted to secondary sources in English is certainly impressive and, yes, it’s possible to produce a reasonably complete bibliography fast (passing for a specialist? Not really…). This, however, is not enough and has other consequences.
The time required to write an MA or PhD dissertation, an article or a book, is possibly shortened by on-line resources. Perhaps a year spent plodding through paper catalogues in library-based literary research can now be reduced to a few weeks, even less. Many sources can be downloaded from home, of course, and any book can be located all over the world. Naturally, once the sources are found, reading them takes the same time it used to take in pre-computer or pre-internet times, so does thinking and articulating thought. Until the time, that is, when, as happens in cyber-punk fiction, neural implants become generally available. I mean it…
Many students beginning literary research feel overwhelmed by the many resources available and it’s certainly harder and harder to determine what should be the proportion between sources quoted and our own writing. If you read older secondary sources on English Literature you’ll be surprised by how much pre-1980s quality work (published, for instance, in PMLA) has a very short bibliography or even none at all. I am by no means saying this is desirable but when I come across articles that quote 50 sources in 20 pages, I wonder where the limit should lie. We run the risk of transforming our literary research into an exercise in intensive cut and paste, and even though collage has its merits, surely we need to consider them carefully.
In fact, evaluating the merits of any bibliography in literary research is also becoming quite complicated, as there must be very few specialists who can keep track of all that is published in their field, no matter how small that is (say, lesbian detective fiction!). Also, there’s no way to distinguish between bibliographies that reflect extended reading on the author’s side or a great proficiency in the use of the digital resources to avoid, precisely, investing too much time on a dissertation or an article. Add to this that as instant availability matters much in our fast-paced times, secondary sources on paper that are hard or expensive to track might eventually disappear, never to be quoted again.
So, on reflection, do the internet and other digital resources make literary research easier? No, I personally think they make it different: daunting for beginners; richer in secondary sources perhaps even to a dangerous extent; increasingly indifferent to the old idea of authority and more often conditioned by immediate availability. These tools may give you more time for reading as less is needed for (re)searching, but they also increase the amount of what the researcher may deem fundamental reading. They require, in the end, not so much skills to use them as skills to know when to stop using them… and start writing!