Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 254.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-12-07 11:30:51+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: always there?

A teacher of mine In an otherwise undistinguished MA programme in 
English literature imprinted me with a scholarly habit that has stayed
with me and survived translation from pen and paper into my digital 
practices. Its survival as proven to be to a degree one might suspect 
would have declined steeply with the onset of the web--but hasn't. 
Hence a question to practitioners here.

He told us students then to capture to whatever degree possible 
everything in and about the sources we came across. (This was, I must 
note, before photocopy machines, decades before the web. Then the
physical card catalogue was one's starting point.) He took us 
out of the classroom and into the library, where he taught us the 
rudiments of research. Many of these have changed utterly. But his basic 
advice hasn't. He said to us that whenever you have a book in your 
hands, write down everything about it you may ever need to know,
for you may never see that book again. His was, hands down, the most
valuable course in that programme. No one else ever bothered to teach 
me the basics, in particular to think so carefully about the mechanics 
of research.

Many years later I translated his lesson into my digital scholarly
behaviours, capturing everything practical to capture, downloading 
journal papers and books, scanning in books I cannot find online, 
storing all on my computer. A few minutes ago I went to the (sadly 
much debilitated) Internet Archive for something I do not have and 
found the Archive offline. My MA teacher's words came to mind.

My question: is it not naive in this unstable world of ours to assume
that his advice is no longer prudent? Should one act as if what's out 
there will always be there?

Best,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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