Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 255.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Gabriele Salciute Civiliene <gabriele.salciute-civiliene@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: [Humanist] 39.254: always there? (53)
[2] From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.254: always there? (26)
[3] From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.254: always there? (46)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-12-08 10:53:20+00:00
From: Gabriele Salciute Civiliene <gabriele.salciute-civiliene@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: [Humanist] 39.254: always there?
[heart] Gabriele Salciute Civiliene reacted to your message:
-----
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 254.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
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
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-12-08 17:02:11+00:00
From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.254: always there?
My opinion -- still great advice, probably now more than ever because the
haystack is much, much bigger. There are add-ons to web browsers and such
for annotations. I use iAnnotate while reading.
Jim R
On Mon, Dec 8, 2025 at 2:48 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> 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
>
--
Dr. James Rovira <http://www.jamesrovira.com/>
- *David Bowie and Romanticism
<https://jamesrovira.com/2022/09/02/david-bowie-and-romanticism/>*,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
- *Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism
<https://www.routledge.com/Women-in-Rock-Women-in-Romanticism-The-
Emancipation-of-Female-Will/Rovira/p/book/9781032069845>*,
Routledge, 2023
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-12-08 15:48:58+00:00
From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.254: always there?
Dear Willard,
Am 08.12.25 um 08:48 schrieb Humanist:
> 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?
in my opinion you put the thumb on a festering wound.
In principle, "keeping stuff" digitally is much easier than it used to
be. At a psychologically difficult moment at the end of the nineties
I've thrown away almost my whole paper correspondence until than, to
start a new job unencumbered. Since than, I've saved almost
"everything", never deleting an e-mail that was not spam or just a
notice that a package had been delivered.
However the common opinion in the "digital preservation community", of
which I've been part for 10 years, has almost completely been converted
to the vision, that the safety of information is <emph>in the overall
system</emph> - information being copied and recopied every few years to
the next generation of storage devices by an infrastructure which will
always be there, accessible to everybody. I've always held the opinion,
that this is a dangerously unhistorical approach. What we would need is
a form of storage device which could survive, outside of a complex
system, cataclysms, to provide safety for the <emph>individual
medium</emph>. Cataclysms have happened, and I see no reason why they
should not do so again. /Systems/ rarely survive them; /objects /do.
Well ... forgive me to respond with a thought dear to me personally; you
probably wanted a more mundane answer. Is it still a good idea, to
extract everything you can from a chunk of information, digital or
otherwise, which you encounter before you loose sight of it? As far as I
am concerned: yes!
Best,
Manfred
Am 08.12.25 um 08:48 schrieb Humanist:
> 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?
--
Prof.em.Dr. Manfred Thaller
formerly University at Cologne /
zuletzt Universität zu Köln
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