...the ease of digital access could make us dumber--or not.

I Wrote Them Down in My Diary

I think of this line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade often.  Unlike the elephant, I forget.  My iguana mate teasingly calls me his "little goldfish," playing off that animal's 3-second memory span.  I am the worst at remembering the title and author of a book I just read.  The ability to quickly Google that information, however, allows my seeming incompetence to quickly be reversed.  I've become very good at looking up information because of this.


But there's so much information now available online.  Refer to this clip from a recent State Farm commercial:


This video initially comes to mind while reading the articles for this week.  As historians (and intelligent, critical thinkers), we've had to fine tune our abilities to parse the validity of information.  One of the ways we've grown better at sorting information is through better targeting of search terms.  In William Turkel's exploration of AOL search data, he discovers patterns in people's search terminology and translates it to better methods of using metadata for targeting his own historical sites. 

From the perspective of the historian searching for information, Patrick Leary lauds the advances in technology that have enabled the greater dissemination of information.  However, he is leery (pun intended) of the accuracy of such searches, especially in the use of OCR (optical character recognition) in documents.  I have found these same issues myself when searching scanned newspapers through Newsbank, for instance.  You have to be flexible in your search terms to overcome errors inherent in OCR.

So in consideration of these points, I find the lessons put forth by Daniel Cohen to be on target.  While he advocates a higher-tech approach (aka references to programming languages and the like) to searching through specific sites for information, I prefer an easier method that is especially less frustrating to those self-proclaimed Luddites.  Put your search in "", then add site:www.----.com.  Tada!