Googling the Victorians (link to 356KB PDF), an article by Patrick Leary published in Journal of Victorian Culture (10:1 (Spring 2005) 72-86) has picked up a few links in the blogosphere in the past week or so, almost certainly due to a link in The Google Exchange which I linked to last time around.

It is an interesting article (and not just because it makes reference to “Michael Gorman” in the first line; a little Googling (I know, right?) shows that it’s not that MG) in the way Leary looks at the vast amount of material now easily searchable on the web for scholars of the 19th century.

One thing became more clear to me about where Leary and Duguid are coming from in that “Google Exchange.” Duguid’s article was explicitly looking at how “authority” is transferred from a printed edition in a university library collection to a scanned “edition” (are we calling it that? “Manifestation?”) in Google books, and seems to be trying to evaluate Google Book Search results as “books.” Leary’s article is more about text-mining and searching large datasets of uncorrected texts.

I suppose I agree with both of them: On the one hand, I’m skeptical of GBS scans as “books” of any sort due to the problems they seem to be having with quality control with this particular project, and the lack of affordances when it comes to e-books in general at this particular time in history. On the other hand, I’m happy to have this strange GBS collection to search through, and the rewards when searching 19th century topics in particular are easy to see.

Perhaps I am simply easily persuaded by whichever article I have read most recently.

I’ll end with two substantial quotes from “Googling the Victorians.”

From page 5 of the PDF linked above (looks like pagination was different in the published version):

It has been often and rather piously proclaimed (by myself, among others) that googling around the internet cannot possibly substitute for good old-fashioned library research, and this is certainly true. But we are perhaps reaching a point in our relationship to the online world at which it is important to recognize that the reverse is equally true. No amount of time spent in the library stacks would have suggested to me that any of those sources would be an especially good place to look for instances of that particular phrase [a puzzling caption to a cartoon from Punch. -SL], and if it had, the likelihood of actually discovering the phrase in a printed edition of any of them would have been virtually nil.

And then there’s his take on “if you can’t Google it, it doesn’t exist” (my words, not his). On page 13, Leary writes of an “offline penumbra”:

The offline penumbra is that increasingly remote and unvisited shadowland into which even quite important texts fall if they cannot yet be explored, or perhaps even identified, by any electronic means. …Inevitably, more and more scholarly work will be done on texts that can be found online, whilst more inconvenient, costly, and laborious kinds of research, particularly with unpublished manuscripts, is likely to be correspondingly avoided. At a time when even accomplished researchers rely heavily upon online searching, and when many students and interested members of the public rely on little or nothing else, the offline penumbra represents one side of a ‘digital divide’ that I suspect will subtly affect the ways in which we think, teach, and write about the nineteenth century for years to come.

While I’m sure Leary isn’t the first or only person to put it this way, I think this emphasis on the new possibilities of online searching combined with how tedious some forms of offline research already seem to be rings truer to me than huffing about how kids these days just want to search the web.