Tuning in the Past
I have a radio on my desk. It has a wooden cabinet, on its face are four things: a dial, a speaker, and two knobs. It was made by one of the older radio makers that is still in business. It is one of those radios with no digital readouts: turn the back lit dial, move the needle, drift through an ocean of soft hisses to a station.
There is an entire hobby of doing this (at least on the AM band.) One would listen for distant stations (especially at night), drop them a line that you heard their signal, and get a bit of memorabilia in return. I have other, digital radios — I like being able to push a button to jump to the AM news station or my favorite dish washing music — but I tend to only listen to stations that have buttons assigned to them, and I can miss new stations for months at a time.
Our campus library is currently moving more towards electronic databases. One of my favorite things to do when I first arrived at college was to just walk through the newly put out magazines: I felt how wide the world was, how many things there were to know, what was being done in my major and in others. This is a difficult effect to get from online databases (even if someone offers highlights of new articles someone else is still doing the selecting) and there are no pictures. (One of the charms of archaeology is, "What is that?") It is easier to find specifics and more difficult to find generalities, and more difficult to keep up with the the broad range of fields I need to know at least something about. "So, what's going on in Egyptology these days?" is not a question an electronic database can yet parse gracefully or easily.
Let me explain: research in my field comes in two stages, the surveying and the digging. (By surveying I do not mean the exacting work with levels and GPS, but the initial walkover looking for walls and shards.) In surveying you have a vague idea "Wait, maybe Paul's city is the key to his letters! Library — tell me everything you know about ancient Tarsus!". At this stage of research you want to know as much as possible, you want to look at different fields of study (geography and topology, maps, every ancient document that mentions the city, history, urban planning, classical archaeology, religious history.) This narrows things down — there are areas with no information, there are areas of irrelevant or unhelpful information, there are subjects that have been done to death — until you get to the digging stage. "Wait, maybe the religious history of Paul is the key to his letters! Let's look at local religions in Tarsus and Paul's attitudes towards Gentiles!" Here databases are a great help in excavating this very specific subject. However, limiting the surveying stage makes it difficult to get to the digging stage: and success in the second stage often depends on success in the first ... time and resources are better spent on a likely prospect (a wall, a refuse heap, a craftsperson's workshop) than on hastily selected portion of featureless dirt.
I fear our campus library is, once again, in the grip of a 'modern idea': the last one was microfiche. (Now I don't think I could find a microfiche reader in the entire building, although I haven't tried in about a decade.) I suppose I should ask someone what happened to our holdings on (or converted to) that format ... and I will resist the temptation to bring along an ordinary, quite usable, book purchased by the library during the same era. Each kind of technology has its advantages and disadvantages: I wish these could be weighed more carefully before only one way of doing things becomes primary.
-Kushana
P.S. The end of the semester has weighed on my more than usual, I wanted to wait to write this so it would neither be too curmudgeonly nor an all-out rant.
There is an entire hobby of doing this (at least on the AM band.) One would listen for distant stations (especially at night), drop them a line that you heard their signal, and get a bit of memorabilia in return. I have other, digital radios — I like being able to push a button to jump to the AM news station or my favorite dish washing music — but I tend to only listen to stations that have buttons assigned to them, and I can miss new stations for months at a time.
Our campus library is currently moving more towards electronic databases. One of my favorite things to do when I first arrived at college was to just walk through the newly put out magazines: I felt how wide the world was, how many things there were to know, what was being done in my major and in others. This is a difficult effect to get from online databases (even if someone offers highlights of new articles someone else is still doing the selecting) and there are no pictures. (One of the charms of archaeology is, "What is that?") It is easier to find specifics and more difficult to find generalities, and more difficult to keep up with the the broad range of fields I need to know at least something about. "So, what's going on in Egyptology these days?" is not a question an electronic database can yet parse gracefully or easily.
Let me explain: research in my field comes in two stages, the surveying and the digging. (By surveying I do not mean the exacting work with levels and GPS, but the initial walkover looking for walls and shards.) In surveying you have a vague idea "Wait, maybe Paul's city is the key to his letters! Library — tell me everything you know about ancient Tarsus!". At this stage of research you want to know as much as possible, you want to look at different fields of study (geography and topology, maps, every ancient document that mentions the city, history, urban planning, classical archaeology, religious history.) This narrows things down — there are areas with no information, there are areas of irrelevant or unhelpful information, there are subjects that have been done to death — until you get to the digging stage. "Wait, maybe the religious history of Paul is the key to his letters! Let's look at local religions in Tarsus and Paul's attitudes towards Gentiles!" Here databases are a great help in excavating this very specific subject. However, limiting the surveying stage makes it difficult to get to the digging stage: and success in the second stage often depends on success in the first ... time and resources are better spent on a likely prospect (a wall, a refuse heap, a craftsperson's workshop) than on hastily selected portion of featureless dirt.
I fear our campus library is, once again, in the grip of a 'modern idea': the last one was microfiche. (Now I don't think I could find a microfiche reader in the entire building, although I haven't tried in about a decade.) I suppose I should ask someone what happened to our holdings on (or converted to) that format ... and I will resist the temptation to bring along an ordinary, quite usable, book purchased by the library during the same era. Each kind of technology has its advantages and disadvantages: I wish these could be weighed more carefully before only one way of doing things becomes primary.
-Kushana
P.S. The end of the semester has weighed on my more than usual, I wanted to wait to write this so it would neither be too curmudgeonly nor an all-out rant.
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