Googles of the Past: Concordances and Scholarship

Abstract

Concordances and ScholarshipThis article examines whether published keyword indexes to 22 British poets had any measurable effect on scholarly production related to those poets, mainly using quantitative output measures, since these are all that is available. It also draws on archival information about the individual concordances and their origins. The article tests whether concordances facilitated scholarship, or were a by-product/correlative of scholarship, or mere unrelated to scholarship. The preponderance ofthe evidence leans toward the by-product hypothesis. More important, given the centrality of keyword indexing today, the evidence is mostly inconsistent with the facilitation argument. It is most likely that concordances emerged as a by-product and adjunct to scholarship and that their main use was by undergraduates, amateurs, and others below the elite level. Implications for the present are briefly discussed. Scholars and LibrariesCurrent debates in the library world often involve claims about the power or the danger of new research tools. On the one hand, they are said to make research possible that has never been seen before. On the other, they are said to automate or undercut the human factor in scholarship. Both sides make explicit or implicit claims about the relative quality and quantity of scholarship before and after the digital revolution.On the qualitative side, the debate lacks a common theoretical and operational grounding. The claims of both sides presuppose a measure of scholarly quality to be optimized or improved. Yet even in the loosest sense, there is at

From the Outside Looking In: TheAnnalesSchool, the Non-Western World, andSocial Science History

“…However, only the Historical Geography network and a few other panels have addressed these issues. One early article in Social Science History used citation analysis, and Andrew Abbott's recent work on concordances is a welcome exception (Abbott 2013).…”

“…There is a Catch-22 phenomenon at work, in which scholars don't organize panels and write articles for institutions that do not promise an audience, while audiences go to the meetings and journals where they find what they already expect. Andrew Abbott has described this as a common phenomenon of fractal splitting in disciplines: new trends generate new journals and new groups often are not connected to older groups (Abbott 2001). Most of us focus our efforts on three types of meetings: the disciplinary association, regional studies associations, and one or more topical, methodological meetings.…”