Part of it probably went to all the traveling I did for the Academic Bowl. Chances are good that the rest went into the Library. We've been busy this semester! Summer will be a good time to relax a little bit and focus on other projects that don't have a rapidly-approaching deadline.
Either way, I'm still plugging away at those ol' books. I just finished The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer, and it was an interesting book. Told mostly through flashbacks, the story covers a sort of alternate 20th Century where things are pretty different from our own world. Most of the changes seem to stem from a single person, Prospero Taligent, a mechanical genius who builds robots, flying cars, and other such wonders without going anywhere near an electronic circuit. Because of this, the world of the novel is more technologically advanced than ours, but ours is more scientifically advanced. They haven't discovered the atom, how to manipulate electrons, or progressed much further than basic electrical generation.
It's an interestingly different universe that bears some eerie similarities -- the art world there is an almost exact copy of our own, for instance, with artists being lauded as geniuses for creating large canvases that have only single words painted on each. The effect is a weird sense of bleed-through between our 20th Century and theirs, which is exacerbated when the author himself appears in the novel. There are also a few little jokes, like when one character muses on the possibility of developing a mechanical system that relies on switching between "open" and "closed" in order to think or accomplish tasks -- which is the basis of binary code itself.
Oh, right. I forgot. The plot. The main character is a writer of greeting cards who has a long association with Prospero Taligent and his daughter, Miranda. Prospero is the wealthiest man in the world, but is incapable of relating to an actual human being until he adopts Miranda. Unfortunately, he has an engineer's need for a sense of control and predictability, and as Miranda grows up and begins to rebel, Prospero descends into madness, drives Miranda insane, and drags the main character down with him into a surprising and tragic conclusion. Or maybe it's not tragic; it's so bizarre, really, that I'm not sure what to make of it.
And, of course, all of this takes place in Xeroville, an alternate New York that continually haunts the novel with its decaying gloom. Usually when reading one of those other-dimension novels, it's pretty clear that the premise stems from the basic question: "What if that happened instead of this?" What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, what if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, what if Franz Ferdinand had survived? None of this is clear with Dream of Perpetual Motion; I thought maybe it was the emergence of the Taligent empire, but there are indications that the differences go back further than that, including frequent references to an "age of miracles," where angels and demons shared the world with humans until industrialization came and killed them all. So who knows?
Either way, it's an absorbing novel. It reminds me a lot of Gears of the City in some ways (which I'll get around to reviewing in here someday -- I read faster than I blog).
So last week, I promised you some words about the nature of research in general.
This is mostly because I've encountered some students in the last couple of weeks who are surprised to find out that there is no magic bullet that will bring up everything they need in a single try. When I explain that research takes time, effort, and a little mental footwork, they look at me as though I'm an alien.
Questions regarding my status as an Earthling aside, the students' reaction is both unsurprising and regrettable. Unsurprising because they're used to Google, which has become incredibly good at finding you what you want based on your initial search query. Regrettable because it predisposes those students to give up quickly, turn in substandard work, and contend with either a low or failing grade. Sometimes, if they don't learn how to handle the research process soon enough, they wash out altogether, even though some actually have enough smarts to go pretty far once they have that diploma in hand.
Here's the thing: Academic databases are not Google. Google uses an algorithm that's so secret no other search engine can use it without going through Google, even for academic purposes, and so advanced it nearly qualifies as an artificial general intelligence, relying on contextual clues that most ordinary machines can't understand in order to figure out what you mean.
Okay, so why can't an academic database use Google to run its search, as Gallaudet does when you want to search through its website?
Because to do so, Google's algorithm and ancillary programs -- like the spiders that comb the Web and index everything they come across so it can be searched -- would need to be copied into the (copyrighted and subscription-only) database itself, something Google never permits. Even when you see a Google-based search on a Web site that's not Google, it's using the same resources as google.com; you can see this by clicking on the search I sent you to in the last paragraph and looking in the address bar of your browser. The first thing you see: http://www.google.com.
This is a lot of technical stuff. The upshot: Academic databases just aren't as easy to search as Google, so that's the first reason why it can be a little more difficult to find what you're looking for and why it takes time.
The second reason can be chalked up to vocabulary. There are two different ways your vocabulary can make research take some time:
- Academic jargon. Some fields are very specialized and use words you've never heard to describe a common thing. For instance, in a medical journal, don't go searching for "nose job." Doctors don't use that term in scholarly work.
- Synonyms. This is sort of the opposite of the first reason; often, especially in so-called "soft" sciences like psychology and sociology, different terms can be used to refer to the same thing, like "domestic violence" or "spousal abuse."
The nose job example also illustrates the third, and probably most significant, reason why research takes some effort: It requires some detective work. You have to figure out your starting point, and use whatever clues you find to proceed from there, step by step. Sometimes it's easy, especially if you pick a well-studied topic like the Maginot Line in World War II, but when you're working on more esoteric topics -- like the effect of rhinoplasties on a specific psychological model of self-perception -- this strategy is invaluable. However, it's also time-consuming and can take a few hours.
That's why you learn about time management in your First Year Seminar course when you arrive at Gallaudet as a freshman. School takes time, and it always will, especially if you decide you want to do the best work possible.
One final note, and this is something I say to a lot of the courses I present to: There will be times at which you hit a wall. You can't figure out how to proceed any further with your research. Maybe you've run out of terms to try, or there simply isn't anything in the databases you've been looking in. At this point, ask a librarian. It's what we're here for.
Question of the Week
Are you open during the summer?
We're open year-round! Our hours are usually reduced during the summer -- we generally close at 8 p.m., for example -- so things will be a little bit different, but we're open nonetheless. We'll be releasing our summer hours pretty soon; keep an eye on this blog, and I'll let you know when you can find out!
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