Filed under the category of “things maybe we shouldn’t worry about” is this op-ed piece in today’s New York Times by writer Edward Tenner, who frets that Google’s search engine is compromising the intellectual pursuits of today’s students. His argument: Google’s citation analysis algorithms often churn up mediocre results and unsuspecting scholars might accept low-caliber resources instead of truly valuable fonts of wisdom.
Curious about the academic field of world history? A neophyte would find little help entering “world history” in Google. When I tried, the only article on the world history movement, from the open-source Wikipedia project, didn’t appear until the fifth screen and was brief and eccentric, erroneously dating the field from the 1980’s. (In fairness to Wikipedia, that entry has since been corrected and improved; moreover, the paid-access Encyclopaedia Britannica site has no specific article at all.) Only on the seventh screen did I find the World History Network site, financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it is not yet a good portal for beginners.
Um, people who are truly curious about “the academic field of world history” are likely to be people who will dig deeper into Google’s results to find material that is sufficient meaty and interesting, something they were unable to do before the rise of Google. Tenner makes one good point in arguing for better “information literacy” that teaches students, specifically university students, to be better judges of search results. But let’s hope even absent information literacy that universities aren’t cranking out researchers who are unable to distinguish among the varying levels of web site qualities generated by Google searches.
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:42 PM|Comments(0)
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