Text searching has drastically changed how we interact with information. It makes finding exactly what you need and gaining access to those pieces of information much easier. Text searching has made doing research papers so much easier for me and I’ve been completely unaware until the guest presentation in class. It’s strange to think that I didn’t appreciate such a great tool until it was brought up in a lecture. This tool is a fairly simple way of finding the exact information you need regarding a certain topic, you just need to know how to search for it.
I say that because as someone who does a fair amount of research papers for school, I’ve found that text searching is only as useful as you make it. Searching the same key words over and over again is not going to get you anywhere. You need to adjust the words you use to get to certain answers and sometimes you have to be extremely specific to get exactly what you want. Besides that this is an amazing tool that brings you to so many digital resources that can help you in so many ways.
However, this information is only digital. By only being able to use this tool on digital media you miss out on human interaction with the primary source. You don’t get to feel the paper a letter was written on or look at the physical object. You can only interact with what can be digitally uploaded into the computer database.
Milligan’s article brought up a good point that I found relevant to the topic of text searching. Text searching is often used with databases such as the collections in the Library of Congress, as discussed in the article titled “WPA Publications in the Library Collections”. Milligan brought up a good point about these databases that said they give us a false sense of completion. They make us feel like all the information is there when there is an extremely high chance that some pieces of information are missing.
Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review, University of Toronto Press, 27 Nov. 2013, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/527016.
“WPA Publications in the Library Collections : Amassing American ‘Stuff’: The Library of Congress and the Federal Arts Project of the 1930s : Articles and Essays : Federal Theatre Project, 1935 to 1939 : Digital Collections : Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-theatre-project-1935-to-1939/articles-and-essays/amassing-american-stuff/wpa-publications-in-the-library-collections/.
