Untitled - witz cultural

39AN lNTRoDUcrloN to read online, since one can increase the size of print in the online copy.Nonetheless, not all research involves back issues of specialist periodicals,and depending on Internet search tools at the present time might cause oneto miss a good deal:The biggest problem is that search engines like Google skim only the thinnest layersof information that has been digitized. Most have no access to the so-called deep Web,where information is containedisolatedatabases like online library catalogs.Search engineseek so-called static Web pages, which generally do not have searchfunctions oftheir own. Information on the deep Web, on the other hand, comes to thesurface only as the result of a database query from within a particular site. UseCoogle, for instance, to research Upton Sinclair's 1934 campaign for governor of California,and you will miss an entire collection of pamphlets accessible only from theUniversity of California at Los Angeles's archive of digitized campaign literature.With an estimated 500 billion webpages hidden from search engines, companieslike Google and Yahoo have entered into agreements with major librariesto index their collections. Still, as many observers have pointed out,researchers who only Google for their information-yes, it's actually becomea much-used verb-miss not only a good deal of valuable material but thepleasures of working with printed books and materials, including the delightfulserendipity of stumbling onto something particularly interestingwhile looking for something else. If history provides any lessons, then themarked convenience of Internet resources will increasingly dominate bothscholarly research and far more common everyday searches for information:the appearance of the printed book did not make individual manuscripts anymore difficult to use than they had been before Gutenberg, but eventually therapidly growing number of texts in print, their standardized vernacular, andtheir increased legibility made them so convenient that only scholars withvery specific interests consulted manuscripts, or still do.Frankly, I think the consequences for literary education, criticism, andscholarship are vastly exaggerated for two simple reasons. First, comparativelylittle-indeed, almost no-literary research requiring this kind of inaccessibleinformation takes place in colleges and universities. Much of whatis now termed literary research simply takes the form of reading secondarymaterials, and the rest involves working with materials contemporary withthe texts one is studying-materials almost always catalogued. As far asundergraduate education is concerned, I believe electronic resources likeISTOR provide a far greater range of information than do Twentieth-CenturyViews and other prepackaged collections of secondary materials.