Internet Research, Then and Now

A few mornings ago, on my way to work, I was thinking about just how far the Internet has come. I was one of the early users of the Internet, not when it was still brand new, but just before it started to become popular. In the United States, home Internet access started being proliferated around 1995/'96, but it was still a few years before most homes had it (I think my family got connected in early 1997). When I got to college, the Internet had become pretty mainstream, but the available resources were a tiny fraction of what we enjoy today, and you didn't have the sort of quality control that we now sort of take for granted... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFBDn5PiL00 Anyway, I did a lot of my research on the Internet, even back when most professors (particularly my history professors) were still pushing students to use books and articles from "scholarly journals", the former of which were difficult to get a hold of, and the latter of which were nearly impossible to identify and procure. I remember writing a research paper for one particular course, and being gently hounded by the good-natured but skeptical professor. Ironically, he's been one of the department members who's come to embrace the online format for his curricula, but at the time he was very reticent to accept work that relied on Internet resources. In particular, I remember him being extremely suspicious of an article I'd used as a source (Roman Ireland: What did the Romans ever do for us?, Damien DeBarra, 27th July 2002) because it was "from a site called 'Blather net'". It actually ended up being a pretty critical resource, particularly because it pointed me to other articles by distinguished scholars whom the author, having worked at the archaeology museum of the National Museum of Ireland, had been intimately acquainted with.

Fast forward to 2013, and very nearly all of my postgraduate research was conducted online. I read a few traditional textbooks, particularly before leaving the States for Aberdeen; and I got a handful of hard copy books that were out of print and unavailable online to use as sources in my dissertation; but aside from that, the vast majority of my research for my four courses and my dissertation was done online. I used some of these techniques to achieve great success. I got news and journal articles online, I raided multiple document repositories for (publicly available) official and academic sources, I incorporated tons of news stories. And, of course, my advisor didn't bat an eye.

I don't suppose I have a real point, aside from reminiscing about how revolutionary the information revolution actually is.