Jacob Schutz | Killing the concept of research

There are many things I don't understand about the past: powdered wigs, the Puritans, Richard Nixon, disco. The full list is more extensive (though a lot is related to disco and Nixon), but perhaps most baffling to my 21st-century mind is the concept of scholarship before the Internet.

I am told people used a "Doo-E decimal system" to locate data on servers of (get this!) bound paper. Firewalls in this epoch were considered a danger, not protection. These "paper-servers" were located in warehouses that contained many packets of bound papers called "books."

The University has actually preserved one of these warehouses above the Undergraduate Study center in Van Pelt. I am told it is a fascinating, if somewhat musty, place to visit that has become a hotbed for sex tourism (factoid: "sex in the stacks" originally referred to finding an uncensored anatomy textbook).

As silly as pre-Internet scholarship seems, it sounds somewhat noble.

These days when I'm writing a research paper, I rely wholly on my natural genius. Because I don't want to interfere with my already perfect thesis on the subject, I tend to use most of my energy checking blogs and Gmail chatting about how awesome my paper is. After several hours, I have the crux of my paper finished.

Then I head to JSTOR, EBSCO MegaFILE or Google Scholar. I type in a few keywords from my thesis (example: nihilism AND "viral videos") and then the Internet finds people who agree with me. A couple citations later, and BAM! there's your research paper. And yes, you can just give me the A now.

But if I'm honest with myself, I realize that using research to confirm previously held opinions is anathema to a liberal education. And it's being made easier by the Internet.

College freshman Alex Utay told me he thinks the Internet is a great resource because it allows people to focus their research. Yet he sees a potential problem with this kind of scholarship.

Internet research sites, "to make things easier, leave out a lot of important things you probably need to know." (As an aside, I cherry-picked this interview because Alex agreed with me. Ironic? There were plenty of other students who claimed to write papers the old-fashioned way: research, thesis, paper.)

Maybe the suffering and toiling caused by the paper warehouses served a purpose. Maybe the frustration of finding some book or journal that specifically supported their position forced ye olde scholars to confront opinions that were contrary to their own. Such a methodology would force me to question the inherent views and values I bring to my academic research. In reality, I realize I'm shockingly ignorant and should treat my initial reaction to any viewpoint with mistrust. But with the Internet, it's so easy to do the opposite.

We're only beginning to see what the Internet can do for academic research. Google Scholar already allows you to search some books. And as more books come online, it seems likely that paper warehouses such as Van Pelt will become even more obsolete.

I'm not railing against such developments. Books have always had indexes to make finding evidence easier. Cherry-picking information for research papers is not a recent development.

But the plethora of online sources and precision of searching makes it much easier to do this without even realizing it. In the future, it will be easier to disguise one's own initial opinion as the product of exhaustive research.

I trust that TAs and professors will root out a lot of this. Yet I also worry that these methods of self-confirmation will become widespread, combine with grade inflation and create an atmosphere in which Internet scholarship is accepted at the undergraduate level.

Let's avoid that by heading to the stacks and challenging our own brilliant thesis.

Maybe we'll see someone having sex. We can ask them what the hell the Doo-E system thing is.

Jacob Schutz is a College junior from Monument, Colo. His e-mail is schutz@dailypennsylvanian.com. The MacGuffin appears every Monday.

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