Electronic Resources for Nineteenth Century Studies

Electronic Resources for Nineteenth Century Studies

Electronic resources in nineteenth century studies (and the humanities generally) might best be described at the moment in terms of promise and peril. I say "at the moment" because, as we all know, any statement about electronic texts that is true today may be false tomorrow. I say "promise' because, as we also know, electronic media are promising wonders that could only have been dreamed of five years ago: searchable databases of an almost inexhaustible size and variety, immediate access to colleagues and scholars around the world; webs of content, context, and hyper linked materials that connect to an almost dizzying array of information; multimedia wonders of text, image, and audio files for classroom and scholarly use. I say "peril," because as we are increasingly coming to understand, these technological wonders arrive only with several crucial caveats: Internet addresses can be here today and gone tomorrow, CD ROMs and complex Web sites are astonishingly time consuming and costly to produce, proprietary interests are starting to use finance as a means of controlling access to information, and hardware is developing so quickly that the septium or octium chip can only be a matter of months in the future (unless all of our desktops are replaced by Java driven hollow boxes). We have reached an important moment in scholarly and pedagogical history when these developments should neither be embraced uncritically nor ignored.

I would like to take this opportunity to review a number of current electronic resources in the humanities, with nods toward other hypertexts, as a means of assessing not only the ways that these new technologies may alter our work in the coming years but also the way they may already be altering our understanding of what information is, where it comes from, and how it is transmitted. While students and scholars can currently say, "look, I have instant access to material that would have taken me months to gather in the past," they are also forced to ask two important related questions: "how accurate is this information?" and "who are the authors of this material if it was gathered or drafted by a committee, edited by other individuals, coded and linked by still others, published by a complex consortia of interests, and then subject to ongoing and immediate modifications (in the case of Web resources at least)?" Academic research and teaching will undoubtedly alter in unimaginable ways as a result of emerging technologies.