Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

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For one thing, it depends on international politics—the world could be under a single authoritarian government in a hundred years, with the power, like the Chinese emperors, to destroy all preexisting learning. Browsing is a casualty mainly because students don’t realize that one of the things you have to do early on in a project is a fair amount of background reading and a lot of memorization to just kind of get the stuff into your head, so that as you read, you’ll recognize important things. But serious scholars, who want their work to stand the test of time, will appreciate Abbott’s unique, forthright approach and relish every page of Digital Paper. This notion that you can get to ‘the point’ and extract ‘the point’ has become central to people’s thinking about how knowledge works. I thought, ‘wow that’s brilliant’, but then I sadly also thought ‘he can do that because he’s Andrew Abbott’.

It’s like me answering this question—I could go on and on about it, but I just have to focus on one particular thing—the lost student. A historical sociologist with strong quantitative skills, he’s produced books on the history of academic disciplines and the dynamics of their formation and professionalization. When you are doing brute force, actually doing the stuff, you can’t afford to let your theoretical mind run. Alternatively, you can download the PDF file directly to your computer, from where it can be opened using a PDF reader. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).

Chicago decided to keep all the print on campus, and put the unbrowsable materials (such as special collections) and things usually consulted en masse (long runs of government documents) and things already digitized (print journals) into Mansueto. In the natural sciences that seems a useful assumption, because the natural sciences are loosely built around a progressive ideal of making explanation more and more precise. He still does this even when he’s working digitally, and claims that after teaching his students the benefits of paper files, the scales fall from their eyes and they all begin taking notes with pen and paper. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

He’s also a fan of high-quality bibliographies, which can be out of date but still have a better signal to noise ratio than the Internetz. But remember, the humanities were subsequently vastly enriched by disassembling precisely that definitive text. As a current graduate student, there is quite a bit of mystery in terms of what constitutes a 'successful' academic paper.The problem with project-specific files is that each project makes sense, but your overall biography starts to lose coherence — you don’t anymore have a personal library or personal notes, its just one bloody project after another. But groundbreaking work is wonderful because of something that has value in terms of those unwritten, perhaps unknown, and certainly untheorized, rules that govern the enterprise.

So when I wrote a paper on the history of the use of libraries, I decided early on to look through the titles of all the MA and PhD theses ever written for the University of Chicago Library School.

Abbott is (proudly) a bit a dinosaur and still prefers to work in paper, with a collection of folders for each specific project.