Susanna Moodie and the Gooey Kablooie

[felis_ultharus]

Well, I finally began work on my seminar. I looked up every scholarly article on Margaret Atwood's Journals of Susanna Moodie, in every major scholarly publication that deals with Canadian literature, what libraries they were available at, when those libraries were open, who wrote them, when they were written, how many pages they were, and even browsed a few newspaper reviews of the book.

It took fifteen minutes.

What did grad students do before the invention of the Internet? Did they even have grad school back then? Probably, but I expect the classes were conducted in Latin, and mostly involved reconciling Aristotelian physics with the writings of the Fathers of the Church.

Comments

[helenseidolon.livejournal.com]

Similarly, I don't want to imagine the study of ancient history before searchable, full texts of ancient authors online.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I've found those useful, too. When I started reading the classics (in English translation, of course), I was able to find even some of the more obscure texts online.

Conversely,. it's probably best the internet did not exist in Classical Athens. Else, the dialogues of Socrates would probably be handed down to us in the ancient Greek equivalent of netspeak, and would thus be lost to history.

[montrealais.livejournal.com]

I have much the same thoughts about translating. I don't particularly want to know how they did terminology before the net, but I imagine it involved a buttload of index cards.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Probably a lot of very expensive books. Likely they were more specialized than they are now, as well.

Those are my guesses, anyway.