I learned to do research using index cards--one topic to a card, with citations. When I had gathered enough of them, I sorted them out on the kitchen table, and the work progressed in prescribed order, from cards to outline to longhand draft to the finished work, which then had to be "copied over" to make it presentable.
My first research paper, in sixth grade, was about the Johnstown Flood. Other than the World Book, there wasn't much to go on at home. But in the vast stacks of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library, along with a half-dozen old books about the flood, I discovered a cache of yellowed newspapers in giant flat binders. Here was the breathless writing of the first reporters on the scene, stories telegraphed to Pittsburgh and New York with every lurid and heroic detail. Though I borrowed several books to write my paper, it was turning the pages of those old newspapers that brought the disaster fully to life for me.
Doing the same research as a student today, I'd still end up in a library, but first I'd check out the World Wide Web. When I asked Yahoo!, the popular search site on the Web, to give me a list of pages containing the words "Johnstown" and "flood," it quickly delivered more than 1,000 citations. Among them was the full text of Willis Fletcher Johnson's 1889 History of the Johnstown Flood and several of the same newspaper articles I had read as a sixth grader. The search also turned up visual materials, such as a map of the flood's deadly progress down the Conemaugh Valley and photographs of the devastation. In less time than it took to ride a bus to the Carnegie Library, I had gathered on the Web all the salient facts of the flood--its causes, effects, death toll, and meaning to the city of Johnstown.
Yet there was more--and this is the real dividend of the Web. Beyond the data, images, and maps were dozens more links that a curious student could follow. Spending a few more minutes, I found information on urban hydrology, articles on dam safety, advice from the Weather Channel on surviving flash floods, poems about the flood, a brief history of the Pennsylvania Railroad--even the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen's "Highway Patrolman."
Was I veering off the track? Wasting my time on the Internet? I suppose, but I also remember wandering those library stacks as a child, browsing books and journals that were completely unrelated to my mission there. Though it regrettably lacks the physical connection with history that I experienced reading those old newspapers, the glory of the Web (as you will see in "Digital Dancing," page 10) is the ease with which you can wander the stacks of hundreds of "libraries" around the world, seeing new relationships and making connections between people, ideas, and events.
Such connections are at the heart of a liberal education. The intellectual skills taught at Swarthmore--learning how to find information, asking critical questions, evaluating what's important, making connections between ideas, and drawing conclusions from a range of resources and viewpoints--are essential in making sense of the vast amount of information available today. In a way, though we've given up writing in longhand, we still need to be able to sort our mental index cards. Without them, living in the information age can be overwhelming--but with them, a whole new world of ideas and possibilities opens before us.
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