Ramsay, Stephen. “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books.” In Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology, edited by Kevin Kee, 111-20. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
There is a never-ending, unsatiated search for truth and wisdom. Nonetheless, that has not stopped philosophers and the like from attempting to create a declared path to what is known. It is this same train of thought that aids professors create class curricula and syllabi. All one can do is survey a field while presenting a topic that in turn will resonate. It is in this state of unease with the unknown that new ways of knowing are devised. This state of flux and anxiety can also be linked to the early days of the Internet and its seemingly chaotic order. As with what happened with print media, there was an attempt to create sense out of the chaos using guides and tools such as Google. The author describes how this turmoil is present in his field of literary studies, the debates about canonicity and who is in and who is out. With the vast amount of material that exists, one may never even be close to creating a reliable guide to a cannon and may only ever be able to create a random sampling. The author describes that there are some solutions that have been proposed such as accepting our ignorance and the fact that we will never know it all. He continues with a discussion of how using a library in different ways for specific research can follow the premise discussed above. Following this is a discussion of searching and browsing and how the two terms are different. The author concludes the chapter by stating that there are too many books for one to ever read and one should neither try to read them all nor pretend that they have but one’s personal path through the vast archive is important.
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