Anthony Grafton on the Digital Age
As with most of his other writings, Anthony Grafton has written an interesting article in the New Yorker on “Digitization and its Discontents”. Grafton’s bottom-line is that no matter how important 21st c. technologies are for research, and how much they often help academic research, Google Books, JSTOR, et al. will never take the place of good old books, letters, magazines, etc., that one can hold in their hand and really examine close up (he brings a great example of how a scholar smelled letters in order to learn historical information).