September/October 2002

VOICES
Research
IF A TREE DOESN'T FALL ON THE INTERNET,
DOES IT REALLY EXIST?

BY JOHN LENGER

Last fall, a colleague and I taught a new journalism course at Harvard University Extension School. As the school’s night college, the extension school attracts extraordinary students. Participants in the new course, ranging in age from early twenties to forties, included writers, editors, a lawyer, a producer, and several recent Ivy League graduates.

Our group project, designed to teach students to work together in reporting teams, centered on a historical puzzle. In March 1732, Harvard College was involved in an ownership dispute over a piece of land known as “Morroiconog Neck.” The questions for the class were these: What happened in 1732? Where was Morroiconog Neck? How did Harvard get title to the land? When was the dispute settled? Who owned the land now? Most important, did the dispute offer any insights into why Harvard had grown from a poor and humble school into a rich and powerful university?

As it happens, a document offering some details about the dispute is part of my personal collection of Harvard memorabilia. I gave each student a copy of the document; at the end of a week of research, we would form teams to compile and sift through the information we had gathered. The students also got a warning: almost none of the information they needed would be found on the Internet.

I did not expect this to be a difficult exercise. The document itself, though hard to read in places, contained the names of several people, the places they lived, and dates when certain events occurred. Harvard University has an extraordinary archive that dates back to its 1636 founding. Harvard also has the world’s largest academic library. To get to class, the students had to walk past both the university’s main library and the archives. With so much information available, how hard could such an assignment be?

The next week, the students made their reports. They had spent most of their time researching on the Internet. Some had spent hours. They had accumulated some general information — much of it from online genealogies — but its reliability was questionable. More frustrating to me was the discovery that only three students had used their Internet searches to find real people to talk with. During the class discussion, several students said they were not sure how to use archives, while others said that using actual libraries was burdensome.

The youngest students had difficulty imagining a pre-Internet world; one, who had located a Web site for the university real-estate office, didn’t believe me when I said this office was unlikely to have records from the 1730s. “They’ll just look it up in the computer,” she said. Such attitudes were reinforced when students worked together. Researching what Harvard was like in the 1730s, for example, members of a small group had typed variations of “Harvard in the 1730s” into a search engine, found nothing, and concluded that no records existed.

A handful of students did uncover some significant information, through visiting the Harvard Archives, locating an expert in ancient English documents, and hooking up with a historian from Harpswell, Maine, the present-day name for Morroiconog Neck.

Yet basic questions weren’t addressed because students had difficulty using the libraries and archives that would give them the answers. At semester’s end, we still didn’t have the story.

Those of us who learned our journalism before the mid-1990s, when Internet use started to grow astronomically, understand that not all of the world’s accumulated knowledge exists on Web servers, and probably never will. Copyright, privacy, and the expense involved in digitizing old documents effectively keep billions of information sources offline. In the United States alone, more than three centuries’ worth of records exist in non-digital form, and not every record generated today is computerized. Yet most students who enrolled in the new course saw the Internet as not only authoritative and reliable, but also comprehensive. They were genuinely surprised that the wisdom of the ages has not been digitized and made accessible through a Web browser. For them, the Internet looks like a free lunch.

But search-engine journalism won’t allow us to dig deeply. While teaching the wonders of the Internet, we also must emphasize the importance of archives and libraries and human beings. Tomorrow’s journalists must learn that the Internet hasn’t made other research skills obsolete. It has made them more valuable — and necessary.
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John Lenger is assistant director for publications in the Harvard University office of news and public affairs. He has been teaching journalism at the university’s Extension School for the past five years.