Aaron McCollough

I ENDURE

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Is this true?

Posted on February 2, 2009 - Filed Under | 1 Comment

OMG I could have sworn I was really in the library!!

From the Princeton Alumni Weekly…what humanists want from libraries:

Still, Grafton believes that humanists will want to wander the stacks. ‘Students need to be in the library because that’s how you learn your fields of scholarship,’ he says. ‘I don’t actually think you can learn it on the Web in the way you learn it by walking the stacks and seeing the books and reading some of them and leafing through others. I don’t see any other way to train graduate students.’

That’s how Princeton English professor William Gleason familiarized himself with the history of leisure as a graduate student at UCLA. ‘It’s really important for libraries to strike a balance between having all those data-generating machines and creating an environment that invites people into the library, to read and to use it in a way that’s not available on your laptop,’ says Gleason. ‘The closer digital technology comes to actually reproducing the experience of wandering the stacks, the better — that’s really what the humanists are looking for. So much of the work we do involves a kind of serendipitous wandering through the library.’

What would Gleason be imagining here, a virtual reality cave? It makes me think of the scene I saw recently in a Futurama rerun where we first see someone playing skeeball, then we see someone playing virtual skeeball, then we see Amy Wong with a helmet on playing “virtual virtual skeeball.” She says, “wow this is just like playing virtual skeeball.” I take the point that humanists wander, and that our invention practices tend to involve something of the flaneur’s jaunt, but how would that translate to code?

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