For years, I’ve had a solid research routine. My methodology (pardon the academic drivel) has consisted of scouring the online library catalogue, inundating my laptop with PDFs, reading PDFs, and then downloading more relevant PDFs from the PDFs cited in the original PDF.
It’s been a lot of PDFs!
Since COVID, I have conducted almost the entirety of my research remotely through my laptop. I do not leave my seat for more than five minutes to scroll dead-eyed through social media, and then I return to my desk. Even before lockdown, the digitisation of journal articles, books, and newspapers made it unnecessary to go to a library in person when I could simply access these things from home.
Until a few weeks ago when I went to Fisher Library ‘IRL’ and found myself miraculously enlightened in my place as a student in such vast swathes of knowledge.
In one of my units this semester, we’ve been reading the Histories of Herodotus, largely regarded as the foundational work of the western history-writing tradition. For Herodotus, the emerging discipline was an act, and a distinctly human act at that. His novel methodology required the engagement of all human senses.
The most important sense for Herodotus was sight (opsis). He tells us that the information he is presenting was gained through his ‘own direct observation,’ and that he has actually seen these remarkable things with his ‘own eyes’ (autopsy). Materiality matters; his overwhelming reliance on visual evidence reinforces the centrality of the physical human body in conducting and presenting the practice of historical inquiry.
Herodotus also listens and speaks at length with various authority figures of the places he visits. Even taste and smell are involved in his history: he eats a lotus root in Egypt, and records the scent of cinnamon in Arabia. It is through the senses that humans make sense of the material and non-material world, and understand our place in it.
There’s no question that being in the actual physical space of a library — or an archive or museum — engages our senses far more than watching another PDF eBook file download onto an already crowded laptop drive. We become more connected, physically and intellectually, to both the subject matter as well as the methodology of our research. Taking a book off the shelf, physically holding it, flicking through the pages, and taking it off to the side. Coming back to the shelves to look again. These movements mirror the cyclical rhythms and patterns that Herodotus saw as the central forces of historical change.
The Ionian concept of thauma is invoked in the Histories. This encompasses ‘wonder’ or ‘marvel’, typically towards visual, poetic, or musical feats. In these moments, the responder cannot help but feel the pull of a force greater than themselves. Whatever you imagine that force to be, it’s hard not to feel something like that in a library: overwhelmed, awed,and definitely intimidated,by all that insight and paper towering above your head.
Not everything in the library is actually digitised, although some of it is sprouting mould. As the weather gets colder, there’s no better time to fulfil your dark academia fantasies. Browsing the library and checking out a book in person is a canon university experience that a lot of students miss out on. Crouch down, sit on the floor. Slink mysteriously through the labyrinthine shelves wearing a turtleneck. Feel your vision start to blur behind as you struggle to locate that call number. Or, God forbid, the despair when you approach the right call number and the book. Isn’t. There.
Hostility towards the arts has been brewing for years — it shows no signs of abating. In the United States, the Trump administration is increasing book bans and mounting direct attacks on libraries, archives and museums. Now is the time to re-engage (or keep engaging!) with these institutions, and their roles in expanding education, combating misinformation and housing a myriad of human cultural, intellectual, and artistic achievements.
