Wednesday, March 25, 2009
brownie ice cream
what to do with a half a tray of super dark chocolate brownies? brownie ice cream! i used a half n' half + 6 egg yolk base and folded in the brownies after i strained the mixture. unbelievably good. you really do need to go all the way with fat in order to achieve that sexy ice cream texture. pictures to come!
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Google books is a game changer
I am seriously thinking about including google books in my acknowledgments section...once I finish the dissertation...which WILL happen. I digress. I started using google books for dissertation research in Fall 2007 when I was researching my first chapter which deals with battle painting during the First Empire. The amount of sources for the first part of the nineteenth-century was already impressive. But as I moved forward in time (Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Empire), I have been overwhelmed with the amount of sources available. Sometimes it's a curse to have so many sources, but ultimately my work has benefitted tremendously from google books.
I wonder how many other PhD students are out there using google books and how many of them are having experiences similar to mine. We are likely the first generation of researchers who will be able to integrate it into our research methods: when I told my advisor about the resources on google books, she could not believe it.
The fact is that the archive available on google books is unparalleled. The research libraries of Michigan, Berkeley, Oxford, NYPL, Havard and others are available. For scholars of the nineteenth century, we are lucky enough to be well beyond the copyright restrictions in terms of the amount of primary sources available. I have lost count of the number of sources discovered using the advanced search in google books. By limiting the dates and putting any term in quotations (to search that exact term: for example "tableaux de bataille" will search uniquely for that combination of words), I have been able to locate texts that I never would have found while combing over the microfilm at the Bibliotheque national.
Plugging in search terms and dates into google is a completely different mode of conducting research and not necessarily the most complete. For one thing, you are limited to the books digitized by google and more problematically, some of the nineteenth-century periodicals that I have encountered are so damaged that the googlebot has trouble recognizing one word from another. So sometimes google books completely misses a term because the text itself has not scanned clearly. This is something that will probably improve with time. In any case, I remain grateful to google books for making all of these nineteenth-century sources available online. My work simply would not have the amount of contextual richness it does without it.
I wonder how many other PhD students are out there using google books and how many of them are having experiences similar to mine. We are likely the first generation of researchers who will be able to integrate it into our research methods: when I told my advisor about the resources on google books, she could not believe it.
The fact is that the archive available on google books is unparalleled. The research libraries of Michigan, Berkeley, Oxford, NYPL, Havard and others are available. For scholars of the nineteenth century, we are lucky enough to be well beyond the copyright restrictions in terms of the amount of primary sources available. I have lost count of the number of sources discovered using the advanced search in google books. By limiting the dates and putting any term in quotations (to search that exact term: for example "tableaux de bataille" will search uniquely for that combination of words), I have been able to locate texts that I never would have found while combing over the microfilm at the Bibliotheque national.
Plugging in search terms and dates into google is a completely different mode of conducting research and not necessarily the most complete. For one thing, you are limited to the books digitized by google and more problematically, some of the nineteenth-century periodicals that I have encountered are so damaged that the googlebot has trouble recognizing one word from another. So sometimes google books completely misses a term because the text itself has not scanned clearly. This is something that will probably improve with time. In any case, I remain grateful to google books for making all of these nineteenth-century sources available online. My work simply would not have the amount of contextual richness it does without it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
