| Yes, the title of this mailing is a pun on net + methodology, and yes, I'm dreadfully sorry. As this mailing list shows, the internet is a useful tool for communication, both professional, commercial, and increasingly now... academic. Naturally, the internet is also a huge - and growing - repository of information of all sorts, and therefore an ideal hunting ground for thought-food. But as more and more people are using wikipedia on a daily basis, the need for quality control on the internet becomes increasingly evident. What sources can you trust? Where can you find them? How are such sources connected? It's hard to sort the good from the bad from the ugly. I admit it, I personally used (and still do use) wikipedia a lot for research. It's fantastic for formal sciences and almost anything, and the philosophy articles are getting better and better. Naturally, the plethora of editors, malleable nature of the medium, and disparity in quality from one article to another make it an unreliable source, unwelcome in most academic bibliographies. This, I can understand. Because of this, and because of the lack of depth of the articles (which aim to be synthetic by nature) it is better used as a starting block, since the references at the bottom of articles are sometimes quite helpful. But all in all, I used to rely on books and journals a lot more. That's a bit of a shame, really, as there are so many good places to look that I know of now that I wish I had known of at the beginning of my degree. Thus, as this discussion list is about philosophy, I suggest we do more than talk content: let's talk methodology. Below are a few of the online resources I find most valuable at this point in my academic life. I hope you find something new and useful, and/or are willing to share your secret stash of URLs with the rest of us. - Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/) is always a good start, especially if I know very little about what I'm writing about. As mentioned above, it is not a very popular direct source, and info should be take with a grain of salt the size of your eye. But definitely an excellent place to start if you're in the dark. - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html) is a godsend (pardon the _expression_). This helped me out so often when I was crawling through journals during my first year, trying to understand, and it certainly still does. Long, detailed, high quality articles about a myriad of topics. And proper reference formats are suggested, so you can go ahead and cite the article in your paper. Like wikipedia: an perfect way to start a paper. - EpistemeLinks (http://epistemelinks.com/) is a philosophical directory. If you have a basic idea concerning what you're looking for, this can help you find some very relevant papers with varying degrees of complexity. I also generally use this to double-check tip-offs or interesting claims made in wikipedia articles. - Sosig (http://www.sosig.ac.uk/philosophy/) is sort of like EpistemeLinks, but refers you to sites instead of articles or books. I haven't used this as much as the above, but I can see how it can be useful for stumbling onto quite a wide range of suggested bibliographies for different topics. - Ingenta, The Philosopher's Index and WebSPIRS are possibly the best thing that have happened to me since the day JFK tripped and took a bullet for me back in the day. Before Rab introduced me to Athens (a service most likely provided by your university which will, in turn, give you access to the aforementionned services), I'd waste so much time searching through journal indices, looking for interesting papers. Ingenta/TPI and WebSPIRS (which should be provided by your academic institution, thus explaining the lack of URL) are an online repository of electronic resources (digitalized books, journals, etc) and a journal/book database, respectively. This allows you to search through abstracts with keywords or advanced parameters, and hopefully obtain an online copy of the relevant journal, all within minutes. The only down side is that I no longer get to enjoy the refreshing air during my daily walk to the stacks. - Finally, also worth mentioning is the British Library's website (http://www.bl.uk/welcome/researchers.html). I've only checked through it a bit so far, but it offers comprehensive listings and some digitalized work, if that book you need for your dissertation isn't available via your usual channels of acquisition. It is unfortunate that the internet/computer medium provides so many just-as-easily accessible distractions that deter me from work, because these online resources a great example of the power of the internet. I urge you to give them a look and use them, if you haven't done so already. And once again, if you have anything helpful of the sort to suggest that I didn't mention here (and therefore probably don't know of), please do tell. Sincerely Yours, -- Edward Grefenstette. |