20. Using new databases for environmental history research
(SEJournal Winter 2005)
You never start a story without research. It’s just standard practice. But how can we teach that?
In the newsroom, you can always check the library (once called “the morgue”) and look up the old clips about the subject you are working on.
Until recently, journalism students couldn’t do their initial research at a newspaper because the newspaper libraries were not open to the public.
So students had to fall back on standard library techniques. That would usually involve a two step process: first, a check in the printed index, such as the shelf full of indices for the New York Times; and then a tedious run through miles of microfilm or microfiche.
In the past ten years or so, as Lexis-Nexis became more affordable for universities, it was easier to look up recent news articles. But a full history was still a long and tedious slog through indices and microfilm.
Recently, a new kind of online database became available. In July of 2002 , ProQuest (formerly Bell & Howell) began offering the entire New York Times backfile from 1851 to 1999. The backfile has three million pages and over 25 million articles covering 148 years of history. In 2003, ProQuest added the Washington Post. Other papers like the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times are also available.
A search using Boolean delimiters and dates returns a list of possible articles, just like any other database, but then in the second stage, the full text is returned as a pdf formatted file. The page position is also available as a lower-resolution pdf. Although it is not full cut and paste text, the value of the pdf format is that pages look as they did when they were printed and it is unlikely that material has been omitted or changed.
These databases are also an improvement in that they are significantly more comprehensive than the old printed indices. For instance, a search for air pollution and smoke nuisance articles through the Progressive era in the New York Times showed many more hits from the ProQuest database than articles referenced in the New York Times original printed index. (Chart 1)
(Source: Research by Bill Kovarik)
In order to teach students how to use these databases, and also as an experimental teaching assignment, I asked members of a class of media history students to help me find articles for an SEJournal column concerning environmental coverage 10, 25, 50, 75, 100 and 150 years ago. “Help your professor make his deadline for SEJournal” was the name of the assignment.
All of the items in this newsletter’s historical section are from these student efforts.
The assignment was useful but not entirely successful. About half of the students in the class attempted to complete the extra credit assignment, and of these, only about 2/3 were able to follow instructions and return four or more pdf files through email with a summary.
Part of the problem was conceptual: most students did not believe that there was any news coverage of environmental issues earlier than the 1970s, and the assignment was a challenge.
Part of the problem was semantic. Although students were instructed to use alternative search terms (in some cases specific alternative terms), much of what is now considered “environmental” fell into different categories in years past, and some students gave up in frustration. One student, for example, could not find any information about endangered species in the 1900 - 1920 era, but she did find one article on buffalo extinction, which she offered very tentatively as possibly not meeting the requirements.
Students said that finding articles on the environment was difficult. “I would assume that much of this is due in part to the lack of concern for things such as forest conservation until more recent years,” said one. Assume, of course, being the operative word here, because once you start looking, there are literally thousands of news articles on forest conservation and many other environmental issues in the ProQuest papers from the 1880s to the present.
This naturally leaves an opening for a discussion about seeing and believing. The old saying is that seeing is believing. But does believing help us see, and does not believing keep us from seeing?
While students are familiar with the idea of a theory growing out of observation (inductive approach), it is also true that theories can inform our research and lead to more observations (deductive approach).
Class discussion might also concern a link between scientific research and historical research in that both often depend on the interplay of deductive and inductive approaches in order to search for the truth.
_______
Added in Dec. 2005 --
When we ask students to generalize from a few specific instances within large pools of data, it is not surprising to find students arriving at suspect conclusions. For example, one student compared mid-19th century medical advertising to turn of the 20th century medical advertising. (1850s to 1900s). He concluded that the more modern ads were more explicit in their claims , to the benefit of consumers. He relied soley on his examples, and by doing so, he completely missed the issue of patent medicine fraud and the subsequent establishment of federal regulation (FTC and FDA). Students should be told that their conclusions should be checked against a contextual search of secondary historical sources that would not have missed the context. It is, then, an example of the inductive fallacy, in which generalizations from small amounts of experience may later be proven wrong.
