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Number 1 - the Internet.
I honestly have no idea how I would've done research in a pre-internet age. Being able to quickly look through the Library catalogue (and also the catalogues of all the libraries associated with WorldCat) is an amazing tool. And then there are so many articles and journals which are available in their entirety through the magical powers of the internet (and expensive university subscriptions to these services).
But that's not all! The internet also makes it possible to quickly get copies of things that you need which are physically across the continent. I just received a PDF of a scanned book chapter which I only asked for last week (I think that it came from U of T, but I don't remember). That's flipping amazing.
Also it looks like it's going to be a good source. On the downside - it's in Italian. Also this chapter is 100 pages long.
FML.
On the bright side - it turns out that Italian is about ten times more comprehensible to me than German. Of course I've also spent about an hour scanning ten pages - but I understand what I'm reading! Which is way better than when I tried to read a German article for a paper I wrote last term.
I keep thinking about that scene in Red vs Blue when the robot Lopez' language circuits are stuck on Spanish, and amongst a bunch of other things says his name. The response form one of the Red guys is "He said Lopez! I speak Spanish!" So here I am piecing together sentences of words that look vaguely familiar, thinking: "He said Cremation Burials! I speak Italian!"
I'll let you know when I inevitably crash and burn. :)
Number 2 - Google Translate ;)
I honestly have no idea how I would've done research in a pre-internet age. Being able to quickly look through the Library catalogue (and also the catalogues of all the libraries associated with WorldCat) is an amazing tool. And then there are so many articles and journals which are available in their entirety through the magical powers of the internet (and expensive university subscriptions to these services).
But that's not all! The internet also makes it possible to quickly get copies of things that you need which are physically across the continent. I just received a PDF of a scanned book chapter which I only asked for last week (I think that it came from U of T, but I don't remember). That's flipping amazing.
Also it looks like it's going to be a good source. On the downside - it's in Italian. Also this chapter is 100 pages long.
FML.
On the bright side - it turns out that Italian is about ten times more comprehensible to me than German. Of course I've also spent about an hour scanning ten pages - but I understand what I'm reading! Which is way better than when I tried to read a German article for a paper I wrote last term.
I keep thinking about that scene in Red vs Blue when the robot Lopez' language circuits are stuck on Spanish, and amongst a bunch of other things says his name. The response form one of the Red guys is "He said Lopez! I speak Spanish!" So here I am piecing together sentences of words that look vaguely familiar, thinking: "He said Cremation Burials! I speak Italian!"
I'll let you know when I inevitably crash and burn. :)
Number 2 - Google Translate ;)
no subject
Date: 2011-03-03 03:31 am (UTC)From:-J