Information abundance only makes scholarly relevance more elusive

Academic life was a lot simpler in the humanities and social sciences when simply finding a document guaranteed originality, says Disha

Published on
September 30, 2025
Last updated
September 30, 2025
Disha
A woman stares at a blank screen, symbolising the difficulty of finding relevance in the digital era
Source: bernardbodo/Getty Images
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Reader's comments (21)

#1 Submitted by graff.... on September 30, 2025 - 12:05am
"Finding a document" NEVER constituted scholarship. That required comparing and critically interrogating and then interpretatively synthesizing multiple documents. That's central to the arts and humanities unless much of the social and natural sciences.
#2 Submitted by ... on September 30, 2025 - 8:23am
Well yes indeed, but of course in the old days you had to travel and sit physically in the archive for hours and days, weeks to read and research your material but now much of the work can be done remotely by accessing sources digitally available and using key word searches. Of course you have to very careful with relying only on a keyword search which has serious dangers for scholarship given all the other material you will miss which may be crucial as well as an understanding of contexts.
#3 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 6:49am
Indeed, archives once required presence and patience. This article argues that digital abundance creates its own burden by removing closure and amplifying the anxiety of incompleteness.
#4 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 6:47am
True, discovery alone was never scholarship. The argument was that the conditions of scarcity made discovery carry a symbolic weight it no longer does.
#5 Submitted by ... on September 30, 2025 - 12:48pm
For what it's worth, the vast majority of archives remain undigitized.
#6 Submitted by ... on October 1, 2025 - 1:42pm
Well many of the major archival and library sources are digitised, certainly enough to source hundreds of doctoral these, articles and monographs. Depens what you mean by archive of course, massive numbers of archives are probably never vkisted or consulted
#7 Submitted by ... on October 1, 2025 - 5:34pm
That depends a lot on what you mean by "main." It's not even true for most sources of the main national archives in most countries. Of course, there is a lot of barely original work being done in a small concentration of fully digitized databases because they're more easily accessible.
#8 Submitted by ... on October 1, 2025 - 8:13pm
Well I think you are being a bit unkind here. I am on your side actually. However, you seem to argue that the excellence and originality of research is entirely dependent on the degree of the accessibility of its sources, in this case archives as if fully original research may only be done in a remote archive barely touched by human hands (I am exagerating for polemic effect here of course). Scholarship does not work that way in the present age in my view and so many significant collections are now digitalised. Now, we may be thinking more in terms of the print than the manuscript area perhaps. But my point is that in the past to do the actual research we needed to visit several research/copyright libraries and to get the peer-reviewed funding to do this etc, perhaps for a few weeks in the Boddie or the BL or a more specialised library, but now, so often the materials are all online. It does not make the research any more significant or less valid because the medium has become digitalized and it is now more accessible and more quickly and easily processed. But of course, in a sense it is easier physically but that is not a quality issue per se? After all it depends on how you process and synthesize it. Is anything done in a digitalised archive necessarily "barely original" becaue it has been digitalized? The academic research process has been, in a sense, democratised by this. Is this not a good thing we should celebrate? If someone spent years in the past researching a monograph in dusty remote archives is that research better and more original than the person researching online the same substantial and expansive materials that are now digitalised and may be searched online in a fraction of the time? Why is the latter "barely original" and of less worth? Personally, I am old school and admire the ideal of the heroic researcher visiting archives distant in place and doing all the hard stuff, but this is no longer the world of Sir Robert Falcon Scott, we have nucleur powered icebreakers now. And of course many archive are not always that interesting in the first place. Not all disciplines are archivally based in research terms in any case.
#9 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 7:01am
I share your admiration for the archival researcher of the past, but I also see digitalisation as an important democratization of knowledge. The point of this piece was that every generation of scholars has its own struggle, and for ours, it is abundance rather than access.
#10 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 7:55am
I think so but it produces real challenges and also constitutes a "threat" if you like to our professional standing perhaps a bit like "Dr Google" does to the medical profession. The notion the only research that is original is that which takes place in a hard to access library or archive is not tenable in my view and certainly not in itself a guarantor of excellence. Perhaps this is a discipline specific issue. I guess if you are a medievalist working with scarce manuscript materials in far flung libraries across Europe then these issues are different from someone writing a cultural history of a subject or a work of literary criticism.
#11 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 6:59am
True, not everything is digitised. But even the concentration of easily accessible databases is enough to create the pressures of abundance and repetition that younger scholars face.
#12 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 6:58am
Indeed, archives differ in scope. But the digitised core sources have already tipped the balance from scarcity to abundance, which was the point of this piece.
#13 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 6:50am
You are right, most archives are still physical. But even partial digitisation has transformed the experience of younger scholars into one of abundance rather than scarcity.
#14 Submitted by graff.... on October 1, 2025 - 12:09am
On reflection, I have no idea what the author means by "relevance." Can anyone explain that to me?
#15 Submitted by ... on October 1, 2025 - 8:21pm
And while your at it coukld you also explain "irrelevance" in a scholarly context
#16 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 9:05am
Irrelevance simply refers to scholarship that does not matter beyond the act of being published.
#17 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 7:03am
By relevance this article means the challenge of making scholarship matter, not just visible, when so much is already being published.
#18 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 7:50am
I think this is a good article raising a serious point about the chellenges faced by not just by early career researchers but also by established researchers. People are carping a bit. We are not all antiquarians in our research fields and methodologies!
#19 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 10:46am
I really appreciate that. The aim was precisely to start a conversation on how abundance reshapes scholarship across levels and fields.
#20 Submitted by stephen... on October 6, 2025 - 7:21pm
Yes, it is an interesting article. The point doesn't only apply to researchers: it applies to students as well. They now have huge amounts of information available, but this may create the feeling that there is nothing left for them to say.
#21 Submitted by ... on October 2, 2025 - 10:44am
This article tries to show that the struggle has shifted. A few years ago the refrain was that quality matters, not quantity. But today, many younger scholars are managing both: producing quality work in considerable quantity. That reality is what makes the search for relevance so pressing for many PhD scholars observing their peers.

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