You Can't Get There from Here, Part II

It takes me a while to write one of these posts. If I published what came off the top of my head, it would be easy. I want to make sure I can back up anything I say and that takes time.  That path was my choice, so I'm not complaining.

There is a bramble in the path that I will complain about: access to research. Here's a case in point. The American Journal of Public Health released a study on Friday reporting a link between areas of high gun ownership and police deaths. Even before it's out, it's a political football. I want to evaluate it for myself. I don't want to read any of the million opinion pieces saying why it's a good study or why it's a bad study. I want to see the study.

In particular, I want to see the data. One site has helpfully provided a graph of the data. But I don't know anything about this site. Statistics aren't necessarily lies as the popular meme started by Benjamin Disraeli would have it. They're forms of communication. They can be lies or they can be the truth. This news site is new to me. I don't know if they've reproduced this graph straight out of the study or if they've shaded it in some way. If I could see the data, I could reproduce the graph, including the regression line. It's easy to do in Google Spreadsheets or Microsoft Outlook. Reproducing it would allow me to figure out what if anything they had done to shade it. 

Can I get to the study or any of its data? If I follow one of the many links to the study, I get this, a request for money (top image):

This is actually an improvement over what I would have gotten five or ten years ago. News sites wouldn't link to studies. Often they wouldn't even provide the name of the paper. If I wanted to find it, I'd need to search through a dozen articles, hoping someone would provide the study's name. Or I'd need to search on the study's subject along with the organization that published it. 

This particular site wants $22 just for the article. That's a bargain. I've seen sites that want north of $30 per paper.

So, I can view the opinions of thousands, even tens of thousands of blowhards for free, but I have to pay to see the work of people who do real research? "But!", I can hear you asking, "you're not a an expert in this field. You're not qualified to judge the veracity of the research." But I know people who are. I could ask them to fact check my posts. Better yet, I could ask them to write a piece for my blog. 

We live in an era that is increasingly anti-science. While bloviators proliferate, the way research is published hamstrings the voices of knowledgeable people. What if all qualified professionals could view this study for free? We'd potentially have an army of qualified debaters for every comment thread, every family gathering, every city council meeting. That's not to say we would have this in every case. But it would be better than what we've got.

You Can't Get There From Here

A few days after posting History On Line more items showed up in my news reader describing online archives of various flavors. I started thinking about problems I've had with other online archives. Rather than explain it, I'm going to ask you to do it.

Let's start with the Dead Sea Scrolls archive, a web site containing images of the scrolls put up by he Israeli Antiquities Authority.  Go to the archive and search on the "The Damascus Document".  Let's pretend you can actually read the text on the photos of these ancient documents. Why? Because the relevant portion of this discussion isn't nearly as cool as Dead Sea Scrolls.  I"ll get to that in a minute.

Now go to Google and search for "Dead Sea Scrolls."  Notice that the archive we just looked at is the second result, right under the Wikipedia article on the same.

Finally, do a Google search for "The Damascus Document."  Notice what you didn't find.  The Israeli archive is nowhere to be seen.  I clicked through five pages of search results and never found the Israeli archive.  I don't know if Google's results are the same at all times and all places, so your results may vary. I think my results demonstrate the point.

I put a premium on source materials. I hope I don't need to explain why. Even in the age of Google, you may not find source materials unless you can guess what web site might have it. This problem isn't confined to databases of ancient history.  More often than I'd like, finding the right answer to something means finding the right database.

Let me give you some every day examples. Who owns the derelict property down the street? Turns out, it's owned by a paper corporation.  Who really owns the paper corporation? Can I do a background check on someone without paying for it? Maybe. Do you have time to find all the databases you need to check in all fifty states, then check all those databases individually? (On reflection, this last example might be a good thing. It keeps casual snoopers from poking around my records.)

The phenomenon I demonstrated with the Dead Sea Scrolls archive is one I first observed while searching property records and doing background checks. To find what I was looking for I had to first find the correct database.  Expand this to anything you want to learn or prove.  Want to show, for example, the religious beliefs of the founding fathers? You need their actualy writings.  An article by a historian, or worse, a blow-hard pundit isn't enough. 

What would be nice would be to search engine that find repositories rather than text strings.