It's also our dirty little secret. We know that students use it, but faculty use it, librarians use it, we all use it. Why? We like it for the same reasons that we've always liked encyclopedias: it's fast access to basic information on a topic you know nothing about. It gives you an overview in language written for a novice, offers you key terms that are helpful when you proceed with your search to more scholarly resources, and it increasingly cites some of that scholarly material right there in the references and external links sections. But it's the unmatched breadth and currency that makes Wikipedia invaluable: entries on wide-ranging--often esoteric or technical--topics, and near instantaneous updates in direct response to news and world events.

So why do we tell students not to use Wikipedia (which doesn't stop them) and why do we groan just a bit when we admit that we found that fantastic resource by checking the Wikipedia entry, not by searching the library catalog or databases, as if our find is a bit less valuable for the scandalous way we discovered it? Because these are articles born on the Internet, compiled by unemployed, underwear-clad slackers! No one checks it for accuracy and anyone can add and delete whatever they'd like!

Of course this isn't true--there are clear guidelines about editing Wikipedia, there are human and automated methods of stopping careless and intentionally destructive disregard of these policies, and the entire site is built on software designed to record every change, easily allowing you to compare versions and to revert as necessary.

There are other problems with Wikipedia, however. Some of them were recently in the news. But they have to do with the need for more editors not less. Wikipedia is based on an idealistic model of crowd-sourced collaboration. Early criticism focused on a belief that specialized expertise was more valuable than the wisdom of crowds. But recent concern about Wikipedia's decline is focused on the fact that not enough experts are joining the crowd, especially experts who aren't middle-aged white males. Wikipedia needs more editors, more diversity of thought, and it needs more people willing to navigate the sometimes intimidating philosophy and etiquette of the site.

Wikipedia has made several recent efforts to expand their community, especially to tap into the subject expertise of academia. They have encouraged editathons focused on specific underrepresented areas of the encyclopedia. They have created sample syllabi and assignments, offered volunteer ambassador support to deal with technical hurdles, and designed course page templates in an effort to encourage faculty to build class assignments around improving the encyclopedia.

These assignments help address the subject deficits in Wikipedia by building upon short or nonexistent articles on interesting academic topics. But they also offer students a wonderful opportunity to create a writing assignment that lives beyond one semester and one set of faculty eyes, and offer faculty an alternative to receiving the same term papers semester after semester. They also help students improve a very specific type of writing valuable in any field of study: collaborative writing for the web.

And whether the students continue to edit Wikipedia or not, these assignments offer them a new understanding of what's under the hood of their go-to encyclopedia. Wikipedia is demystified--no longer a monolithic source of all factual knowledge nor a horrible morass of unverified conjecture and politically motivated vandalism. It's a website built and monitored by a community of volunteers. It can be edited or reverted with a few clicks, for better and for worse. And you can explore the history of changes on any page or the rationale for those changes just as easily.

As a librarian, I'd love to see us remove the stigma of using Wikipedia by modeling when it’s useful to go there and teaching how to use it effectively in tandem with traditional resources—moving seamlessly between the two. I can't think of a better way to start than by taking Wikipedia up on their offer to create class assignments to improve specific entries. Numerous faculty are already embracing this idea, building engaging classes right on the site. The largest and most ubiquitous encyclopedia ever created is here to stay. We want it to be more accurate and complete, and they need us (and your students) to make it happen.

Elliot Brandow (@ebrandow) is the senior reference librarian/bibliographer for history at Boston College.

Jonathan Rees

Norge Refrigerator advertisement, 1953.

So I have a new book out.  It’s on the history of the American ice and refrigeration industries and the research and writing only took me thirteen years. Why would anybody work on any subject that long?  Well, to be fair, I have published three other books over that same time.  Still, I developed a few serious problems along the way that really slowed the entire writing process down to a crawl.

The first problem was picking the right level of focus for my work.  The very first documents I looked at were ice and refrigeration industry trade journals.  These are giant periodicals, available bound together in only the largest libraries, and written primarily for the refrigerating engineers who used to make what is now a mostly forgotten industry function.   Being something of a perfectionist, I was determined to understand everything they understood, from how ammonia compression refrigeration works to what the heck “raw water ice” was.  As I no longer live near any of the largest libraries in America, getting time and resources to do this research, let alone understand what I was reading, took an awful lot of time.

The second problem I faced was figuring out how to turn the story of these industries into a coherent narrative.  Biographers have the luxury of beginning at birth and ending with death, or maybe their subject’s legacy.  Describing the history of an entire industry, as well as all of its related industries, proved much tougher.  My solution was to adopt a refrigerating engineering conceit known as a cold chain, which is basically another way of saying that I started at the point of production and ended at the point of consumption.  I didn’t figure that out until 2006.

So what explains the extra seven years?  Part of it was information overload.  Sometime around the time I figured out how to organize everything, Google Books went from being a pet project to a research revolution.  All of a sudden, it was like being back at the University of Wisconsin again.  I could get any obscure tome I wanted faster than it used to take to walk to campus and hit the fourth floor of the Engineering Library for my precious trade journals.  With so much more to see, I felt obliged to read everything I could get my hands on.  I know it sounds like I’m whining, but the final book really is much better because of that effort.

The main reason for that was a choice I made in 2009.  I decided to make the book global in scope.  Yes, it’s called Refrigeration Nation (which is a reference to the United States) but to prove that America has always been refrigeration crazy I had to at least make a pass at what was going on throughout the world, which I did mostly (but not exclusively) through American sources.  That took more time still because even though I had more information at that point than I knew what to do with, I hadn’t been collecting the foreign evidence I needed to adopt this approach until very late in the game.

Research is fun.  That’s why I don’t regret a moment I’ve spent working on this thing.  However, I’m also convinced I’ll never write another book this same way again.  In an age when nearly every published source is both searchable and right
there at your fingertips, there is much less incentive to read everything available because whatever breadth of knowledge you develop will be far less impressive than it once was.  While some people might think this development a sad one, I look forward to reading history books that devote more time to organization, analysis and just plain old good writing.

Whether I just managed to produce such an animal is up to my readers to decide. 

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  Refrigeration Nation:  a History of Ice, Appliances and Enterprise is making its way to distributors now.  If you can’t buy one immediately at your local bookseller or favorite online book store, it will be available very, very soon.

Eric Schultz

Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be?

“If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.”

Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges.

Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data—though it would take 35 years to earn that name. Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff (or, as my engineering buddies would say, the signal from the noise), and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means.

For the last year, you may have noticed, it’s been hard to escape stories about “Big Data.” In a world where everything can be measured—from your location to how well you sleep to how long you brush your teeth to all of your “Likes” on Facebook, Big Data is upon us with avengeance. Or, as it were, like a Cloud.

Some of you will be lifelong historians and wrestle with Big Historical Data for your careers. I happened to take a left turn into business school and ended up working at and running companies. In the process, I spent an awful lot of time pondering questions about marketing and strategy.

This is how strategy works: Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff, and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means. Sound familiar? I’ve had to do that kind of work in everything from baby products to pet food to Red Sox baseball to the global perishable supply chain. I thank my lucky stars every day for Professor McLoughlin.

Now, we’re being told, in the emerging world of Big Data there will be more and more piles of the stuff lying around. Is there any group in the world better trained to make sense of it all—to wade confidentially into the sea of Big Data—than historians? It’s not just about monitoring, data gathering, and quantitative analysis. (Though a course or two in statistics is a good replacement for the Greek most of us got to skip, and get yourself over to the Computer Science building and spend a semester or two doing some simple coding, just so you can see how the other half will live their lives.)

But in the end, conventional data analysis falls short. When Chris Anderson (of “long tail” and “information wants to be free” fame) wrote that “[w]ith enough data, the numbers speak for themselves,” he was dead wrong. Causal analysis is an extraordinarily deceptive and nuanced thing. Data sets on their own are neutral and largely useless. Cobbled into relational information they begin to sing. But only when a storyteller comes along and provides context and human insight does Big Data really give up the goods.

Tom Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, believes that integration is the new specialty—that someone with a renaissance view of the world is more likely to spark an innovation than a pure engineer. If you are learning the craft of history, that could very well be you.

I do not know exactly what Big Data jobs will look like over the next generation, but I couldn’t predict a decade ago that there would be thousands of “app developers” or positions called “Chief Evangelist” or professional bloggers. I certainly didn’t know to put “Pope” and “tweet ‘in the same sentence. But I stand firm in the belief that God blesses the storyteller; it is he or she who makes data human, and our only real chance to use it like a tool instead of a club.