New issue of THE HEROIC AGE

[Mark]

Check out--

http://www.heroicage.org/issues/12/toc.php

[Michael]

One of the articles from that issue makes an interesting point that hits home for me professionally (as a search optimization strategist):

Philological Inquiries 1: Method and Merovingians

...the workings of the databases (like the Toronto Dictionary of Old English Corpus)4 are not as obvious as even the old Microfiche Concordance and certainly not as straightforward to use as the Bosworth-Toller dictionary (Bosworth and Toller 1921), the glossary in Klaeber's edition of Beowulf (Klaeber 1950) or even the execrable Clark Hall dictionary (Clark Hall 1969), and they can trick the unwary and philologically untrained scholar into a false sense of knowledge: all that power can easily lead one astray. Enter a string of letters, click search, and come back with an unfortunate error like labeling "umborwesendum" a hapax legomenon. This error, which appears in a very good, peer-reviewed study, would not have been made using the non-computerized tools, as the proximity of "umborwesende" even in the Klaeber glossary, or the note in Bosworth-Toller that the word might be a compound ("umbor wesende" or "umbor wesendum"), would suffice to prevent the erroneous conclusion. A screen with a single search result provides less context, and so what the computerized tools give in ease, they take away in transparency. But with philological training, the best of both approaches is possible. Knowing the extent of possible morphological forms and alternate spellings allows a philologist to get the most out of the databases, generating results that are better than either simple searches or pre-computer philological methods could generate on their own.5 In order to make the most of the tools, a scholar must have a method for asking the right questions, as well as one for interpreting the answers. Philology can supply such a method. Hence, in this opening column, we will examine a case study which demonstrates the value of new technology coupled with a philological approach for re-opening an abandoned line of inquiry, grappling with important problems of literary, cultural and even aesthetic interpretation, and reconstructing the past.

Read the full article here

They are discussing specialized search tools but these limitations are just as true of the major search engines, which cannot be trusted to point you to the best, most reliable information sources.