Organizing research and Moby Dick

The novel Moby Dick can be applied to many topics within digital culture.  The main topic that is very apparent within the novel is how we do research and curate information. The way the character Ishmael presents information to the reader within the novel can be applied to the way we do our own research and curation of information in this digital age.

At first when you read Moby Dick it is easy to get lost in the middle of the book as Ishmael goes into great depth of the process of whaling.  Much like the information we receive in today’s digital world, there is a lot of information that is both good and bad available to us. Ishmael in the novel, takes quite a broad subject of whaling and whales in general and breaks it down into smaller subjects by narrowing topics within the whaling processes. 

In today’s digital world, there is so much information available to us that, like reading the whaling chapter of Moby Dick, it is easy to get lost in the amount of information that is and will be available to us. Fortunately for us, we have tools available that helps us organize the curated information we have as we do our own research.  Though it may be overwhelming, like Ishmael did in his whaling chapters, we have specific tools that are available to us that can help us in the organization of our research and the information that we collect.  This makes not only the organization of our information much easier to find and read, but it also presents us the opportunity to like Ishmael take rather broad topics and narrow them down into more specific genres and details which then provides us to better understand our topics and the research we have done on it.

 

Though it may be overwhelming to read the whaling chapters as Ishmael describes the process of whaling and of whales themselves, ultimately his breaking down a big subject into smaller genres. Much like the process Ishmael goes through, the process of researching and organizing our information can be just as painful. But by using the example of Ishmael and the way he present and organizes his information, the same process that he goes through can help us in our own organization of research. Like Ishmael, because of the vastness of the information that is available to us, it is important to break down the information and research we find in order to make sense of it and digital culture provides us with specific tools to help us do that.