Researching the Past

Similar to many honors courses here at BYU, Honors 202 requires not only a willingness to work and think, but also a little initiative. Specifically for Digital Civilizations this requires outside research into topics, people and works. In the spirit of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, our esteemed teachers have asked us to use sources other than those normally used for internet searches,and have even provided us with ideas. There are however problems with rejecting established authority, the one that I have discovered, is that most other sources (non-Wikipedia/Google) tend to focus on ideas as opposed to the people, for example, that we are looking at in the class. To illustrate this I am going to perform a side-by-side comparison of results, and then let you draw your own conclusions.
Denis Diderot was, according to the class website, a philosopher, encyclopedist, and satirist. Now if this were enough information to get a well-rounded picture of the man, then we could stop here.

But it's not, at least for me. You can follow along as you like.
1. To avoid the common ruts of Google and Wikipedia, I first turned to OER Commons, an open enducational resource and searched for our friend Denis. And the results? No items. Diderot, still nothing. Finally, a search for "encyclopedia" resulted in about 17 entries with only the vaugest reference to an encyclopedia, including one entry where the reference to "encyclopedia" was in the last line of the abstract, and only because the main subject, Charles Van Doren, had once, worked with the Encyclopedia Britannica.

2. Now let's try Connexions, another open educational resource. At last, a total of 2 entries for both "Denis" and "Diderot". The first "Europe: AD 1701 to 1800" only briefly mentions Diderot as co-author of the Encyclopedie. The second, "Special Section: Summary of the Advance of Knowledge in the 18th Century", looks promising, and does contain some relevant information, but again, fails to comprehensively define Denis Diderot. Onward and upward. 

3. I had high hopes for Curriki, however, I found no relevant entries, and a few that mentioned the use of the encyclopedia.
4. MIT's open course ware yielded several syllabi from a history course entitled, "France 1660 - 1815: Enlightenment, Revolution, Napoleon". After reading all of the syllabi and looking at several of the readings and links to sections of Diderot's Encyclopedie, I began to form a picture of Diderot as a key element of the Enlightenment, and his role in the changing French, and indeed European, culture.

MIT  - a good start.

5. Vimeo, a social website featuring thousands of videos, churned up 6 short videos in French, (which may help someone but not this American-speaking student), and a call for entries in a short film contest held at the University of Paris - Denis Diderot. Well, now we know he made enough of an impact to French culture to warrant having a university in his name.

6. Prezi, a social site devoted to presentations, came up with three relevant presentations that share more fully Diderot's role in the Enlightenment, and how his "encyclopedia" furthered the dissemination of knowledge to all of the European countries. An addition to what MIT had to tell us.

7. Goodreads, a database of books and their reviews, proved significantly more helpful than anticipated. It turns out that in addition to authoring an encyclopedia, Diderot wrote several books professing his opinnions including, Jacques the Fatalist and The Nun. The reviews and summaries of these books added further testament to the role that Diderot played in the advancement of thinking and philosophy in a society that was not ready for what he had to say.

8. Icerocket, is a blog-search tool. Again here, if I spoke or read French and Spanish sufficiently well perhaps I could tell you what the international blogs were talking about. The English blogs, in the first two pages, only displayed quotes, that added little to our database of knowledge in regards to Diderot's character.


9. The recommendation systems, on Amazon.com for example, produced some of the same books found on goodreads, and a couple of books of similar age and origin through the, "frequently bought together feature". However, I see the main problem with finding interesting books on site such as goodreads and amazon, while cool, sort of useless because they don't provide the immediate information generally desired in a quick breeze on a topic. If I were an adventurous college student one might actually find me looking for that fire hazard place that contains books, possibly called a library? But for now we'll leave the books to the shelves.

10. Searching podcasts is the final recommendation. iTunes and iTunes U both mocked my lack of mastery of the French language. This ends the great search for information on Denis Diderot, with only slightly more than we began. In the next section, there will be a general search through Wikipedia and Google, for a comparison of information.