Networking a large Renaissance library, first through on-line concording and then via hypertext links, brings new information to bear on old puzzles. A researcher thus gets more from the tools than output. They encourage new theoretical perspectives that may in the long term prove more important. Methodically reading printed literature on even a single Shakespeare play can take years. Fortunately, humanities researchers today are knowledge harvesters in an age of information technology.
New tools revitalize old sciences.
The early stages of researching any topic pass in no time, as we deposit materials into our research banks. For example, consider the University of Toronto English Library, a group of Web collections with the acronym UTEL , which two graduate students, Christopher Douglas and Dennis G. Jerz, and I put up last April. UTEL is a resource intended for our own students, staff, and faculty. All this and more for scholarly neuromancers to jack in, de-ice, and explore. These resources still take my breath away because I spent my first three decades of research manually combing them.