Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Online Research: Narrowing the Possibilities?

This can be filed away in the “I know it’s important, but I’m not sure I can verbalize why quite yet” category. A . It seems that as with many things web, the rich got richer. I haven’t read the actual paper yet, but this quote from it really made me scratch my chin: “Ironically, my research suggests that one of the chief values of print library research is its poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within journals—likely had the unintended consequence of actually helping the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers into a wider array of articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and scholarship.”

August 15, 2008