{"id":95470,"date":"2025-05-06T03:00:54","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T07:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=95470"},"modified":"2025-05-05T14:26:01","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T18:26:01","slug":"online-tools-for-the-curious-autodidact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/05\/06\/online-tools-for-the-curious-autodidact\/","title":{"rendered":"Online tools for the curious autodidact"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like many people, I was generally not a good student and in primary and middle school, I was notorious for reading the &#8220;wrong&#8221; parts of books because they were closer to my interests than the assigned readings, but I generally was able to scrape together enough marks to pass the tests on the stuff I skimmed or ignored. This is hardly the way to make an academic career &mdash; not that I would ever have done so, unless they just let me study what I wanted to learn about. A useful Substack for my fellow autodidacts [<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Autodidacticism\" target=\"_blank\">Wiki<\/a>] is a side project of military historian Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson called <em>Extra Muros<\/em>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/extramuros.substack.com\/p\/the-autodidacts-tool-chest\" target=\"_blank\">his latest post<\/a> provides some information on tools for online research that you may find helpful:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_95471\" style=\"width: 490px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-06-at-14-22-42-The-Autodidacts-Tool-Chest-by-Bruce-Ivar-Gudmundsson.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-95471\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-06-at-14-22-42-The-Autodidacts-Tool-Chest-by-Bruce-Ivar-Gudmundsson-480x345.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"345\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-95471\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-06-at-14-22-42-The-Autodidacts-Tool-Chest-by-Bruce-Ivar-Gudmundsson-480x345.png 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-06-at-14-22-42-The-Autodidacts-Tool-Chest-by-Bruce-Ivar-Gudmundsson-150x108.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-06-at-14-22-42-The-Autodidacts-Tool-Chest-by-Bruce-Ivar-Gudmundsson.png 728w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-95471\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artrenewal.org\/artists\/gustav-wenzel\/8324\" target=\"_blank\">Gustav Wenzel<\/a> &#8211; &#8220;A Carpenter&#8217;s Workshop&#8221; (1881)<\/p><\/div>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/advancedsearch.php\" target=\"_blank\">The &#8220;advanced search&#8221; page of the Internet Archive<\/a> allows you to &#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>download copies, in various electronic formats, of<\/li>\n<p>&#8211; books and magazines published before 1929<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; works (such as those created by the US Federal Government) that have always belonged to the public domain<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; relatively recent works uploaded by people in countries (such as India) with less restrictive copyright laws<\/p>\n<li>examine books that you might want to acquire for enjoyment the old-fashioned way<\/li>\n<li>find higher-quality copies of items that you found on Google Books<\/li>\n<li>obtain an overview of the works (to include foreign language translations)<\/li>\n<p>&#8211; of a particular author<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; on a particular subject<\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The &#8220;advanced search&#8221; page on the website of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hathitrust.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Hathi Trust<\/a> allows you to do many of the things you might otherwise do on the Internet Archive. Alas (and, indeed, alack), the interface restricts the direct download of complete volumes to &#8220;participating institutions&#8221;. As a result, mere mortals must either seek the PDF in question on Google Books (to which Hathi provides a direct link) or use a bit of freeware called <a href=\"https:\/\/sourceforge.net\/projects\/hathidownloadhelper\/\" target=\"_blank\">Hathi Download Helper<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The Hathi Trust search engine also makes it easy for you to search <em>within<\/em> books for specific words and phrases, as well as the mention of particular places and personalities. Doing the former turns the Hathi Trust database into a kind of dictionary, a way of discovering ways that people in various climes and times have used the expression. Doing the latter converts that cornucopia into an encyclopedia.<\/p>\n<p>The NGram Viewer performs a similar service. However, as it sits atop a smaller collection and suffers from a number of irritating defects, it has proved less useful to me than the website of the Hathi Trust.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like many people, I was generally not a good student and in primary and middle school, I was notorious for reading the &#8220;wrong&#8221; parts of books because they were closer to my interests than the assigned readings, but I generally was able to scrape together enough marks to pass the tests on the stuff I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,79,15],"tags":[135,58,477,513],"class_list":["post-95470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-education","category-technology","tag-copyright","tag-internet","tag-magazines","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-oPQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95470"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95474,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95470\/revisions\/95474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}