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The accumulation of feeds becomes one more thing to check, one more inbox to process. Nobody likes seeing their unread items count spiral out of control, and quickly skimming headlines to catch up doesn't feel like engaged reading. Brett Kelly has recently described why he quit RSS in an effort to read more intentionally: I realized that, for some reason I couldn't quite recall, I felt obligated to stay abreast of new developments in technology and such. That fabricated obligation led me to routinely scan big lists of headlines and, more often than not, mark the whole mess as "read" and go on to something else. Imagine this happening 2-4 times per day and I was spending between 10-30 minutes per day skimming or ignoring stuff that, for the most part, wasn't what I wanted to read. Instead of obsessively checking his RSS feeds, Brett has committed to reading longer material (in his Kindle) and to using Instapaper for managing blog and news posts that he'd like to read. How does he discover those posts, if he's not subscribed to hundreds of feeds every day? Twitter:

Interesting article, and the discussion in the comments is even better.

this is a must read! gold mine of important ideas and challenges for where we need to put our attention  /st

I love the final paragraph "Another way of putting that is: Do not spend eight years getting a doctorate with the sole purpose of becoming digital humanist, as you would be better off just learning to code and getting a job as a software engineer. However, if you have already made the unwise choice to enroll in a humanities Ph.D. program, one way to salvage what will otherwise be your eventual entrée onto a jobless hellscape might be to "disrupt" your Eliot (George, T.S., whichever) and start using technology to analyze, distribute, or supplement your research. The worst possible outcome, after all, will be that more than three people read your work."

A report of findings from 2,318 respondents to a survey carried out among college students on six campuses distributed across the U.S. in the spring of 2009, as part of Project Information Literacy. Respondents, while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research. Almost all of the respondents turned to the same set of tried and true information resources in the initial stages of research, regardless of their information goals. Almost all students used course readings and Google first for course-related research and Google and Wikipedia for everyday life research. Most students used library resources, especially scholarly databases for course-related research and far fewer, in comparison, used library services that required interacting with librarians. The findings suggest that students conceptualize research, especially tasks associated with seeking information, as a competency learned by rote, rather than as an opportunity to learn, develop, or expand upon an information-gathering strategy which leverages the wide range of resources available to them in the digital age.