Computer-assisted research and the construction of a "dried fish literature"

Title	Computer-assisted research and the construction of a "dried fish literature"
Author(s)	Eric Thrift with Derek Johnson, Ben Belton, and Jonah Olsen
Format	Essay
Anticipated length	3000 words
Synopsis	Three years ago, we set out on what appeared, at the time, to be a fairly straightforward task: writing a survey of the published literature on dried fish. As we struggled to make sense of the thousands of references to dried, fermented, salted, and smoked fish returned by Google Scholar’s opaque algorithms, we found that technology had come to play a governing role in our unexpectedly formidable project. Instead of simply reading and summarizing an established body of scholarship, we were actively working to define a “dried fish literature” through the intermediary of Google Scholar, Zotero, and additional tools of our own design. In this essay, I reflect on how communicative tools and technologies shaped our reading of this literature, structuring our ways of seeing and interacting with “dried fish” as a category of knowledge.