Something interesting happened at work this week, and it’s something that’s happened any number of times before (and by “at work” I mean my day job, researching & writing & recording Skeptoid). This was for an episode coming up in a week or two about the mapinguari, a folkloric creature from the Amazon basin.
If you do a Google search for the mapinguari you’ll learn “scientists think it’s a relict giant ground sloth still living in the Amazon.” Well, no, they don’t. It’s just that that’s the only thing on the Internet about it; the actual mapinguari’s footprint on culture — that of the original folkloric creature — was too small to have any impact on its own.
What I found is that every book published after 1993 discusses it as a giant ground sloth, and every book published prior to 1993 gives a version of the folkloric creature, which bears little resemblance. Why this big change in 1993? One researcher published a paper in 1993 pitching his conjecture that a giant ground sloth might explain stories of locals who claimed to have had an encounter with the creature. Anyway, we talk about that a lot in the episode. (Subscribe to the podcast to hear it!)
But that one article completely changed the landscape of what everyone else ever published about the mapinguari. I was able to establish that for a fact because I had a stack of books on the subject, actual physical books which were indexed; and each told me everything that author knew about the mapinguari at the point in time when the book was published.
Granted, you can search more and more books online these days than ever before, but in many cases, the ways you’re able to do that exist in a legal gray area. Open Library is one such example that’s been extremely useful for me; you can “check out” a searchable online version of a book for a few hours or days. It has a lot of books, but not all of them. There are straight-up illegal sites for downloading pirated e-books. I’m always delighted to buy a proper e-book (I have a research budget that permits this), but these really only exist for a subset of newer books. The older books I typically need are long out of print, so publishers don’t invest in making electronic versions of them. In many cases the publishers no longer exist.
Google Books, which is also not completely in the clear from a copyright perspective, offers “snippets” of some books around a keyword you search for. It’s almost never enough to be useful. And it, too, lacks many books that I need.
I have driven to libraries that are within striking distance (within a few hours drive) and taken photographs of the relevant pages I need. That’s always fun. But usually, I end up buying the physical book I need from Abe Books or some other used book seller. Physical books are not searchable, and I don’t have the time to read the entire thing; so well indexed books are always my most useful tools.
Perhaps the very most interesting case of establishing what was known about a subject before and after a particular incident happened, was my episode Vermeer and the Camera Obscura, prompted by Penn & Teller’s 2013 movie Tim’s Vermeer (Penn produced, Teller directed), in which they promoted a fringe conjecture that had been elevated by conspiracy theorists David Hockney and Charles Falco in their 2001 book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.