No. 10, Issue 3, JSTORNEWS, October 2006

Historic Language Usage in JSTOR

One benefit of a long-term archive of journal back issues ranging across many disciplines is that it can not only provide specific topic research but can also serve as a broader historical snapshot of past language and cultural trends. A fascinating example of this can be found in The Yale Book of Quotations, recently published by Yale University Press in October 2006. The author, Fred R. Shapiro, extensively searched back issues of journals archived in JSTOR to locate the earliest usages of popular quotes and phrases.

Fred R. Shapiro is an associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at the Yale Law School. He is a well-known authority on quotations and the editor of The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations. In this Q & A with JSTOR, Fred describes how he made use of the JSTOR archive in his project and what the implications of this research may be.

JSTOR: Please tell us about The Yale Book of Quotations.

FS: The project was conceived in the late 1990s when I realized that the existing standard quotation dictionaries were lacking in comprehensiveness of coverage and depth of research. I worked on it for six years, from 2000 to 2006.

JSTOR: How did your research for The Yale Book of Quotations specifically make use of the JSTOR archive? Had you used the JSTOR archive for similar research in the past? Also, what other research sources or methods did you use while writing the book?

FS: I was lucky that I compiled the book at a time when online resources allowing vast collections of historical texts to be searched were becoming available. JSTOR was one of the first and best such resources, and I searched for the origins, precise wording, and frequency of usage of many quotations on JSTOR, particularly for quotations relating to the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. (I had previously made extensive use of JSTOR to find "antedatings" of the earliest evidence in the Oxford English Dictionary for many significant words.)

An example of how I used JSTOR was the famous saying, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." Bartlett's Familiar Quotations attributes this to Milton Friedman, but a JSTOR search shows 27 articles using it as an economic maxim before Friedman, beginning with a 1945 article in the Columbia Law Review that refers to "this profound economic truth, 'There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." Having seen from JSTOR that this was a relatively longstanding proverb, I then used other databases to push it even further back.

Other important expressions for which I used JSTOR to trace their origins back earlier than the previous accepted earliest uses included the phrase "lies, damned lies, and statistics" and the terms "software" and "counterculture." John W. Tukey was one of the preeminent statisticians who ever lived, but when he died the headline on the New York Times obituary read "John Tukey, 85, Statistician; Coined the Word 'Software.'" It was only because of my JSTOR search and resulting publicity that Tukey became known as the earliest user of 'software.'

In my research for the Yale Book of Quotations, I also used many other online historical text collections, such as ProQuest, Times Digital Archive, LexisNexis, Newspaperarchive, Questia, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Literature Online. I benefited from extraordinary assistance via a wonderful list serv called Stumpers, networking thousands of reference librarians around the world, and also from the list serv of the American Dialect Society. Of course, I also drew upon the spectacular print resources of the Yale University Library, supplemented by interlibrary loans.

JSTOR: Were there any journals or disciplines that were particularly helpful in identifying the first use of a quote? If so, what were they?

FS: The journals in JSTOR's General Science collection (now renamed Health & General Sciences), including the Royal Society journals that go back to the 1600s and the American science journals that date back to the 1800s. The history journals contained a lot of secondary material pointing to quotation origins. But really the nature of my investigations was so far-reaching that I used all the disciplines, and almost all of the journals. JSTOR's chronological depth and subject diversity make it ideal for this kind of research.

JSTOR: Did anything odd or surprising come up in your research while searching the JSTOR archive?

FS: Since JSTOR is focused on scholarly journals, I was pleasantly surprised to see how powerful it was in finding information relating to many aspects of political life, the economy, society, language, and art, as well as the expected scientific and social-scientific disciplines.

JSTOR: What ramifications, if any, do you see for using JSTOR and other,
similar online archives as a historical research tool? Are there other projects or kinds of research in which the JSTOR archive could be equally helpful?

FS: Most people will not use JSTOR to find word-origins or quotation-origins. However, the same vast coverage and intensive search capabilities that helped me also help scholars and students with an infinite variety of historical researches.

For more information on The Yale Book of Quotations, please visit http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/bookprinter.asp?isbn=0300107986.