In recent years, research in the humanities has fundamentally im­proved. As a result, writing about history and literature should get significantly richer in decades to come. For the past four decades, researchers have had to work in two realms: paper and electronic. Those conversant with both realms enjoy a signal advantage. But the old-fashioned scholars not conversant with computer research are at a distinct disadvantage. Our newfound ways of aggregating and getting at knowledge now allow researchers to make connections never before made.

Two vignettes from my own experience in grammatical and linguistic research might illustrate what’s happening millions of times daily throughout the world.

Beginning in 1979, I wrote a 157-page undergraduate thesis called “Shake­speare’s Latinate Diction” — the centerpiece of which was recording every word of classical origin thought to have been first used by Shakespeare. I spent 18 months reading Shakespeare’s plays, noting words of Greek and Latin origin and painstakingly looking them up in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). While my nearsightedness worsened, I began working not just with the plays but with Shakespeare concordances, which alphabetically array his vocabulary. I also consulted hundreds of texts on Shakespear­ean criticism and dozens of histories of the English language.

My thesis advisers were delighted with the research. They said I was doing important work that nobody had ever done.

Then, in September 1980, three months before my graduation, as I was leaving the graduate library late one night, I had a heart-sinking discovery: Another scholar had beaten me to it. A German Shake­spearean scholar named Jürgen Schäfer had just published a full list of Shakespearean neologisms in an Oxford University Press book: Documentation in the O.E.D. He’d assembled it with a team of graduate students in Augsburg.

Crestfallen at first, I was still able to publish my biggest chapter in a paper titled “Shakespeare’s Latinate Neologisms,” acknowledging Schäfer for the words I’d been able to add with the help of his list. But for a budding scholar in the humanities, this was equivalent to a scientist’s losing a race to decode a genome. I hadn’t even known I was in a race.

In 1979, I had met Robert W. Burchfield, the chief editor of the OED, and asked him whether the Dictionary would ever be computerized. “No,” he said. “Never. Too large a project.” That doubtless emboldened me to undertake the Shakespearean enterprise.

But Burchfield was wrong, and today the OED online (the third edition) is better than ever. Citations have been meticulously antedated, and the big dictionary has gone well beyond the 1989 second edition — probably the last print edition ever. The online version supersedes all the labor that Schäfer and I undertook. What once took years of slogging drudgery now takes seconds, perhaps with a latte in hand. Just a few keystrokes. The toil now is in evaluating the results, not in searching out the items to be evaluated.

Fast-forward to 2020. The big new research boon in the humanities is Google Books, which allows whole-text searching of all the holdings of the greatest libraries in the world. With a second vignette, let me illustrate how it allows researchers to tie together loose strings of information.

One of my research interests today is Lindley Murray, a New York lawyer for whose parents the Manhattan neighborhood Murray Hill is named. Lindley Murray retired from practice in 1784 and moved to a Quaker community near York, England. He’s now known as “the father of English grammar” because of the English Grammar he wrote in 1795. That book was his fourth. He’s been the subject of several biographies and hundreds of articles. Murray’s pre-2000 biographers worked in the old-fashioned way: with paper research. Doubtless they assembled hundreds of notecards for the fragmentary discoveries they found here and there. One imagines them tirelessly ransacking libraries for relevant material.

Now to my point. Some years ago, I bought an original letter written by Murray in December 1785. It seems like an unremarkable piece of paper. Addressed to a man in London, it says that the package it accompanies contains letters from Thomas Ross to be forwarded to America. It notes that Ross has been ill and shows little sign of improvement. That’s it.

Even if a biographer had known of this letter, it probably wouldn’t have gotten a mention. It seems like a trivial cover letter.

Earlier this year, though, I decided to find out what I could about Ross. Because he’s not in American National Biography, I tried the advanced-search function on Google Books, with a date range of 1780–1800. The search was for “Thomas Ross” along with “York” and “Murray.” Lo and behold, I found an obscure 1798 book that gives a detailed account of Ross’s slow death in 1786 at Lindley Murray’s house. Ross was a Pennsylvania Quaker minister who, after arriving at York, stayed with the Murrays and never left their house — lingering for four months. It’s a poignant account that records Ross’s many lofty utterances as he approached death. In his dying words, Ross quoted a biblical verse: “O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy Victory? I see no cloud in my way. I die in peace with all men.”

So obscure is this 1796 Quaker book — Piety Promoted, in Brief Memorials and Dying Expressions of Some of the People Called Quakers — that no Murray biographer has ever discovered it.

But then there’s the matter of piecing things together. Some weeks after this discovery, it dawned on me that Murray’s first book was probably triggered by this episode. Just a year after Ross’s death, Murray wrote The Power of Religion on the Mind in Retirement, Affliction, and at the Approach of Death. Hence the letter I own actually relates to Murray’s very beginnings as an author. Through his literacy books, he ultimately be­came the bestselling author of the first half of the 19th century.

That’s a connection well-nigh undiscoverable before the advent of the Internet. It’s a relatively trivial one, perhaps, but in the aggregate, if you can try to imagine such a thing, such connections show microcosmically how much more knowledge historians can have about all the syllables of recorded time.