A small open cabinet filled with buttons and scraps has keys hanging at its side, a felt rat on top and a torn pale flag.

Original artwork, not a still

Roger Ebert

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

The comparison imagines web research as using a library collected haphazardly and repeatedly damaged. The two images combine disorder in how material arrives with instability in what remains. It is a sharply critical description of the research experience, expressed through an exaggerated picture of a chaotic collection.

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