To business

I finally began my final research project today after two and a half months of procrastinating, err, brainstorming. It will eventually become a ten-page paper in Portuguese. I don't think I've written more than a five-page paper in college. Good thing I'm getting a headstart.

Doing any kind of academic work in Brazil is at least 10 times harder than in the US. Internet access is much harder to come by, and printing documents can be a slow and expensive process. All my assignments at PUC can be turned in handwritten. It's not even an issue. Obtaining copies of old newspaper articles, however, has proved trickier than I thought.

For my research paper on Brazilian athletes, I have to go to the Arquivo de Estado, a large, blockish building located on the north-side of São Paulo. I am analyzing sports articles that appeared in old newspapers, so I have to know the exact dates of the newspapers I want to see. Once I submit my requests (limited to three at a time), I sit and wait at a desk in a sterile, white room with other researchers and a couple security people to make sure no one steals/destroys any documents.

I wear rubber gloves when dissecting the stack of yellowing newspapers that arrive at my table and take care not to allow my elbows to rest on the table. This is forbidden. When I find an article of which I would like a copy, I place a white marker inbetween the pages and write the issue and page number down. When I'm finished with everything, I return the old newspapers in their binder and submit the articles I would like copied.

After I leave, the arquive people make microfilm copies of the pages I requested, transfer the images into JPEGs and put the JPEGs on a CD. Then they mail me the CD. I should receive my articles in a digital format in roughly two weeks.

If this process seems entirely drawn-out and complicated, that's because it is. In fact, if I were to try and invent a way to make something simple, like getting a copy of a previously published article, into something difficult, it would fall far short of the above-mentioned process.

This is one of the challenges of conducting research in a developing country. It's also why most of the leading academic people of Brazil work for universities and colleges in the United States - because in my country we have splendid devices called scanners!