ABSTRACTThis article argues the digital tools and search environments that increasingly support historical scholarship in rhetoric and composition have material and epistemological implications for how we discover, access, and make sense of the past. In light of these changes, I suggest that more explicit reflection and discipline-specific conversation around the uses and shaping effects of these technologies is needed. Tracing my own digitally enabled search for information about an early-twentieth-century advice writer named Frances Maule, I describe how mass digitization has shifted conditions of findability. I conclude by outlining a heuristic for critical reflection—a “principle of proximity”—and urging rhetoric and composition historians to take a more active role in shaping the emerging landscape of digital research.