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FlickrNew Forms of Reference?
These posts keep getting shorter; I wonder if perhaps we are approaching some sort of blog singularity here, where eventually the novels I hope to post will just start magically appearing here for you all to read. The things men dream before their coffee...
What brings me here is actually a Saturday morning breakfast scan of the wonderful and illuminating Cabinet of Wonders. Her recent topic of focus seems to be menageries, and that in and of itself is wonderful (though I shouldn't view pictures of strange animals first thing in the morning, it leads to visualizing how they'd each feel crawling across my bare feet). What really riveted me, though, enough to warrant a post, was a single footnote in the second paragraph: "'the price of admission was three half-pence or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions.' [wiki]" (emphasis mine).
[wiki]. Thrown out as simply and as casually as [3], or [Atlas Shrugged, pp 87-91]. As though this were a thoroughly legitimate bit of academic annotation.
A Google search for "[wiki]" is fruitless, of course, given that the engine won't pay much attention to the brackets; and I don't know enough about Heather MacDougal to know if she's fully plugged in to current mainstream academic endeavor. But nevertheless, she is an eloquent and clearly educated writer, if not necessarily formally so, so I don't think this is necessarily random chance. The reference made by the footnote is relatively clear, if in need of more specification in a bibliography, and the information is exactly the sort one would quote from another source.
Is the war beginning to go quiet? Have mainstream intellectuals begun to accept wikis as a source of real and verifiable data? I'm not wholly overjoyed at the prospect--wikis are a great launchpad, but need at least as much if not more verification of sources to be solid points of reference--but I do love to see this sort of cultural progress in action. Maybe next we'll be seeing it in scholarly essays published online. Or maybe Ms. MacDougal is a fluke, and we'll be going right back to the same internecine war about what should or shouldn't constitute a primary or secondary source. Either way, I'm excited to see what happens next.
What brings me here is actually a Saturday morning breakfast scan of the wonderful and illuminating Cabinet of Wonders. Her recent topic of focus seems to be menageries, and that in and of itself is wonderful (though I shouldn't view pictures of strange animals first thing in the morning, it leads to visualizing how they'd each feel crawling across my bare feet). What really riveted me, though, enough to warrant a post, was a single footnote in the second paragraph: "'the price of admission was three half-pence or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions.' [wiki]" (emphasis mine).
[wiki]. Thrown out as simply and as casually as [3], or [Atlas Shrugged, pp 87-91]. As though this were a thoroughly legitimate bit of academic annotation.
A Google search for "[wiki]" is fruitless, of course, given that the engine won't pay much attention to the brackets; and I don't know enough about Heather MacDougal to know if she's fully plugged in to current mainstream academic endeavor. But nevertheless, she is an eloquent and clearly educated writer, if not necessarily formally so, so I don't think this is necessarily random chance. The reference made by the footnote is relatively clear, if in need of more specification in a bibliography, and the information is exactly the sort one would quote from another source.
Is the war beginning to go quiet? Have mainstream intellectuals begun to accept wikis as a source of real and verifiable data? I'm not wholly overjoyed at the prospect--wikis are a great launchpad, but need at least as much if not more verification of sources to be solid points of reference--but I do love to see this sort of cultural progress in action. Maybe next we'll be seeing it in scholarly essays published online. Or maybe Ms. MacDougal is a fluke, and we'll be going right back to the same internecine war about what should or shouldn't constitute a primary or secondary source. Either way, I'm excited to see what happens next.
posted by Tyler at
9:08 AM
2 Comments:
Aha! I've been wondering if this would happen.
In writing a blog, I'm choosing to follow the styles and guidelines of bloggers, rather than that of academics. Blogging is by nature an imperfect and fluid medium of discussion, so (to my great joy) I do not have to worry about sources quite the way I would for an academic paper. I am quite fine with referring to any Wikipedia article which is well-written, whose facts appear to check out, and which is not clearly suspect.
That said, I may have missed actually putting a link on the [wiki] to which you refer! The average blog post takes me a whole day to write (including finding/posting pictures), and I occasionally miss a detail like that. In the world of blogging, putting a link there would obviate the necessity of having a perfect reference, because you can actually *go* there, instead of looking it up.
So... if I missed the link, pardon! I will correct it. Which is one of the great differences between blogs and papers: you can go back and fix things.
Which is wonderful.
Meanwhile - mwahaha. I am as interested as you to see if traditional style will become subverted by the new medium...
So let me start, and say that it was a delightful treat to see you post a response to this! May I ask how you stumbled across this post-about-a-post?
I agree with you on pretty much all points--I judge wiki articles no differently than I do any scholarly article, looking for sources and verifying those sources exist. I do apologize for hitting an error and calling it a revolution, but I think you hit on the other simple revolution that blogging is causing--the ability to set up a method by which an essay's source material can be instantaneously verified.
Fun fact: I included a Wikipedia article among the references for my Master's thesis ("Albinism" was the article in question); so maybe, in a roundabout way, this entire post exists purely so you can deny leading the revolution and I can take up the flag myself. A guy can dream, can't he?
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