For not-so-distant future reference:
Respect the URL in Reference Lists
MLA.org has nice, simple URLs that you can pull up on an iPhone from memory.
- Tagged With:
- Chicago, IL 2:44PM
As of the seventh edition of the MLA Handbook, “the MLA no longer recommends the inclusion of URLs in the works-cited-list entries for Web publications.”
The logic behind this is that URLs are often long and unwieldy (ironically, the worst offenders in this department are often major bibliographic indexes and article repositories, not to mention the mile-longers offered up by Amazon.com), and that retyping URLs is not nearly as efficient as simply Googling for the author and title of a work. (On this second point, I agree; but as I suggest below, omitting URLs is not the solution.)
There are two significant flaws with this logic.
The first is that the MLA seems to be imagining a web governed by restrictive copyright, one that is free from Creative Commons and other forms of permissive content licensing. Only in a locked-down copyright scenario does the assumption hold that a given document on the web would have one single, solitary location–not to mention one single, solitary version. In reality, neither is true: not only because of Creative Commons licensing (which leading web-available scholarly journals such as Kairos and First Monday openly encourage their authors to use), but also because of RSS feeds, JSON, and other modes of content syndication that make one piece of content easily published in multiple locations. Add to this sites like the World Wide Consortium that explicitly and meticulously version all of their pages, and the “Just Google it!” idea behind omitting URLs quickly reveals its limits.
The second flaw in the MLA’s logic is that it misses the entire point of URLs (or more generally URI: Uniform Resource Identifier) on the web. URLs are the only means for reliably referring to a particular item on the web and other parts of the internet. URLs are also the only means for accessing pages stored in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which is an essential scholarly tool. I cannot say how many times I have read articles, particularly in the fields of computers and writing and digital humanities, that cited now-defunct websites and web pages, only to find them via Wayback. Without a URL/URI in those articles’ lists of references, this type of crucial digital archive reading would be impossible. And while one could argue that Wayback needs a text search, it would reveal the same problems of uniqueness in referring to live pages. Read the rest of this entry.
Twitrhet: From Nothing to a Website in One Week
Clay Spinuzzi has probably the best description of the value of Twitter that I’ve read, something that he calls the “ambient status” that emerges from ones collected followers:
I get a sense of the trends in the fields in which I work, but also the well-being of my contacts. I see when they’re engaging in activities similar to mine. I can tell when they’re struggling with particular issues. I can get a sense of what they’re reading, writing, and studying.
The problem is that Twitter does not make it terribly easy to find other people, at least in its basic, twitter.com-based form. If someone’s not using their full name or an email address that you know, finding that person is next to impossible. And finding people generally is either pure luck or the haphazard function of sites like twollow.com, which sets your account to automatically follow someone if they tweet a word from a list of keywords that you specify.
But other means of self-organizing around Twitter are emerging, such as TwittGroups.com, which helps establish membership lists and, more importantly, a shared hashtag for the group. (Hashtags are nothing more than a hash, #, followed by a word or acronym; hashtags.org is a key site that aggregates hashtags.)
The people I follow on Twitter who are also a part of rhetoric, composition, writing, technical communication, and so on, tend to use conference-based hashtags. But it occurred to me that what we really needed was a shared hashtag that could be used all of the time, apart from conferences. In the rhetoric and writing community, #cccc09 is in wide use because of the conference is going on now.
But what happens next week? Read the rest of this entry.