On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 10:48:18AM -0500, Her Serene Highness wrote:
And herein lies some of the problem. I'm a college professor, and I recently earned my PhD. I would have had a hard time getting a rtext past my professors without being able to document who published it. I would have a hard time making a citation to a document with no pages. I would be very annoyed with a student who just pointed to something on the net that had no provenance whatsoever- even many pieces of ephemera have provenance. I don't think this is a matter of fuddy-duddy professors who just don't understand how wonderful e-books are; I think the very concept of e-books as it now stands, while excellent for casual readers or people who simply want to educate themselves, is deeply flawed. When I am citing a text, I cannot refer to a vague document. I need to know EXACTLY when the original was published, who published it, and where, since there are variant texts out there. Even a single word change that might have occurred in the copying process could change the meaning of a vital sentence. PG is wonderful- but as a student and a teacher, I don't think that most cybertexts provide the citability that is so important for academics. If PG was the only source in the world for vital texts, that would be one thing- but it isn't. ...
My Ph.D. in Information Transfer is from 1993. I've taught Internet stuff and a whole lot of other things since 1988. I went to college in 1983, and never left, holding faculty positions since 1991 - in short, I'm very much a professional academic. Here are some of my experiences related to electronic texts: - I *have* entirely electronic articles cited in my academic vita (http://petascale.org/vita.html). Nobody (none of my deans, etc.) has even raised an eyebrow. Today, like always, peer review and the reputation of the publication are what matters, not whether it was printed. - I have refused paper submissions of any assignments from my students for years (http://petascale.org/paperless.html), including master's theses and doctoral dissertations. Again, this is just not a problem. At the end of the degree process, we (the committee) signs a piece of paper and the student submits copies of the printed document to the library. Then, a PDF or similar goes to various archives and Web pages, and is available for widespread free access. - I was recently appointed Editor of the standards document series in the Global Grid Forum (http://www.ggf.org), which publishes an all-electronic document series modeled after the RFC series published by the IETF (which is much older, and is essentially the standards that defines the Internet). - Every citation format (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) specifies how to cite documents which are not printed. For the most part, they distinguish between epheremal stuff like email messages and more permanent stuff like online journal articles. This is still difficult, and many people cite inappropriate items as though they were published documents rather than things like personal communication, changeable Web pages, etc. But it's certainly done, and it's done in journal articles (print & electronic), standards documents, books, newspaper articles, etc. Here's one of many good pages describing electronic citation: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_docelectric.html In short, I'm happy to say that my experience is completely different than yours. Moreover, unlike you, I seem to have specific documents, citations and processes to back up my impressions, while you haven't provided any. Certainly it's the case that some academic fields rely more on the exact words of a particular printed item. Hermeneutics is an example, and some others of the historical, classic & humanities disciplines. But to dismiss "academics" as being unable to deal with online content (as the subject/object of research, as support for research, or as the published outcome of research) is certainly an overstatement, and inconsistent with the experiences of me and my academic peers. -- Greg