-----Original Message----- From: gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org [mailto:gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org]On Behalf Of Greg Newby Sent: Friday, November 12, 2004 1:47 PM To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] Perfection 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. Agreed. I have no reason to doubt you. However- you did say that your work is in Information Transfer, right? Do you think there might be a teensy bit of difference between a reference by an Information Transfer academic that is from an electronic journal and was published for other academics in that and related fields, and a citation of, say, Emily Dickenson's poetry without information as to when the book it was taken from was published- considering that it is now known that many earlier copies of Dickenson used incorrect punctuation because previous editors messed around with them? I'd have no problem accepting or using a citation of the US Census online- I've done it. I've used citations of NYS divorce and sexual offense law from online sources- no problem. All of those are frequently updated. But a citation of an out of print book in anthropology, English literature, the hard scieces, et al, which might very well not be correct in its information- that will be problematic. I would be very happy to see Boas online. Eventually I hope to track down an out of copywright version of his writings and scan it for PG. I'd like to do the same with Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and quite a few other people. However- and this is the big 'however'- while these texts would be useful for casual and serious non-academic readers, and even for many academic readers as a point of reference, theie usefulness would be seriously impaired without info as to who originally published the books and when. Boas' works vary according to edition- therefore, knowing which edition you are reading can matter if you are doing research on his theories. If I were doing online research in a general fashion onthe history of anthropology, it wouldn't matter. If I were writing a scholarly work, it would. It would also matter if there was no pagination. Again- I'm not talking about materials produced in the past twenty years. I'm talking about historical materials. They are not entirely electronic. Another example- I'm tutoring a 15 year old about the incidents that led up to WW2. We go online and find the Treaty of Versailles. He can cite it- not only is it a well-known document (making it easy to check for errors and lacunae), but each section of the treaty is numbered. It's easy for him to refer to Article 15 in a paper, and easy for a teacher to find the section in an online document. I would encourage him to use it in class, and to do an internet citation- no problem. But if he was to try to cite Winston Churchill's autobiography from an online site (Not that it's online) or Mein Kampf (which probably is), he'd run up against a problem. In chapter 5 there might be a very quotable sentence- but what my student doesn't know is that this sentence was changed in later editions. And there's no page number- does he tell his teacher to read the entire chapter to find a sentence that won't be there in a later edition? The last time I looked at PG (a few weeks ago) I found it very easy to red books if I wanted to read the whole text. If I wanted to find chapters or pages I had hard luck- I had to scan through whole documents. You don't have to believe me. Just find this quote. It's from The Koran. "And thou takest vengeance on us only because we have believed on the signs of our Lord when they came to us. Lord! pour out constancy upon us, and cause us to die Muslims." It's in Sura VII. I have no doubt that you'll find it- but it will take you quite a while to do so with no page numbers and no way to go to each section separately. As a teacher, I don't have time to read half The Koran (that's a hint, by the way)to find this one quote on PG. I can however find websites that will make the search much easier for me, and will provide some info on the translation. After all, I have no idea who JM Rodwell was, or whether his translation of The Koran is the definitive English version, or why his translation was chosen- other than that his book was out of copyright. From my point of view, that's a red flag itself. If this translation is so superb, why isn't it still being used- or is it? 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 I'm aware of that. As I states above, I've used electronic citations, even when professors raised eyebrows. But you are not dealing with my particular statements, which have nothing to do with the citation of contemporary documents and ephemera, or with copies of documents that make searches for particular passages much easier for readers and writers. I was very specific in my criticism- and since you have a degree in Information Transfer and have taught Library Science, it ought to be of concern to you, too. But being an expert in Information Trnasfer is not the same thing as doing research using out of print documents. Your business is making them readable and accessible, which is important. From where I stand that is important too, but less important than being able to consistently find passages, and checking to see the differences according to editions. Nietzsche's work for instance, was butchered by his sister. There are conflicting copies of his work floating around. When his works were copied for Project Gutenberg, did someone go for an out of copyright copy that is definitive, or one that his sister chopped up? Did that matter, or was it just more important to get a copy up? Cattle ranchers, butchers, and chefs all deal with meat. That doesn't make a chef an expert on cattle feed or an butcher an expert on how to best prepare beef in orange sauce. We may both be involved in academia, but our concerns regarding information technology might be very different- that doesn't mean that one or both of us are idiots, or that I'm a Luddite, or that you're a geek with no appreciation for what's inside the books you put up. 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 _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d