Chapter one of Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, by Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova, is now online:

Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders

A decade ago, most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site, and scholars, editors, graduate directors and librarians were meticulous about the integrity of footnotes. They knew that citation was the backbone of research, from agronomy to zoology in the sciences and from art history to Zen studies in the humanities. The footnote upheld standards because it allowed others to test hypotheses or replicate experiments. Testing and replication are at the heart of the peer review and scientific processes upon which academe is based, from papers by first-year and transfer students to grants by postdoc and professor.

Because so much depended on the foundation of all scholarship, the footnote, academicians admonished students for sloppy or erroneous citation. This was the norm even a decade ago when most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site. Our discipline of communication scholarship was as exacting as any other in the academy, especially when it came to footnotes. Students submitting dissertations and faculty, journal articles, were fastidious about the accuracy of footnotes, knowing that their reputations relied on the fine print at the bottom of the page or at the end of the manuscript. Unacceptable were citations that simply named the source without specifying the document, as in “U.S. Mint, 801 9th Street NW, Washington, DC 20220-0001.” The worst types of mistakes would contain particulars, including an article’s title and date of publication, but might locate it in the wrong volume and issue of a journal. Indeed, if dissertation advisers went to the stacks to verify citations, as they often did, they would be aghast at checking a citation and finding none in any volume or number, or finding it with wrong pages or other particulars, and discovering a journal with those pages ripped out and missing. Those mistakes could doom a letter of recommendation for a job or advanced study. More…

From The Onion

Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text. …

“Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text

Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age

Authors: Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova
Price: $18.00
Published: Summer 2010
ISBN: 978-1-936117-14-7
Printed on acid-free paper

A decade ago, most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site, and scholars, editors, graduate directors and librarians were meticulous about the integrity of footnotes. They knew that citation was the backbone of research, from agronomy to zoology in the sciences and from art history to Zen studies in the humanities. The footnote upheld standards because it allowed others to test hypotheses or replicate experiments. In sum, the footnote safeguarded scientific method and peer review upon which academe is based, from papers by first-year and transfer students to books by postdoc and professor.

Since 2003, authors Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova (Iowa State University of Science and Technology) have been at the forefront of research on the erosion of online footnotes and its implication for scholarship. Their research has been showcased in The Chronicle of Higher Education and a number of academic journals, including The Serials Librarian, portal: Libraries and the Academy, New Media and Society and Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, among others. Their book documents the vanishing act in flagship communication journals and provides readers with methods to mitigate the effect.

Michael Bugeja is director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University where he also serves on the board of the Institute of Science and Society. He is the author of 20 books, including the acclaimed Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005) and Living Ethics across media platforms, and writes for several magazines, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. His comments about ethics appear in Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, Quill, Editor & Publisher and other publications.

Dr. Dimitrova’s research focuses on Information and Communication Technologies, Internet Diffusion, and Political Communication (ICTs). Her dissertation examined Internet adoption in the post-communist countries and proposed a multidimensional framework to predict Internet diffusion globally. Another interest is online news coverage of conflict (wars and terrorist attacks).

Malcolm Jones has an article in Newsweek’s online version (June 23) titled, “Slow Reading: An Antidote for a Fast World?” John Miedema’s book Slow Reading is hotlinked and the author quoted. This is the biggest press event for one of our books so far. John’s work seems to be having an impact.

[Note added later: The July 12 print edition has another, similar article on slow reading that also quotes John.]

Poet Dave Bonta has an podcast interview series on his Via Negativa blog. His latest interview is with John Miedema, author of Slow Reading. It’s a good listen.

For fun on a Friday, a couple of recent New Yorker “Shouts and Murmurs” columns related to our world:

Live Your Life

and

Subject: Our Marketing Plan

John Miedema gave his talk at the Library of Congress the other day, and has posted his text and bibliography.

John is working on an interesting follow-up project to Slow Reading…

From Salon: “Is the Internet melting our brains?” “No! The author of “A Better Pencil” explains why such hysterical hand-wringing is as old as communication itself.” By Vincent Rossmeier.

From The Australian: “Specialist Pleading,” by Frank Ferudi. “ONE of the most influential contemporary cultural myths is that our era is characterised by the end of deference. … Commentators interpret the declining influence of traditional authority and institutions as proof that people have become less deferential and possess more critical attitudes than in the past. However, it is less frequently noted that deference to traditional authority has given way to the reverence of expertise.”

From the L.A. Times: “The lost art of reading,” by David L. Ulin. “The relentless cacophony that is life in the 21st century can make settling in with a book difficult even for lifelong readers and those who are paid to do it.”

From Policy Review: “Orwell’s Instructive Errors,” by Liam Julian. “The edifying commentator is also a flawed one.”

Call for Papers

*Politics, Libraries and Culture: Historical Perspectives*

*Library History Round Table (LHRT) Research Forum, June 2010*

* *

The Library History Round Table (LHRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) seeks papers for its Research Forum at the 2010 ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., June 24-29, 2010. The theme of the Forum will be historical perspectives on the ways in which politics and libraries interact and influence one another. In this instance, politics should be considered broadly—not simply as concerning the administration of governments (international, national, state, local) but also the politics of other institutions and groups. Possible topics might be the effects politics have had on the history of libraries, archives, government documents and other cultural records. How have individual and institutional efforts of librarians influenced public policy pertaining to information access, reading, and services to the public? How have political concerns shaped the collection, preservation, availability and use of libraries and other repositories in different periods, locations, and jurisdictions? How have libraries, archives, and similar institutions tried to shape information politics and society through copyright law, the right to read, public library funding and other efforts?

LHRT welcomes submissions from researchers of all backgrounds, including students, faculty, and practitioners. Proposals are due on November 30, 2009. Each proposal must give the paper title, an abstract (up to 500 words), and the scholar’s one-page vita. Also, please indicate whether the research is in-progress or completed. Proposals should include the following elements: a problem or thesis the study addresses, a statement of significance, objectives, methods, primary sources used for the research, and conclusions (or tentative conclusions for works in progress).

From the submissions, the LHRT Research Committee will select several authors to present their completed work at the Forum. The program will be publicized in January 2010. So that the Forum’s facilitator may introduce and react to each author, completed papers are due June 4, 2010. The Research Forum will likely occur on Sunday, June 27, 2010. All presenters must register to attend the conference. For registration options, see ALA’s events and conferences page at http://www.ala.org/ .

*DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS*: November 30, 2009

*DEADLINE FOR COMPLETED PAPERS: * June 4, 2010

Please submit proposals and direct inquiries to:

* *

*Melanie A. Kimball
LHRT Vice-Chair/Research Committee Chair*
*Simmons** College*
*Graduate School of Library and Information Science
300 The Fenway*
*Boston**, MA 02115*
Telephone: (617) 521-2795
E-mail: melanie.kimball@simmons.edu

John Miedema, author of Slow Reading, will be speaking at a forum on the Future of Reading at the Library of Congress, on October 22nd. The forum is sponsored by the Library of Congress’ Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC).

“Verbiage” is a derisive word describing prose that uses many words to say not a lot, or more particularly, prose that uses words carelessly, to create impressions without attending to what the words actually mean in a specific sense. For techies, “verbiage” is stuff that English majors add later for the benefit of end users, but doesn’t really matter very much. Verbiage is intended to sound good without taking care to convey clear meanings. Insofar as verbiage reflects a lack of care in the choice of words it represents laziness and a disrespect for language. In the way it shows an intention of “sounding good” and creating impressions it reflects a mass-media culture dominated by advertising. It is wording that “has to be there” but isn’t worth paying attention to.

So I break my pencil (if I used a pencil at work) every time I am in a meeting and a co-worker says, “Ok, so Annette will take care of the verbiage on that page.” I don’t know if you hear this in your workplace, but I hear it in mine a lot. There are people in libraries who use the word “verbiage” to refer to anything we write to communicate with our users in a textual way. Shouldn’t we have more respect for our users? (Our readers?)

Libraries, of all places.

I think the decline of respect for language is tied to the rise of non-print media, as well as the rise of the culture of BS that Harry Frankfurter so insightfully talked about in On Bullshit.

Words come into fashion and are used as mild doublespeak, in a process of mass self-deception. Take “intuitiveness” as the name of the desired quality of Google-like user interfaces. What “intuitive” should mean if it describes a user interface is that the interface clearly communicates the underlying functionality to the user so that the user doesn’t have to read manuals to understand what the software or database’s functionalities are and how to employ them. The way the word tends to be used most often, though, is to describe interfaces that are made less confusing by reducing the functionalities that are available to users, often with the addition of an AI-based search engine in the background whose functionalities are opaque and not possible to control directly or with any precision. Used in this way, the word “intuitive” is deceptive, because the user actually understands less of what is going on under the hood than before, and is less able to control the search. The user becomes dependent on the intelligence of the search engine to give him useful results. If it works as intended, the search engine itself might be “intuitive” if it accurately understands the average user’s desires, but its interface is unintuitive relative to an interface that provides greater control of the underlying functionality. Furthermore, its “intuition” is based on assumptions about users based on averages, which works for some but not others.

A question I am interested in asking more and more is about where control is shifting and how it is shifting. It is generally viewed as technical progress when we develop better AI for interfaces between people and systems, but if the result is a loss of control for users, is this really user centered? Where is the respect for users? And if the respect isn’t going to the users, where is it going? And where is the control going?

A cultural theme in America for the past few decades has been a certain conservative populist “anti-elitism.” Barack Obama’s victory despite his vulnerability to the charge of elitism – owing to his statements about small town America “clinging to guns and religion,” his educational background, and his personal choice to assume an intelligent audience when he speaks – may mark the beginning of the end of this trend, for now. But the theme of cultural anti-elitism is still evident in the culture in a wide variety of forms – in popular culture, marketing, religion, and backlash against social ideas that have a strong foothold in the academy.

Oddly, as Thomas Frank has observed, America’s present anti-elitism is not directed at the power elites whose existence is what keeps America from its ideal of democracy but always at cultural elites – you know, people who think they know more than the average Joe or talk in ways that the average Joe doesn’t understand. In Frank’s diagnosis this problem was initially the fault of upper-middle class liberals who, because of their social class, could afford to protest the Vietnam war while the same generation’s working class lacked the leisure of college students and lacked the resources to escape the draft when called up. As a result, over the decades the education/class gap manifests as resentment against a class of liberals who, to “mainstream America” “just don’t get it.”

Thomas Frank’s recommended strategy for the Democrats in his 2005 book, What’s the Matter With Kansas, was to emphasize economic issues that the party’s traditional base cares about and to de-emphasize social issues for which the working class and a growing population of Hispanic voters supposedly have less sympathy – gay rights, abortion rights, funding for the arts, funding for higher education, etc. Frank’s recommendations were heard within Washington’s corridors (he moved there from Chicago after the book was published) and seem to have had some effect on Democratic policy directions.

Cultural anti-elitism is not always tied to anti-liberal backlash, however, at least not directly. I have encountered it in institutions of higher education over the years, coming from administrators who are more in touch with the pulse of funding than they are with the pulse of academic life, or from students who clearly aren’t in college because they are interested in intellectual pursuits but because they want that ticket to a middle class job. Administrators and tuition-payers want the curriculum to be “more relevant” to the needs of today’s college students, who, after all, have a louder voice than in the past because of the increased role of tuition and fees and the declining role of state subsidies in higher education. “Relevant,” unfortunately, means (on balance) less demanding and less theoretical, because today’s students are not inclined to spend much time reading for class, are less intellectually prepared for college-level work, are over-scheduled due to full time jobs and social activities, and relatively uninterested in academic subjects. To administrators, faculty who insist on high intellectual standards 1) have their heads in the sand and 2) don’t know which side their bread is buttered on. Faculty who get this message understand what is going on, but wonder who, if not they, are going to preserve, pass on, and encourage cultural achievements and the life of the mind.

After all, people whose lives are lived in the midst of poetry, science, art, and philosophy seldom choose to refer to themselves as “cultural elitists;” the term implies a populist perspective. From their own perspective, their ability to engage in these cultural pursuits, and the existence of an educational system that opens doors to this world to people of all backgrounds, is a primary measure of a society’s attainment of civilization.

It is one thing to make the populist argument that academics are out of touch with real world problems (sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not) but it’s another thing to devalue their cultural contributions or show hostility toward their values in favor of “real world, practical concerns.” Unfortunately, hostility toward what E. M. Forster called the aristocracy of the sensitive is present in academic institutions, which one would expect to be a refuge.

So there is the story; here is what it means in the context of debates in academic libraries.

A number of related trends that are influencing decisions in academic libraries are supported by cultural anti-elitism (though other factors of change may be more fundamental to them). The first is that of “adapting to the Millenials.” Among other things, this means retooling our services to suit students who we take it as a given will study by spending 20 minutes watching YouTube videos rather than six hours reading (selling them short in the process). The second trend is that of “making the collection more relevant.” Among other things, this means catering to popular tastes and duplicating the offerings of local public libraries, with circulation statistics to back up the shift of resources. The third trend that finds anti-elitist support is the continuing rationalization of work processes in libraries through automation, outsourcing, and bureaucratic efficiency measures, and the deprofessionalization into which it factors.

There is an enforcement dynamic that accompanies these trends. If you question the wisdom of moving in these directions, you are “against change.” The expectation is to demonstrate that you are a forward thinking librarian (countering the stereotypes) by de-prioritizing precisely what is offered by academic libraries alone in society – a rich collection of scholarly and literary texts and a high level of knowledge of what they contain in order to provide meaningful access to them. Instead, there is pressure to put emphasis on what people in other enterprises are already doing better and for which they are looked to first – social media, new media, and web technology. In jumping on the bandwagon we are jumping out of the boat. Anti-elitist pressure pushes in this direction because of what it values and de-values.

I think it is worth shifting the discussion away from the meaningless frame of “change, for it or against it” (as though “change” can only mean one thing) and toward the more relevant, underlying issue of anti-elitism versus the cultural pursuits that the academy is here to protect and cultivate. There is a thread of anti-intellectualism running through much of the talk about relevance and change that must be pointed out and identified on the spot – on blogs, at meetings, at conference presentations – so that it can be tied to its specific roots and manifestations, and separated out from a rational discussion of where to go from here. We should ask, who is being served and what is being undercut by specific changes? What is behind them? And, we should reject references to “change” in general as though its specifics are a given and not subject to intelligent planning, with consideration of the ends we want to achieve.

It’s funny how a lack of perspective can make cultural decay look like progress….

There is a common assumption that trends should be identified quickly so that we can more quickly and more fully adapt to them, in order to stay competitively ahead-of-the-curve and relevant.

But trends are not all the same. Let me give you an analogy. I have heard of two primary policy themes in response to global warming, which is of course a major current trend. The first, and most common theme, is to reduce our own contribution to global warming as much as possible in order to slow it down or reverse it. This is the Global Warming Must Be Stopped! theme. The other major policy direction, which I have heard advocated only occasionally, is to accept global warming as an inevitable fact, even though we can understand our own contribution to it as a process, and plan to adapt our economies to it as it progresses. So in response to global warming there are people who say Resist! and people who say Adapt!, despite agreement on both sides that it is a process that we have thrown into motion ourselves as industrialized nations.

Other trends are like this, though the balance between the Resisters and the Adapters may be reversed, and the threat to us less acute and less easily understandable.

I point this out in order to counter any assumptions people might have that “trends” are different from “problems,” in that “trends” are good, or at least should be regarded simply as “what is,” while “problems” are bad. We ought to decide for ourselves, thoughtfully, what trends are problems and what trends are blessings, and what trends are, shall we say, mixed blessings.

Among current social trends it is possible to focus on certain aspects, and draw out patterns, relations, and consequences.

So, If we consider as trends:

• The increasingly rapid pace of life
• The shift away from print media towards more interactive, sensory-stimulating aural and visual media
• The tendency to share our lives online, by choice
• The loss of personal privacy, not by choice
• The decline in educational standards, at least in terms of traditionally-valued skills having to do with written texts
• The shift from individualized to collective thinking
• The new ubiquity of communication technology and the 24/7 connectedness that it brings
• The decline in literary reading as a pastime (as noted by the NEA a few years ago)

…then I think it is possible to find a broader, emergent trend that ties these trends together. That trend concerns the interior space of a person.

Interior space.

As we lose our privacy, as our lives speed up and fill with signals, and as we lose time set aside for contemplation, the interior space that belongs to each person is progressively being diminished: shrunk down, grayed out, eroded away, and rendered exterior surface by exposure to the social world.

Interior space is something that people can cultivate. It is cultivated through time spent in sustained, imaginative reading; time spent meditating for greater mindfulness or higher consciousness; time spent reflecting on a problem, on an idea, or on past events; or time spent in another way, as long as it involves a degree of solitude and freedom from external demands. What interior space requires for its maintenance is time, solitude, autonomy, quiet, and a freedom from external sources of stimulation.

Interior space is something that the value of which is by nature difficult to explain, since it cannot be imagined in order to be understood without possessing a share of it. Making it harder to explain is that it is not an object, and descriptions imply objects. Attention focused on an object tends to distract one from apprehending its context, and interior space is more of a context-a place or a way-than a thing, and therefore apprehended differently. The attractions of external stimulation and highly dynamic connection to others are attention-diverting, perhaps in an essential way, and distract us from sensing the space we occupy internally. The difficulty of explaining what interior space is makes it difficult to say what is at stake in its loss or potential recovery. I tend to believe that we will miss it and will put concerted effort into recreating it when it is gone. This is my hope.

We know with certainty, however, that libraries, in being quiet spaces with books, are natural allies of interior space. Few other places are socially-sanctioned as allies of interior space. Religious buildings (temples, churches, synagogues, mosques) and nature preserves are two that come to mind. Museums are arguably another, depending on how one thinks about art.

My point, obviously, is that we, as librarians, should not overlook the value of libraries in their traditional sense, and should not be so quick to treat every social trend as inevitable, unquestionably good, or something that we Resist at the peril of a final loss of relevance.

In terms of relevance, it seems to me that what is making us less relevant is our feverish attempt to duplicate what other people are already doing better: social media, pop culture, and dumbed-down information via the web. We don’t become more relevant by making our identity more vague, occupying others’ shadows. It seems to me that what gives us continuing relevance is that what we offer above all – the means for creating and maintaining interior space – is in increasingly short supply, and is even becoming rare. That is a source of, not a threat to, our relevance.

If people have lost interest in interior space, then we should consider that if in a few years they come around wanting to regenerate it (and things tend to come back around), it would be a bad thing if there were no quiet places with books available to help them do it. The more quickly things change, the more disoriented people become. If anything ought to serve as a source of continuity, as something to come back to, a point of reference and a site for recovery of the self, I think it should be libraries.

John Buschman sent a link out this morning to this article by Chris Dede in the current EDUCAUSE Review, “A Seismic Shift in Epistemology. The article examines the deep changes in the meaning of knowledge in the academy and elsewhere that are being effected by new technologies, with a focus on Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 applications. It’s a brief article, but I think Dede does a good job of clarifying what is going on, and manages to be more critical than EDUCAUSE authors are normally able to be (although he is not a knee-jerk “classicalist”).

Dede notes that at present, “the response of most educators is to ignore or dismiss this epistemological clash.” I think that’s somewhat true, but it’s partly because educators have so little time these days to reflect on the way that they teach and the way their curricula are structured (an important part of the problem). I like seeing things like this and I hope to see more thinking along these lines – further development of insights and clarification of problems and opportunities.

John Miedema, author of Slow Reading, is doing an Author Chat on LibraryThing. His chat there will be going until May 22nd. Hope you’ll add your thoughts….