citation systems for new media
Thursday, June 19th, 2008One of the things often discussed on this blog is the nature and challenges of the open peer-to-peer system of review that MediaCommons hopes to launch. A recurring question is this: once such a system has been designed and implemented, how do you get scholars to participate in and support it, both senior scholars who may be heavily invested in the current system and junior scholars who are expected to succeed under entrenched guidelines for promotion and tenure? If we want authors to contribute to an open-access platform on the web that determines prestige in new ways, then we need to create a system of incentives for them to do so. For example, we’ve discussed generating a letter for each author’s tenure and promotion dossier that documents how often her MC-published work has been accessed, linked to, and cited, and how it’s been received, commented upon, and re-used.
It’s the citation problem and its relationship to “usage patterns” that I want to focus on here. In the American Council of Learned Societies’ report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the authors identify “citation systems” as one essential element of a robust cyberinfrastructure, in part because of the role they play in information retrieval (6). Likewise, the University of Maryland’s online guide to citation systems and style manuals includes this statement about why referencing sources is important:
Proper citation allows others to locate the materials you used. This allows interested readers to expand their knowledge on a topic. In some disciplines, one of the most effective strategies for locating authoritative relevant sources is to follow footnotes or references from known valuable sources.
Despite their importance, however, the citation conventions we’ve evolved for print resources are often inadequate for electronic resources. This is not, strictly speaking, a citation problem; it is an information services problem. Moreover, it is a problem that is especially acute in the arts and humanities, where we deal with aesthetic objects whose experimental nature often makes them difficult to classify and document. For example, The MLA style manual–the manual of record for arts and humanities scholars–offers no guidance on how to cite a variety of emerging creative genres that are native to the WWW: how, for instance, would you cite a machinima production? Harry Potter fan fiction? A “mixed reality” art work, such as Filthy Fluno’s Sintetika, which exists both as a virtual painting in Second Life, and a limited edition print in Real Life? A YouTube mashup? A transmedia novel, such as Cathy’s Book, that tells a story across multiple media? If such works are essentially un-citable using existing citation standards, then they risk becoming invisible because they cannot easily circulate within scholarly communication channels. (more…)
