[NOTE: the
paper version of this story, in the Sunday NY Times, contained blue highlighting
simulating hyperlinks. These were missing in the online version,
which contained footnotes at the end with some real hyperlinks, but
no hyperlinks in the text itself. I have added the simulated textual
hyperlinks to this copy of the online version, using blue color and underlining.
They are not real hyperlinks, they don't go anywhere if you click on them.
They make a different impression in the printed newspaper, where you are
not accustomed to colored hyperlinks. TG]
WHERE Have All the Footnotes Gone?'' the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb asked in a 1991 essay.1 At that point, footnotes lucky enough to survive at all had moved to the backs of books and turned into less scrutinized endnotes. Annotation was out; breezy, uninterrupted prose was in.
At around the same time that historians were getting upset at the decline of footnotes in journals and books, a physicist felt there had to be a way to improve the referencing system on the Internet. Instead of just getting upset, Tim Berners-Lee did something about it: he created the World Wide Web, writing the world's first browser and releasing his software as open-source code in 1991.2
Soon the missing footnotes would have a home.
The reading process mourned by scholars who thought footnotes superior to endnotes - who preferred the process of interruption, midstream re-evaluation and jumping around - is the natural process of reading on the Web. Small children who would normally not read books with footnotes until secondary school know their way around bright blue hyperlinks. 3 They learn early that a Web site isn't complete without references to other sites, and that the cooler the site, the cooler its links.
Indeed the Web has not only revived the footnote, it has spawned a cross-referencing craze that renders the formerly complete media event into a reference-laden, link-dependent, list-spewing wallflower waiting to be courted by the next available annotator. Television shows, newspaper articles and radio programs refer to Web sites, and those sites in turn refer to books, magazines and software. Cable channels like MSNBC have even asked viewers to watch television and the Internet simultaneously. The original glorious goal of such cross-referencing was hip media convergence: the actual result is fans running from the living room to the den in a frustrated effort to view the computer and television at the same time. One newspaper, The South Carolina Post-Courier, now publishes hyperlinks - not just Web addresses but actual bar codes that readers can scan using laser pens provided by the newspaper and, yes, attached to their PC's.
In the old-media world, the question was how to get the audience to stay with you. In the new-media world, it is how to get the audience to leave and come back again. After all, it is not readability that makes for greatness on the Web: it is clickability.
Obeying the Cartesian principle of new media - "I link, therefore I am" - the popular search engine Google ranks its results by popularity, measured in quantities of links. The best sites, then, are the ones most often cited.
Citing is a kind way of putting it - it can also be rehashing. It can be cannibalizing. Or, in the case of recent copyright disputes, stealing.
There are entire publications on the Web that are just indexes of other publications. The review Arts & Letters Daily, for example, culls entertaining articles from a wide variety of newspapers and magazines.4 Its originality lies in its extremely clickable headlines and in its rearrangement of already published materials.
In a realm where an index is hailed as a publication, the pressure to be original is outweighed by the heavier pressure to be well connected. Some of the connections grew out of strategic alliances between visionary new-media companies and terrified old-media companies. But since many 12-year-olds know enough html to create hyperlinks between sites, much cross-referencing has arrived unannounced, raising questions about the right to link.
A daily Internet newspaper, The Shetland News, published headlines that linked directly to stories in the electronic version of the weekly newspaper, The Shetland Times, without mentioning the source. The News used "deep links," connecting to the articles themselves and bypassing the competition's home page. The Times sued for copyright infringement. The parties reached a settlement that called for a redesign of the links.
At that time, cyberlaw was in its infancy, and anything seemed possible. A site operated by Total News Inc. had no original content, just links to 1,350 news outlets. In 1997, The Washington Post, Time Inc., CNN, Reuters New Media, the owners of The Los Angeles Times, and the owners of The Wall Street Journal sued Total News, a five-person operation in Phoenix, over multiple copyright and trademark violations. The attorneys for the plaintiffs called Total News a "parasitic Web site." In the settlement, Total News was prohibited from using "frames," a technology that did make its site look particularly parasitic: CNN or Reuters items would pop up, conveniently bordered by the Total News logo and ads. Like deep links, frames can make another site seem like your own. Such connecting devices don't merely link; they also claim credit.
"Inline" linking runs even deeper, bringing information inside a site. In 1996, a graduate student at Princeton, Dan Wallach, used this technique to import the daily Dilbert comic strip to his home page. United Media Syndicate threatened to sue, and he removed it. Mr. Wallach argued that he had designed the page so that the company's content did not reside permanently on his server, and that if he was guilty of copyright infringement, so was any search engine. He wrote to the syndicate's attorney that, "Technically, I present a directory of pointers in much the same way as Yahoo, Lycos or Alta Vista."5
Of course, it's hard to imagine an intellectual property lawsuit against one of those engines. But smaller search engines have come under attack, just as hyperlinking has, for "pointing" to copyrighted material in currently pending cases in the film and music industries.
Link suits have proven legally complex, involving claims of false advertising, misappropriation, fair use and the hyperlink's friend, the First Amendment. They have also proven morally complex, raising questions of originality, and of whether pointing to another's work can be a work in itself.
An imaginatively hyperlinked site should ideally have the beauty of a collage, or at least of a gallery exhibit. Its references should resonate the way good literary allusions do - even more so, because literary references speak to an elite readership, while cyber-allusions are for everybody. Indeed, they are so universally accessible that the lines between allusion and authorship, between curating and creating, can become blurred. Problems arise when the curators see themselves as artists, or worse, when they hang other people's art in their own galleries without permission.
Oddly, it is only huge Big-Brother-like corporations who wield enough clout to prosecute creative plagiarists and defend the individual creator, often making cyberpirates seem like sympathetic underdogs.
On the Web, artworks can be summoned by the push of a button, much the way the hero makes paintings appear in his mansion in the movie "The Thomas Crown Affair,'' but without the bother of building trick walls or breaking into the Metropolitan Museum. Those who push the buttons online are considered not international art thieves but designers and entrepreneurs; and then collecting aspires to be an art.
The decline of originality may not be illegal, but it is upsetting. You don't have to go far to find an unauthorized copy of Ms. Himmelfarb's essay on the Web: a quick search, and there it is, electronic reprint rights presumably not paid, linked to a syllabus.
Now that the missing footnotes have resurfaced, scholars have other things to worry about.
NOTE: The hyperlinks
below were printed in blue and underlined in the original newspaper article.
2. For the Berners-Lee home page, see http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
3. Hyperlinks may lead to lovely places unless the links themselves have expired. Then they lead to error messages.
4. See http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/
5. For the full correspondence between Mr. Wallach and United Media Syndicate, go to http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/dilbert/um-letters.html
---------------
Here is Gertrude Himmelfarb's
article, copied from an
online syllabus. Note that copying material raises copyright
issues, but not plagiarism issues, as long as full attribution is given
for all copied material.
| Image Source: Drawing by Richard McGuire, copied from "Where Have All the Footnotes Gone," by Gertrude Himmelfarb, © The New York Times Book Review,June 16, 1991, p. 24. | |
"Where Have All the Footnotes Gone?"
Gertrude Himmelfarb
©New York Times Book Review, June 16, 1991, p. 1, 24.
As a professional trend spotter, I must report the latest manifestation
of the end-of-civilization-as-we-have-known-it: the
absence of footnotes in a growing number of scholarly books.1
Like all moral lapses, this one started on a slippery slope: the relegation
of notes to the back of the book. And, like all such
lapses, this one has a venerable precedent. It was in 1754, in his
"Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality
Among Men" (familiarly known as the "Second Discourse") that Jean-Jacques
Rousseau appended to the preface an ominous
"Notice on the Notes":
"I have added some notes to this work, following my lazy custom of working
in fits and starts. These notes sometimes stray
so far from the subject that they are not good to read with the text.
I have therefore relegated them to the end of the Discourse,
in which I have tried my best to follow the straightest path. Those
who have the courage to begin again will be able to amuse
themselves the second time in beating the bushes, and try to go through
the notes. There will be little harm if others do not
read them at all."2
Rousseau's notes have preoccupied scholars who find in them esoteric
meanings not available in the text, and who interpret
the "Notice" itself, professing to belittle the notes, as an invitation
to read them most carefully and seriously. A more
literal-minded reader however, may take Rousseau's directive at face
value as a justitication for the now common practice
of placing notes (when there still are notes) at the back of the book.
In extenuation of Rousseau it should be said that his notes are discursive
rather than bibliographical. If he wanted to play
games with his readers, saying one thing in the text and another in
the notes, that is the philosopher's privilege. It is quite
another matter for a scholar to be cavalier about his references. And
this is what has happened as notes have lost their
honorable status as footnotes and assumed the demeaning position of
endnotes.
Publishers instigated this practice for obvious reasons of economy (or
esthetic reasons of space, as in the case of this
journal). And authors acquiesced, in the hope that by hiding the scholarly
paraphernalia they would make their books more
readable and marketable. In fact, so far from becoming more readable,
scholarly books have become considerably less so.
Nonscholarly readers had, in any case, long since learned to ignore
the tiny asterisks or numbers in the text and the footnotes
in small print at the bottom of the page. But scholars, who love footnotes
(some are known to read only the footnotes), and
who continue to make up the bulk of the readers, are sorely inconvenienced.
Instead of dropping their eyes to the bottom of
the page to find the source of a quotation (and, if they are lucky,
an acerbic comment by the author) and returning to the text
without skipping a beat, they are now obliged to turn to the back of
the book, thus interrupting their reading of the text and
losing their place to boot - indeed, losing their place twice over,
for in order to locate the endnote they have first to turn
back the pages of the text itself to find the chapter number, which
will then guide them to the page at the back containing the
endnotes for that chapter. (Even on those too rare occasions when there
are running heads on the endnote pages indicating the
corresponding pages in the text, it takes two bookmarks to keep track
of one's place in the text and in the back of the book).
The physical discomfort of the reader is the least of the evils resulting
from the displacement of footnotes. More serious is
the demoralizing effect on the author. This demoralization first exhibits
itself in a casual attitude toward the form of the
citations. With the notes relegated to obscurity, the author is apt
to be negligent about the proper conformation of the vital
data: author (first name or initials first), title (of book underlined,
of article in quotation marks), name of editor or translator
(if necessary), place and date of publication (and publisher, if desired,
all within parentheses), volume number (where
required in capital Roman numerals), page number (Arabic numerals).
The indifference to form inevitably engenders an indifference to content.
Having violated the proprieties of sequence,
punctuation and the like, the author is tempted to be careless about
such details as accuracy and relevance. It is easier at the
back of the book than at the bottom of the page to give a faulty or
incomplete citation, or to parade one's erudition by citing a
dozen sources rather than the single pertinent one. And from such peccadilloes
one may lapse into a disrespect for the very
idea of notes and decide to dispense with them altogether.
The gravity of this situation can be fully appreciated only by survivors
of the most arduous school of footnoters: University
of Chicago Phd D.'s of the 1945-60 vintage. Aged Ph.D.'s from other
universities, reminiscing about their graduate school
experiences, tend to be obsessed with their oral examinations, relating,
with quivering voice and total recall, the cruel and
unusual questions put to them by their interrogators. For University
of Chicago graduates, these traumatic memories are
overshadowed by the formidable figure of Kate L. Turabian.
Miss Turabian (even the most irreverent of us never spoke of her as
Turabian, stlll less as Kate) held no professorial chair,
but she had the much more powerful position of "dissertation secretary."
Outside of Chicago she is remembered as the author
of the much-reprinted (and revised) manual establishing the rules governing
dissertations, professional journals and books
with any pretense to scholarly reputability. It is this manual (based
upon an earlier University of Chicago Press style sheet)
that laid down such arcane and inviolable rules as that the proper
name in a footnote appears with the given name preceding
the surname while the reverse is the case in the bibliography, or that
the title of a published work is underlined in typescript
(italicized in print) whereas that of an unpublished one is in quotation
marks and neither underlined nor italicized, or that a
quotation of two or more sentences and four or more lines is indented
and single-spaced, whereas a one-sentence quotation
longer than four lines or a quotation of two or more sentences shorter
than four lines is not indented or single-spaced.3
Elsewhere these rules were regarded as a matter of convenience and convention.
At the University of Chicago, where Miss
Turabian personally enforced them and had the power to reject any dissertation
deviating from them, they were matters of the
greatest urgency. They acquired, in fact, something of a mystique.
A cynic (and there were such, even among us) might think
them trivial and arbitrary, the initiation rites into academia, the
dues paid to the guild in return for the anticipated privileges
and perquisites of a university position. To the true believer they
were the articles of faith to which one subscribed on
entering the profession. However arbitrary some of those articles were
(even a devout Anglican might jib at some of the
church's Thirty-nine Articles, or the pious Jew at some of the 613
commandments of his faith 4 - which was more like the
number of rules in Miss Turabian's style sheet), the canon as a whole
had the quality and authority of a covenant. Or rather it
estab lished two covenants: the first among the scholars themselves,
the members of the clergy, binding them to a common
credo; the second between the clerics and the laity, the authors and
their readers, serving as a pledge of orthodoxy and
righteousness.
For those of a less religious turn of mind, the rules governing footnotes (that there would be footnotes goes without questio
n)are a warrant, if not of righteousness, then of accountability. They
are meant to permit the reader - the scholarly as well as
the lay reader - to check the author's sources, facts, inferences and
generalizations, and to do so as easily as possible. This is
the rationale for the seemingly arbitrary rules; in prescribing the
exact form and sequence in which the required data are to
be communicated, they make it more likely that the data will be fully
and accurately communicated and that lapses will be
readily discerned.
This is why an annotated bibliography at the end of the book or each
chapter is no substitute for footnotes; they attest to the
author's erudition but do not provide the means of verifying specific
quotations or assertions. It is also why endnotes are less
satisfactory than footnotes; remote from the text, the citations are
apt to be less precise and less pertinent.
Even the most zealous footnoter would concede that footnotes are only
a partial guarantee of integrity and accountability.
They make it possible to determine whether a quotation has been accurately
transcribed and whether the source contains the
facts attributed to it, but not whether the quotation or source is
itself accurate, adequate or relevant. They do, however, make
it easier for a diligent reader to judge its accuracy, adequacy and
relevance. And they make it a little harder for authors (not
impossible, authors being notably ingenious and not notably scrupulous)
to distort the sources or deviate too far from them. If
they do not quite put the fear of God in scholars, they do make them
more fearful than they might otherwise be of colleagues
so inconsiderate and untrusting as to check their citations and actually
read their sources.
God, it has been said, resides in the detail. I hope it is not sacrilegious
to suggest that scholarship too resides in the detail. It
is fashionable today, among one school of historians, to deride "facticity"
and exalt "invention." This is the bottom of the
slippery slope that started when footnotes were replaced by endnotes
and endnotes by no notes.
1. E.g., Simon Schama, "Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution"
(New York, 1989); F. M. L. Thompson, "The Rise
of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900"
(London, 1986); G. E. Mingay, "The
Transformation of Britain, 1830-1939" (London, 1986); Gordon A. Craig
"The Triumph of Liberalism: Zurich in the Golden
Age, 1839-1869" (New York, 1988); Arno J. Mayer, "Why Did the Heavens
Not Darken? The 'Final Solution' in History"
(New York, 1988); Peter Ackroyd "Dickens" (London, 1990); Michael Holroyd
"Bernard Shaw" (New York, 1988). In the
last case, the references have been promised at the close of the third
volume, - at which time, presumably, the readers of the
first two volumes, published some years earlier, may be expected to
go back and consult those notes. Some of these books
(by Mr. Schama and Mr. Ackroyd for example) have bibliographical essays
but not specific notes and page references. One
might think that anyone prepared to read scholarly books on these subjects
and at this length would not be put off by
footnotes. (The Dickens book runs to 1,195 pages, Mr. Schama's on the
French Revolution is a mere 948 - - pages Mr.
Mayer's is a 492 pages, and the three volumes on Shaw will add up to
something like 1,400 pages.)
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "The First and Second Discourses," ed. Roger
D. Masters, trans. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters
(New York, 1964), p. 98.
3. Kate L. Turabian, "A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and
Dissertations" (Phoenix Ed., Chicago, 1960). This
essay, as it appears here, flagrantly violates some of these rules
in part because it follows New York Times usage rather
than Miss Turabian's (placing titles of books, for example, within
quotation marks rather than italicizing them), and in part
because Miss Turabian's manual has itself gone through so many revised,
and increasingly latitudinarian, editions since its
first appearance.
4. According to Miss Turabian, numbers with fewer than three digits
should be written out, while those with three digits or
more appear as numerals, except where the smaller numbers are in close
proximity to the larger ones, in which case both
sets of numbers' are given in numerals. The Thirty-nine Articles, however,
are governed by their own convention, which
prohibits their-being reduced to numerals.
To a strict constructionist, the placing of this footnote number in
the text is questionable. Except where it is clearly
unavoidable, such numbers (or symbols) should be placed at the end
of the sentence, not in the middle. In this case the
exception seems to me justified (although Miss Turabian might well
have disallowed it).