I provide citations in conversations. If I could speak in hypertext, I would. Most people find this odd.
I once read of a language (possibly fictional) where the grammatical structure demanded that you state the source of your claim. For example, every declarative sentence would start with something like “I once read of…” or “I was thinking…” If this is a fictional language, we need to make it.
: Zubon
oh i understand you very well! i happen to have the same… mmm “disorder”?
but being meticulous about one’s sources not only baffles the opposite site of the conversation, it also lades it with too much formal information, outside of the clear point of the message.
sometimes i feel i’d be happiest as an Ent on an Entmoot…
ps. there’s another fictional language you might find interesting – that of the Null-A series of A. E. van Vogt – it’s basic premise is to provide the language apparatus to be maximum specific in a statement
But… where would all the bullsh!t go???
I can just imagine conversations.
Me: “Weather is nice today isn’t it?”
You: “John Doe of Channel Eight news specifically said at 5:30 p.m. EST the weather was “horrid.” In addition, at weather.com the projected forecast is a 5.6 degree temperature drop from 40 degrees F, so in my opinion you can safely infer that, no, the weater is not nice today.”
Me: “Edges slowly away.”
A language where copious citations are required?
Wikipidgen?
I find it interesting that the article did not contain any hyperlinks or citations. I’m just saying.
Man, I fully support this inclination. Being a graduate student, and having read Vannevar Bush’s ‘As We May Think‘ a few years back, I fully support the use of hypertext-as-citation. ‘Showing your work’ and ‘drawing connections’ are fundamentally important aspects of both journalism and the academy — there’s no reason we shouldn’t ask bloggers to at least sometimes adhere to those conventions.
Pfft, we don’t hold journalists or scientists to those conventions, why bother with bloggers?
That said, I love hypertext. I’d use it in my academic papers if I could.
I was just thinking that. Just this week I read an almost great article in Skeptic magazine reviewing a book, and it skewered the book and hammered away at sources; but the article itself had no sources! This was pretty painfully evident when the article said the book ignored many studies done in the past 30 years, and I thought “such as?”
I wish I could remember every source, even because 2 years later I’ll be arguing a point and remember “there was this one study” or “remember when x happened” but I won’t remember or be able to even find it by Googling.
I have started using OneNote to store stuff like that, since I bought a Windows7Phone and now it syncs across my computers and phone, it is useful to store … notes :) But sometimes I think, do I really want to go through all this effort just so I can win some argument in a few years, when I won’t win it anyway, since no one really changes their mind. But I’ll just have the satisfaction of knowing “hey this really happened and I can point to it”.
edit1: Now that I think of it I need my Kindle quotes to sync with OneNote, and allow categorization and annotation (kindle might have annotation already) and links to other notes.
edit2: my ultimate goal is to not have to actually remember anything, memory will be outsourced, collective, and probably much more accurate for all of us (I just read some studies lately about how memory changes every time you access it, but as usual I can’t remember where!)
So, another question — what is your experience in academia?
A couple of degrees, then working with universities on grant programs for another eight years. And I read a bunch of academic bloggers, which is fun for crossover on this question.