Friday, June 17, 2005

Technologies du Langage: Web: Broken links in online journals: I have just read a worrying article in the latest edition of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, "Hyperlink Obsolescence in Scholarly Online Journals", by James Ho.[...]Frankly, I can’t help but think that if the catastrophic proportion of broken links revealed to us by James Ho hasn’t created more of an outcry, it can only be because the inclusion of references is becoming a kind of simple social ritual that must be followed in order to be published, but which in the end no-one really cares about -- not the authors themselves, nor their readers, and least of all referees, who never have enough time to go and check them out. French novelist, poet, playwright and essayist Georges Perec (who once wrote an entire novel without using the letter e) provides a wonderful caricature of this state of affairs in his Cantatrix Sopranica. I would like to thank my friend Benoît Habert for letting me know that this work is now available on the Internet [en] [fr]: it hasn’t aged a bit and is still absolutely hilarious (although some puns in the citations may be lost in the translation). Let’s not forget that Perec was a librarian at the CNRS (the French National Centre for Scientific Research), which must have helped a bit! (Via Technologies du Langage.) Citation is a dying skill in part because formally proper citations are less and less needed to find articles because of improving search engines. For example, PubMed allows us to find articles easily given some author names and title words. Conflicting citation and bibliography styles suggest that much of "proper citation" is stale, pretentious, non-functional tradition. 9:25:31 AM