Bytes Might Smite Cites?

Greetings, Gentle Reader.

If you are visiting for some knee-slap and rib-tickle, then bustle on over to my blog, the truth hurts , and avail away.

If you are here for a sober and scholarly discussion of the state of practice in citing research sources, you have surfed to the right place.

I have five minutes before class, so this will be a rushed post, hopefully to be expanded later. My thesis, if you will, is this: the current standard styles, developed at great pains to provide the maximum credit in the minimum of space, are quickly being superceded by the greater flexibility and elegance of the hyperlink. Even in printed papers, the current wisdom about source citation is so deeply influenced by the (let's face it) superior citation capacities of the Internet, that the best among our scholars is hard pressed to catch up.

Case in point: phrases that have been popularized, such as "Gentle Reader" currently pass through a limbo during which they still must be cited in text, thereby stopping the flow or truncating the ending of perfectly good sentences all over the English-speaking world. At some point, however, these phrases become so lingua franca that no citation is needed, therefore impoverishing future usage for readers and writers who have no idea what the phrase originally denoted and now connotes.

How much lovelier is it to provide a hyperlink instead, which endures through the transitional stage of usage and beyond? In a click, there you have it: history, context, credit. Yet if you are rushed or simply want to enjoy the sentence on its own, you have a choice today's print-text reader does not: you can skip the link.

As a bonus, if you do click the link and then wander onward to find out more via Google or Dogpile, you get value added and wonderful fuzzy logic around the original idea.

All from one phrase. Kewl.

More anon.