[Air-l] quoting Internet sources: reproducing errors and typos?

Alexandra Samuel alex at alexandrasamuel.com
Sat Jul 31 13:37:05 PDT 2004


Now that I am arriving at the final edit stage of my dissertation on
hacktivism, I find myself struggling with an aesthetic and scholarly
dilemma. Since so much of my interview material comes from e-mail and IRC
exchanges, and much of my additional material comes from site defacements,
bulletin boards, etc, the direct quotations in my dissertation are just
jammed with typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors.

I feel that it would be irritating and condescending to insert a "sic" after
every error. But in correcting them I lose some relevant information (like a
sense of whether the respondent is a native English speaker) and compromise
the accuracy of the quotation. My current compromise is to leave all the
errors intact, but to acknowledge the problem in an early footnote. But this
seems a bit problematic, too, since all the errors are a bit distracting,
and maybe do a disservice to my research subjects. After all, who among us
would want our IRC typos preserved for eternity?

I'd love to know how others have handled this. I haven't been able to find
any standard for how this should be handled in Internet research.

Thanks,


-- 
Alexandra Samuel
samuel at fas.harvard.edu
http://www.alexandrasamuel.com







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