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

Nancy Baym nbaym at ku.edu
Sat Jul 31 17:47:15 PDT 2004


It depends a bit on your discipline, advisor, etc, but if you were my 
student, I'd advise you to include a brief discussion in your methods 
section explaining that the quoted material has been left as it was, 
that it includes 'errors,' and that these 'errors' are part of the 
culture you are trying to describe, so that "correcting" them would 
do a disservice to your project in just the ways you describe below. 
Nancy

>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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-- 
Nancy Baym	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org




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