[Air-L] Citing from a Kindle

[Cristina Lopez]

But it seems that googling the phrase is a different kind of activity than
consulting the cited source. A search might help you find other authors who
have mobilized the idea, and very likely a Wikipedia entry. Or a search
might not yield useful results because as Gil points out, Barthes never used
that exact phrase anyway. (Is Google Search smart enough to know that what
you really seek is the "the impossible science of the unique being?") While
I often use Google for exactly that purpose, searching for information isn't
the same as going back to the source cited to develop better understanding
of the context, or to decide if the author has engaged in a good reading.

Moreover, while it's easy to imagine that citation practices will change to
make it easier than ever to find the information we need, I can see a
downside. Ebooks with hypertext citations would be a great convenience. But
while hypertext provides access to all kinds of information, the constant
pursuit of the next link is not conducive to thought. From Jodi Dean's Blog
Theory: "My wager is that critical media theory is possible in book form.
The wager is inspired by a time-honored tactic in workers' struggle: the
slow-down. As an object whose form installs delays in sampling and
syndication and whose content demands postponed gratification, the book
mobilizes the gap of mediacy so as to stimulate thought." (Dean 3).


On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Peter Timusk <ptimusk at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> May be you could just google "the impossible science of the individual,"?
> that's a joke btw but suggests scholarship may be changing.
>
> Peter Timusk B.Math statistics. BA legal studies
> Legal studies of the Information Age
> Vice President Computers for Communites
> School work blog http://notebook.webpagex.org
> Some papers www.webpagex.org
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
> [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Gilbert B. Rodman
> Sent: January-04-11 11:12 AM
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Citing from a Kindle
>
>
> More to the point, that same passage will be much more difficult to locate
> in a 350-page book.  And a shorter phrase may not be possible to locate at
> all without actually reading the cited work straight through from start to
> finish.  To use a real example, if all an author tells you about the
> phrase,
> "the impossible science of the individual," is that it comes from Roland
> Barthes' /Camera Lucida/, you're probably not going to want to skim through
> the entire book to figure out where (or even if) that six-word phrase
> appears ... especially since, as far as I can tell from actually trying to
> chase down those words on the basis of a page-free citation, they dont
> appear in Barthes' text at all.
>
> cheers
> gil
>
>
>
>
>
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