Citations Between Quotes

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?

A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. •

But intersubjectivity in the text occurs through intertextuality, when distinctions between original and citation become blurred.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

The concern is so acute that the political scientist Jacqueline Stevens has even suggested that research and even emails discussing biological differences across populations should be banned, and that the United States “should issue a regulation prohibiting its staff or grantees…from publishing in any form—including internal documents and citations to other studies—claims about genetics associated with variables of race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other category of population that is observed or imagined as heritable unless statistically significant disparities between groups exist and description of these will yield clear benefits for public health, as deemed by a standing committee to which these claims must be submitted and authorized.

I would argue that how we chronicle the connection between ideas is what matters. Genealogies reflect and reproduce power relations. Citational practices are political, especially when we start talking about “innovation” – oppressed people and places are rarely cited for their many inventions.

Let’s say someone writes an academic paper quoting fifty people who have worked on the subject and provided background materials for his study; assume, for the sake of simplicity, that all fifty are of equal merit. Another researcher working on the exact same subject will randomly cite three of those fifty in his bibliography. Merton showed that many academics cite references without having read the original work; rather, they’ll read a paper and draw their own citations from among its sources. So a third researcher reading the second article selects three of the previously referenced authors for his citations. These three authors will receive cumulatively more and more attention as their names become associated more tightly with the subject at hand. The difference between the winning three and the other members of the original cohort is mostly luck: they were initially chosen not for their greater skill, but simply for the way their names appeared in the prior bibliography. Thanks to their reputations, these successful academics will go on writing papers and their work will be easily accepted for publication. Academic success is partly (but significantly) a lottery.fn2

Interactions should support reading digital text skimming for salience, deep reading for comprehension and evaluation, as well as support for following and evaluating inbound and outbound citations, implicit links and high resolution explicit links. Annotations which ‘live’ in their own dynamic environment, text for thought–and so much more. Interactions should also support sitting under a tree and reading a paper book with beautiful typography and nothing to come between you and the physical paper pages of the document, be it book or paper or whatever else you would like to read. Of course, in due course interactions will include all of those, at once.

Among the conventional adab anthologies, we encounter a somewhat different organization of the traditional material in the Kitâb Adab ad- dunyâ wa-d-dîn of al-Mâwardî (d. 450/1058).84 The five large chapters of the work deal with 1. the excellence of the intellect and intelligence and the blameworthiness of instinctive desire and blind prejudice (hawâ); 2. the âdâb of knowledge; 3. the âdâb of religion (dealing mainly with the negative aspects of the material world); 4. the âdâb of this world; and 5. the âdâb of the soul. As the plural âdâb indicates, the various ways in which intellectual, religious, practical/material, and spiritual/ethical behavior is to be practised are illustrated by preferably brief and aphoristic statements in prose and, quite often, in verse. As is to be expected, the chapter on knowledge shows no systematic arrangement. It starts out with strong expressions of praise for knowledge and the appropriate Qur- ânic citations and statements by the Prophet and early Muslim authorities. Evidence is presented for the superiority of knowledge over ignorance. The impossibility of attaining complete knowledge is explained, and the need to acquire knowledge of all kinds wherever possible is stressed. The relationship between knowledge and material possessions is explored in the usual manner. It is recommended that the process of studying begin at an early age. Knowledge is dif- cult to acquire. Again, the prevalence of ignorance is discussed. The objectionable character of using knowledge for ulterior purposes comes in for customary mention. There are sayings explaining the best methods of study and instruction, the qualities students ought to possess, the need for long and strenuous study, and the drawbacks of forgetfulness. Then, we read remarks about handwriting, about the usually bad handwriting of scholars, and about their constantly being engaged in writing. Remarks on the qualifi cations of students, the hadîth that “good questions are one half of knowledge,” and sayings about the character qualities of scholars complete the part of the work devoted to knowledge. Its predominantly secular outlook is indicated by the fact that knowledge here continues to precede the discussion of religion and ethics. The basic role conceded to the intellect with respect to both intellectual/educational and religious/ ethical activity is formally acknowledged by placing the chapter on it at the beginning, as was also the case in the work of al-Marzubânî.

Editing a written text is a collaborative enterprise that commences with the other parties commenting up the author’s initial ideas and it can include technical assistance in correction of grammatical mistakes, misspellings, poorly structured sentences, vague or inconsistent statements, and correcting errors in citations. Editing is as much as an art form as writing a creative piece of literature. A good editor is a trusted person whom instructs the writer to speak plainly and unabashedly informs the writer when they write absolute gibberish. Perhaps the most successful relationship between a writer and an editor is the storied relationship shared by Thomas Wolfe and his renowned editor, Maxwell Perkins. By all accounts, the prodigiously talented and mercurial Wolfe was hypersensitive to criticism. Perkins provided Wolfe with constant reassurance and substantially trimmed the text of his books. Before Perkins commenced line editing and proofreading Wolfe’s bestselling autobiography Look Homeward, Angel,’ the original manuscript exceeded 1,100 pages. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, Thomas Wolfe declared that his goal when writing “Look Homeward, Angel,” was “to loot my life clean, if possible of every memory which a buried life and the thousand faces of forgotten time could awaken and to weave it into a … densely woven web.” After looting my own dormant memories by delving into the amorphous events that caused me to lose faith in the world and assembling the largely formless mulch into a narrative manuscript of dubious length, I understand why a writer wishes to thank many people for their assistance, advice, and support in publishing a book.

Goody also noted that "many societies have no words that translate as sacred or profane and that ultimately, just like the distinction between natural and supernatural, it was very much a product of European religious thought rather than a universally applicable criterion."[citation needed] As Tomoko Masuzawa explains in The Invention of World Religions (2005), this system of comparative religion privileged Christianity at the expense of non-Christian systems. Any cosmology without a sacred–profane binary was rendered invisible by the field of religious studies, because the binary was supposed to be "universal".

David Landes, the distinguished economic historian, has even seen in the political fragmentation of the Old Continent one of the roots of its later global dominance. By decentralizing authority, fragmentation made Europe safe from single-stroke conquest – the fate of many empires of the past, from Persia after Issus (333 BC) and Rome after the sack of Alaric (410 AD) to Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. The American historian concludes his argument with a citation from Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies: ‘Far from being stultified by imperial government, Europe was to be propelled forward by constant competition between its component parts’ (Landes 1998: 528). These and other scholars stressing the importance of inter-state competition in European history have been inspired by the arguments advanced by Eric Jones in his well-known book The European Miracle. The miracle the British historian wished to explain is the fact that one thousand years ago, more or less, nobody would have thought possible that Europe could ever be able to challenge the great empires of the East, but five hundred years later European global dominance was already becoming a reality. According to Jones the essence of this ‘European miracle’ lies in politics rather than in economics: in its long-lasting system of competing but also cooperating states. Considered as a group, the members of the European states system realized the benefits of competitive decision-making but also some of the economies of scale expected of an empire: ‘Unity in diversity gave Europe some of the best of both worlds, albeit in a somewhat ragged and untidy way’ (Jones 1987: 110).

Ultimately, the imperative to be practical in our field hinges on a deep (if somewhat paradoxical) individualism. In spite of overtones of inclusivity, it treats critical work as self-contained, suggesting that truly ethical work in the library world requires each of us to come up with complete sets of questions and complete sets of answers, to individually balance what is understood to be theory with what is understood to be practice, to ensure that our language is always going to be intelligible to everyone. We in the library world ought to understand that this is neither possible nor desirable, as so much of what we do points to the fact that all work is both necessarily incomplete and necessarily interdependent--the citation, the bibliography and its community of complicated absences, the shelf with more than one item, the marginalia and corporeal micro-residues (visible and invisible) left on magazines pulled through circulation, the reference interaction in which knowledge reveals itself to be created between subjects rather than springing forth ex nihilo as the stuff of individual genius. But the individualist myth of exhaustiveness is pervasive, even if it is persistently exhausting. Such tiresome individualism is, of course, profoundly entangled with whiteness, serving as an animating force in well-worn colonial narratives of race: the unhinged white loner as mass shooter, as contrasted with the terrorist motivated by collective cultural allegiance; the intrepid white explorer 'discovering' the land through economic enterprise; the dark masses of migrants threatening to flood the white nation's border, containable only through mass detention, expulsion, or assimilation; the dispossession of a black single mother read as black cultural pathology. More specifically, it aligns epistemologically with the individualism of liberal racial politics: racism as an attribute of individuals, anti-racism as self-work, the problem and solution collocated and self-contained

What is the right balance? It’s certainly conceivable that the promise of hitting a financial jackpot is so overwhelming that it more than makes up for the inefficiencies introduced by intellectual property law and closed R&D labs. That has generally been the guiding assumption for most modern discussions of innovation’s roots, an assumption largely based on the free market’s track record for innovation during that period. Because capitalist economies proved to be more innovative than socialist and communist economies, the story went, the deliberate inefficiencies of the market-based approach must have benefits that exceed their costs. But, as we have seen, this is a false comparison. The test is not how the market fares against command economies. The real test is how it fares against the fourth quadrant. As the private corporation evolved over the past two centuries, a mirror image of it grew in parallel in the public sector: the modern research university. Most academic research today is fourth-quadrant in its approach: new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other participants to refine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond proper acknowledgment of their origin. It is not pure anarchy, to be sure. You can’t simply steal a colleague’s idea without proper citation, but there is a fundamental difference between suing for patent infringement and asking for a footnote.

Before I even think too hard about it, I drive Pretty Girl, my 1980 Chevrolet Citation that I bought on Craigslist for $300, to the airport and book the first ticket to West Virginia. Yeah, West Virginia. That alone is proof that I must be going crazy. I’ve seen WAY too many horror movies that use that state as a backdrop to ever go there in my right mind. If I get murdered by some inbred “The Hills Have Eyes” lunatic, I’m gonna be so mad!