<< A Question about Public Libraries | Front Page | Worlds That Might Have Been The Case >>
Friday, September 23, 2005
On the Materiality of Evidence; or, Can I Cite Listserv Etiquette?
For awhile now I’ve subscribed to the Jack London Listserv. The discussions range from typical fanboy esoterica ("What ever happened to the Snark?") to scholarly inquiries into London’s sexual orientation ("Was Jack a pitcher or a catcher?"). I had never looked at the listserv’s official homepage before, but needless to say I was shocked by this guide to student submissions to it:
Students doing papers on London are welcome to send questions, however they should be aksed after the research is underway. Do not ask questions like, "How did Jack London’s writings express social Darwinism?" or "Where can I find criticisms of The Call of the Wild?" Instead, be precise, such as "I’m including the following stories for a paper on London and Social Darwinism ... Have I left any out?" Or, "X says the following about The Call of the Wild ... Here is my idea. What do others think?" In other words, do your own footwork first.[1]
Now those of you familiar with my dissertation know why this amuses me: I’m currently writing a chapter on London in a dissertation devoted to proving illegitimate questions like "How did Jack London’s writings express social Darwinism?" One critical component of my argument is that literary scholars, academic historians and the general public have an unshakeable belief that some thing called "social Darwinism" exists and that popular writers (especially naturalists like Jack London) glean their unflappable faith in some form of pernicious environmental determinism from it. Only it doesn’t and they don’t.
I would love to include that excerpt from the listserv’s home page in the list of general misconceptions that necessitate a project like mine. But somehow I don’t think it meets the evidentiary standard for academic papers. Then it hits me: I would have (and in fact have not had) no problem including similar ephemera from the turn-of-the-century in my dissertation. (The current version of London chapter itself includes a brief discussion of MacMillan’s advertising campaign for Before Adam.) But for some reason I believe brittle and dessicated ninety-eight year-old newsprint to be more substantial than a webpage on a university server which has been up since (at least) 13 June 1997 and which has contained the text about London and social Darwinism since (at least) 15 August 2000. While I understand that the London site may disappear, the Wayback Machine shouldn’t. (The Wayback Machine is a collaborative project with--among others--the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. While based in San Fransisco, it has mirror sites around the world, so even if the unthinkable should happen to the entire United States, the electronic record of its former citizens’ webpages will be safe ... deep in the heart of the Middle East.) Irony aside, why am I reluctant to cite one form of ephemera when I enthusiastically cite another?
[1] The other question this statement of London Listerv etiquette raises is whether academic listservs should allow undergraduate (or high school) essay writers to solicit the academic community for “advice” on their essays.
Comments
Scott, as you yourself clearly appreciate, the page does meet the one true evidentiary standard for academic papers: namely, it’s evidence. The only trick to citing such a thing is framing it in such a way that you don’t wrongly seem to make too much of it. You don’t want someone becoming erroneously suspicious that you don’t know the difference between a journal and a listserv. You don’t want to appear to be waging righteous intellectual war against a listserv homepage.
So cite it lightly, like it’s the frosting on the cake of your case. (Which I trust it is.)
Worrying about the site going away, or being unavailable for later checking, is a non-issue (quite apart from the unlikelihood in the present case.) If you quoted a rare book and later all copies were destroyed ... well, good for you for quoting before it went.
But I think you knew all that. You are right: it is funny how really really old ephemera seems less ephemeral. Perhaps through some misplaced sense that it has somehow ‘stood the test of time’. 100 years is nothing. I’m married to a classicist (and aren’t you married to a medievalist, or something?)
The point is related to one I made in a comment here.
There is a somewhat hallucinatory historicist tendency to treat past ephemera as though each little scrap were a ‘formulated monument’ (to borrow Trilling’s phrase; see link.) Bonus points for relating this to Greenblattian penchant for a ‘touch of the real’. So long as the specific real in question hasn’t existed for a long time. If it still exists, then building your case around a ‘touch of the real’ - i.e. one of two concrete tokens that strikingly confirm your preconceptions - is just a David Brooks column.
But I think you knew all that. You are right: it is funny how really really old ephemera seems less ephemeral.
I shouldn’t have ended that post with a question, because I am more interested in my own stupidity than the validity of the citation itself. I wonder why I question contemporary ephemra when I recklessly cite it when it’s centuries old. One answer the evolutionist tyrant inside offers is that centuries old ephemera, while fragile, has survived. Means exist to preserve it and that means the throngs of scholars who will one day pour over my work will be able to verify the conclusions I’ve drawn. But the logic there is terrible, little more than an appeal to the extant. Because it survived it is necessarily more substantial than this bit of stuff that can still be googled.
But there still is that other issue: yes, it meets the evidentiary standard of being evidence, but that standard’s not consistent across the academy. I could easily imagine being blindly reviewed by a Tribble who would quibble with the existence of that citation in an academic essay...despite it being both wholly appropriate and, more to the point, the best evidence I have outside of academic journals. Sure, I could cite hundreds of examples of similar sentiments (and, in fact, do), but the web-citation, more than being a simple change-of-pace, also indicates the way in which these academic debates filter out into the public sphere. Such citations are Trilling’s “huge, unrecorded hum of implication [which] left no trace.” Only they have. Here and in Egypt.
With regard to that other issue: if we aren’t willing to boldly go where scholars haven’t gone before, because the thing didn’t exist - this greatest library and recordation of the hum of implication the world has ever known: the web - then the Tribbles win. If Tribbles win, we lose. At some point I suppose you just have to trust that you can find non-Tribbles to read your work. If you anticipate being read by idiots, the only practical form your preemptive defense against them can take is: writing somewhat idiotically. You’ve got to resolve to do the right thing instead.
I like the image of “throngs of scholars who will one day pour over my work”. Liquid life of the mind out of the pitcher of eternal academic institutionality.
John is absolutely right in his first comment. In fact, he’s so right that I should probably just stop typing now. There is no reason that you shouldn’t site the London listserv site. Or more exactly, there’s no reason you shouldn’t use it. I can’t see that it differs, formally, from any other piece of evidence about the reception/presentation of London and London scholarship.
This simply mean, however, that all such pieces of evidence only “exist”—only become evidence—at the moment they are used within an argument. They are never, so to speak, self-evident. You make of it what you will, big or small. What’s the worry? Why this concern about ephemera? We don’t worry about the ephemeral nature of other equally transient items...like talking.
But with John, I would also say that it looks like your Jack London site might best play a small roll. It seems to show that, in the community on London scholars, the question of London and Social Darwinism is either so old or so “settled” that it would only appear these days in undergraduate papers. And by extension, in that more vile and mindless sub-genre: English teachers’ canned essay assignments.
Now that would be a good topic for a post: What essay prompt do each of you, as teachers and professors, promise never to use in your classrooms?
I sometimes conciously collect art-ephemera in part for the use of whatever the equivalent of grad students will be a century from now. For instance, I have a site with pictures that I took of about a thousand murals in Los Angeles around the turn of the century. All of that has gotten into the Wayback machine. Los Angeles is a world center of muralism, and murals are ephemeral (destroyed by sun, building renovation, tagging, etc.) so I figure that’s going to be thesis material for somebody.
(On a more practical level, it’s also been useful for current muralists, some of whom have the only archived pictures of their work taken from the site.)
John Holbo, I know of classicists in Sarawak and New Guinea. And now Singapore. Those poor folk have been hounded literally to the ends of the earth.
People should read Steve Shapin’s “Social History of Truth”. He shows how early science was embedded in the gentlemanly social structure of the time, and that some of the “assistants” of Boyle and others were actually scientists of high caliber, but not gentlemen, so that their work could reach the Academy only under Boyles auspice.
A vivid case not cited by Shapin is smallpox vaccination. As I first heard the story, Jenner happened to notice that milkmaids afflicted with non-lethal cowpox afterwards were not susceptible to smallpox. That seems like a smart empirical observation by Jenner, but the first people who figured things out were the milkmaids themselves—or the “oldwives” among them. They were deliberately infecting themselves for that purpose, and vaccination started as an oldwives tale.
It might be said that Jenner provided a scientific grounding for the oldwives’ tale, but this is rather minimally true; bacteriology was pretty much in its infancy—what he did was to test the oldwives’ observations and communicate them to the larger community, and his gentlemanly status validated their work.
The gatekeeper question is one about which I am always acutely conscious. A lot of post-modernism is theoretically “anything goes”, but in fact the postmodernists just installed new gatekeepers, new criteria, a new methodology, and a new institutionalized paradigm—you can’t really get away with not having read Lacan, for example.
Nobody, not even me, wants a gatekeeperless system which would let Velikovsky and Dembski into the tent, but the present academic system doesn’t seem valid to me, even though it may be institutionally robust enough to survive (as scholasticism did) a generation or two past its useful life.
Scott, google just landed me here. Perhaps you will find it helpful.