As I’ve repeated twice now in previous posts, I have
a strong interest in the way hyperlinks have changed the way we read. Because I
consume the majority of my written news (newspapers, magazines) electronically
through my phone or whichever other devices I may be using, I am frequently
confronted by the articles hyperlinks, leaving me a click away from confronting
the writer’s research – or sometimes another article from the same publication
which previously made the same point.
But
beyond the sphere of journalism, hyperlinks have dramatically changed the way
we approach, research, citations, and the discipline of bibliography. Just
recently, the reading list from our class included Whitney Trettien’s article,
“A Deep History of Electronic Textuality,” which was published in Digital Humanities Quarterly. Throughout
the article, the author places their citations in their appropriate places as
if it were a traditional academic paper. Digital
Humanities Quarterly is an esteemed academic journal so it only makes sense
for that to be the case.
The difference is that
the citations are also hyperlinks, themselves. Trettien’s article is not the
only example of this phenomenon, where the writer still adheres to the
traditional guidelines of bibliography while also embracing the models within
digital publishing which could possibly make proper citation’s obsolete. Personally,
I do not think that hyperlinks are acting towards the obsolescence of
traditional citations, but it is incontrovertible that they have changed the
way which research is recorded within the final essay.
My final research paper
will be exploring the ways hyperlinks have affected all types of writing with a
specific emphasis on academic writing. It’s with the work of academics that we
readers have the highest expectations for the ways in which the rules of
bibliography and whichever citation style are followed. But we are more often
running into examples where hyperlinks are being used as a replacement for what
we’re already familiar with, and the result is that the reader now has more
immediate access to the research than they previously had.
I’m interested in
exploring how this access and usage will change bibliography and citations in
an academic field. At the moment, I’m researching the ways in which hyperlinks
are used with classics texts, but I will no way limit myself to the works of
the ancients. The interest in the ancients is in seeing how using digital tools
for literally ancient texts has affected the quality of research as well as the
idiosyncrasies allowed by using hyperlinks.
-Jackson Ossea
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