The Modern Language Association Wishes Away Digital Différance

December 21, 2009 | 53 comments

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This is the first academic semester in which students have been using the revised 7th edition of the MLA Handbook (you know, that painfully organized book that prescribes the proper citation method for material like “an article in a microform collection of articles”).

From the moment I got my copy of the handbook in May 2009, I have been skeptical of some of the “features” of the new guidelines, and I began voicing my concerns on Twitter:

But not only does the MLA seem unprepared for the new texts we in the humanities study, the association actually took a step backward when it comes to locating, citing, and cataloging digital resources. According to the new rules, URLs are gone, no longer “needed” in citations. How could one not see that these new guidelines were remarkably misguided?

To the many incredulous readers on Twitter who were likewise confused by the MLA’s insistence that URLs no longer matter, I responded, “I guess they think Google is a fine replacement.” Sure, e-journal articles can have cumbersome web addresses, three lines long, but as I argued at the time, “If there’s a persistent URL, cite it.”

Now, after reading a batch of undergraduate final papers that used the MLA’s new citation guidelines, I have to say that I hate them even more than I thought I would. Although “hate” isn’t quite the right word, because that verb implies a subjective reaction. In truth, objectively speaking, the new MLA system fails.

The MLA apparently believes that all texts are the same

In a strange move for a group of people who devote their lives to studying the unique properties of printed words and images, the Modern Language Association apparently believes that all texts are the same. That it doesn’t matter what digital archive or website a specific document came from. All that is necessary is to declare “Web” in the citation, and everyone will know exactly which version of which document you’re talking about, not to mention any relevant paratextual material surrounding the document, such as banner ads, comments, pingbacks, and so on.

The MLA turns out to be extremely shortsighted in its efforts to think “digitally.” The outwardly same document (same title, same author) may in fact be very different depending upon its source. Anyone working with text archives (think back to the days of FAQs on Gopher) knows that there can be multiple variations of the same “document.” (And I won’t even mention old timey archives like the Short Title Catalogue, where the same 15th century title may in fact reflect several different versions.)

The MLA’s new guidelines efface these nuances, suggesting that the contexts of an archive are irrelevant. It’s the Ghost of New Criticism, a war of words upon history, “simplification” in the name of historiographic homicide.

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  1. Benjamin Miller’s avatar

    Benjamin Miller on December 21, 2009 at 1:03 am

    Agreed and agreed again, Mark – and I’ll add, as well, the frustration of trying to cite specific pages within a poorly managed site, wherein all the pages have the same title (i.e., the title of the front page, presumably copied over in the metadata of the template used for new pages). So it’s not just different versions of the same document that are effaced; in this case, it’s entirely different documents that all inconveniently called the same thing. Only the URL distinguishes.

    And honestly, if the primary concern is long URLs within scholarly databases, that’s probably a red herring: in many cases, these long citations aren’t persistent URLs at all, but rather search histories that don’t even function once the browser is closed. JStor manages to get their direct links down to only 34 characters, including the http://.

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  2. Patrick Murray-John’s avatar

    Patrick Murray-John on December 21, 2009 at 7:23 am

    Indeed — so many issues that seem to defy the fundamental aspect of a citation: help the reader to find the same resource used. I’ve been fretting about this since I saw your tweet, which I plan to misquote and misrepresent willy-nilly in papers, since without providing an URL there is no way to find it again to confirm or refute my reading of it!

    For teachers, this will put a huge practical hurdle on checking how students are reading a source. I used to spend a fair amount of time checking students use of sources in beginning writing courses. Adding the hurdle of hunting via search engines will only slow and discourage that pedagogical step. Worse, students already have a hard time with keeping different documents distinct in their minds — a crucial first step to being able to work with the relationships between documents. The URLs are a helpful step in doing that.

    For researchers, similar issues — if I read a citation, I want to get there quickly and see the surrounding material. This hurts the useful technique of going through others bibliographies to find sources.

    And more to the paratextual stuff, we do a huge amount of republishing posts via RSS/Atom in UMWBlogs, but one twist is that the same document at two URLs doesn’t merge the comments — there’s a completely different set of comments for each URL. That makes a completely different contextualization and probably interpretation for the two resources, though they are supposedly the same document. The issue only gets worse for things like a Flickr image or YouTube video that’s also discussed in a blog post. Knowing whether someone was working from the image or video in Flickr/YouTube/whatever — surrounded by a pool, or a channel, or a photostream, etc. — as opposed to the post providing a completely different context makes a huge difference.

    Last, just to really get my geek on, I’ve spent a lot of time writing code to mine out data, and URLs are relatively easy to regex out of a paper in digital form. So much for that!

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  3. Amanda French’s avatar

    Amanda French on December 21, 2009 at 9:00 am

    Not to mention that many of the publishers I know are desperately trying to move to an electronic platform; one of the things that will distinguish e-books from print books is the possibility of making an e-book a “networked object.” One of the very easiest things to do with regard to putting a book online (not that it’s very easy) would be to link every reference to a citation record of some kind (an Open Library catalog record, for instance, or to a DOI or PURL). Authors are just going to have to get used to putting URLs in again in a few years. Maybe the MLA is just trying to keep itself in the style guide edition business.

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  4. Rosemary Feal’s avatar

    Rosemary Feal on December 22, 2009 at 11:41 am

    It’s always helpful for us at the MLA to hear from researchers about how MLA style suits their needs. The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook is in fact the product of extensive consultations with users — scholars, librarians, instructors, and students.

    These consultations made it clear that users of the handbook have a wide range of needs. Hence, the MLA guidelines are designed to be practical for general writers while leaving openings for specialists.

    Our guidelines call for elements that are both common to many sources and likely to provide enduring assistance to readers who seek the sources. Testing the URLs in the examples in previous editions, we found that most were obsolete. Moreover, our advisers noted that requiring URLs placed a burden on writers. For many writers, distinguishing permanent URLs from nonpermanent ones is a challenge. Others are not conversant with copying and pasting URLs and so type them, with the attendant risk of typos. A widely used documentation style must serve researchers at all levels.

    Contrary to Mark Sample, this does not mean the MLA believes “it doesn’t matter what digital archive or website a specific document came from.” Our guidelines call for naming the archive or Web site.

    We recognize that some instructors and publishers find URLs valuable, so the handbook gives instructions for recording them (5.6.1). If you’re comparing different versions of a single work on the Web, you probably will want to take advantage of the flexibility of MLA style and add URLs or other data.

    The rise of e-books will indeed increase the networking capacity of citations. At this point, though, it seems that publishers, not authors, are the most likely to add DOIs or similar metadata to published citations. We will add guidelines for this practice as it becomes more common.

    We welcome further comments. So that we’re sure to have them on hand for preparing the next edition, please send them directly to me (execdirector@mla.org).

    Rosemary G. Feal, Executive Director
    MLA

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  5. Mia’s avatar

    Mia on December 22, 2009 at 4:35 pm

    I have to say, when I cracked open to new MLA handbook, I checked if there were guidelines for citing tweets. Something for the eighth edition?

    Another thing to think about is static versus dynamic content, and all the other stuff on the Deep Web (which I’m guessing the MLA has taken into consideration). URL plus access date makes a lot more sense if you’re dealing with static html, but not so much for dynamic content like Twitter feeds. Linking to http://www.twitter.com/mlaconvention for Rosemary Feal’s tweet that got me here won’t help you much in twelve months! I know there’s a way to make a permalink for individual tweets, but I’m fairly computer literate, and I had to do some googling to figure out how to get that link (click on the time posted link, btw)–so, not very convenient to find out how to get permalinks for all your web sources, even assuming that there is a way (and most of the time, there isn’t), and assuming that you’re advanced in google-fu.
    And in practice, even if I see a JSTOR permalink, Im still going to access that article with the other author/title/journal info rather than typing in a bunch of numbers.

    All of which is to say… isnt thinking that providing a URL gives access to a stable text a way of wishing away différance?

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  8. Mark Sample’s avatar

    Mark Sample on December 22, 2009 at 10:55 pm

    I appreciate everyone’s questions and comments. Thanks, too, Rosemary, for providing some background on the new MLA style guidelines. The overarching problem, of course, is that our research practices cannot keep up with the evolving forms we study and incorporate into our work. Every other major citation format is facing similar challenges.

    I’m not so concerned with e-journals or e-books; the standard publication info will almost always make these scholarly sources easy to find. It’s the orphan items, the born-digital primary source material with no print precedent that are most at risk for being citationally (not to mention materially) lost. There might be dozens of YouTube videos all with the same name and date (say, a short video of a street protest), but each video might be different. The only specific indicator in this case is the URL. Expert scholars may instinctively include the URL in a citation, but I fear the nuances will be lost among undergraduates and even graduate students (especially if they use something like Endnote or Zotero to auto-generate citations).

    The problem of disappearing URLs and non-persistent web addresses is a serious one. But rather than resigning ourselves to the web’s impermanence, we should see this as a research opportunity. I’d argue that even if we know for certain that a URL will soon change or disappear, it is regardless a key component of that document’s metadata. Art history uses the term provenance to describe an object’s ownership history, its physical relations as it has passed hands, both legitimately and otherwise, through time and space. Until everything has a persistent DOI or URI, the URL is the best way to establish the provenance of digital materials.

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  9. AramZS’s avatar

    AramZS on December 23, 2009 at 1:51 pm

    I’ve always found that the requirements of the various citation styles tend to be behind the times. It’s a good argument for a community-administrated citation style. Imagine the advantage to a Wikipedia-style approach to developing citations, where the editors/administrators are academics such as yourself.

    The reality is that information changes fast, too fast for a staid IRL committee to keep up and still provide effective guidelines for the resources that students and researchers access daily. At the same time, the intersections of tech and text open up serious possibilities. For example, if part of the issue is the length of a URL within a text citation, why not use shortened links?

    The other opportunity comes in the form of link bookmarking services like Diigo, which allow users to cache a web page. This bypasses the issue of non-persistent web addresses, research disappearing behind paywalls, etc… I often use it when writing blog posts. Instead of linking to the original article, I’ll link to the cached page.

    Like I said, all this provides a good argument to resist the imposition of aged and inefficient citation rules and the formation of something unique and up to date that optimizes citation technique for compatibility with the latest technology by using the latest technology.

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  10. Jason’s avatar

    Jason on December 29, 2009 at 9:12 am

    Looks just like ThatCamp — @briancroxalls in the center of things.

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  11. Brian Croxall’s avatar

    Brian Croxall on December 29, 2009 at 11:23 am

    While I might like to endorse Jason’s @briancroxall-centric view of the universe, I don’t know if it really “captures the conference.” But I’ll keep pretending until some Galileo tells me differently.

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  12. Brian Croxall’s avatar

    Brian Croxall on January 2, 2010 at 2:54 pm

    I think my favorites are #46 and #63. #49 is the runner-up.

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  13. Brian Croxall’s avatar

    Brian Croxall on January 2, 2010 at 2:57 pm

    Thanks for making this data available, Mark. The open-source scholar rides again!

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  14. Brian Croxall’s avatar

    Brian Croxall on January 2, 2010 at 2:58 pm

    Crud. I just lost all credibility by not writing “these data,” didn’t I?

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  15. Mark Sample’s avatar

    Mark Sample on January 2, 2010 at 11:43 pm

    Actually, where you lost points was saying “open-source professor” instead of naked professor.

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  17. Amanda French’s avatar

    Amanda French on January 5, 2010 at 5:34 pm

    #MLA10 Tip: Use the word “rhizomatic” whenever possible. Rhizomatic rhizomatic.

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  18. Mark Sample’s avatar

    Mark Sample on January 5, 2010 at 11:30 pm

    I agree, #MLA10 has the chance to be the most rhizomesque conference ever.

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  19. Ben Miller’s avatar

    Ben Miller on January 7, 2010 at 7:58 pm

    To be fair, both versions here (even the second one, with the URLs) are new MLA – cf. all the “Web” and “Print” birth-indicators.

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  20. Mark Sample’s avatar

    Mark Sample on January 8, 2010 at 10:43 am

    Ben, you’re right. The second style with URLs is more of a merger between the old style (including URLs) and the new style (indicating whether it’s Web or Print). If I had my dithers (and time to make my own Zotero citation style), I’d eliminate the “birth-indicator,” as that piece of meta-data is already made obvious by the presence of the URL.

    In any case, I think the difference between the two styles is still clear, as is the fact that researchers/students/teachers still need to know the difference between the two in order to make the decision about which one to use. Many researchers, novice and professional alike, might not realize we have the capability to make that decision, though, when we let software write our citations.

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  21. Cheryl Ball’s avatar

    Cheryl Ball on January 8, 2010 at 11:30 am

    I’m torn. On the one hand, I like the clean lines of the new MLA form, but what is weird is that the web things don’t say Web or Online or whatever like the print things say Print. That’s just bass-ackwards. On the other hand, one of the things I like about the new MLA format is that it does less to distinguish between print and online scholarship — when a reader seeing a URL automatically dismisses it as “less,” that’s a problem that the new MLA style ameliorates. Kinda. Still, in the end, I like having the URLs because then I can click! Better yet, publish everything online and open-source and then embed the URLs into the article titles. That’s the best of all worlds, imo :)

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  22. Dennis G. Jerz’s avatar

    Dennis G. Jerz on January 8, 2010 at 12:23 pm

    When the URL is four lines long, carrying the keywords you entered and bearing a session IDs and requiring an EBSCO Host account, then the URL was pointless to include. When the URL points to a well-formed permalink, it’s pointless to omit.

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  23. Mark Sample’s avatar

    Mark Sample on January 8, 2010 at 12:44 pm

    I tend to agree with you, Dennis. In fact, my beef has never been with the decision to eliminate URLs for materials coming from databases like JSTOR or Ebesco; as long as the journal name, volume and issue number are there, such things are easy to find. It’s the born digital materials, from online peer review journals like Game Studies or blogs, where the exclusion of URLs seems misguided. And luckily, those places usually offer stable, concise permalinks. But we still need to train our students to use them, even if their quick gloss of the MLA Handbook tells them they don’t have to.

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  24. Mark Sample’s avatar

    Mark Sample on January 8, 2010 at 12:55 pm

    I’m with you on the last solution. Embedded URLs (which of course is something I could’ve done above, but that would’ve spoiled my argument!).

    I do like your point that the new format is a bit more democratic, putting Web and Print on the same level of scholarship.

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  25. Mark Sample’s avatar

    Mark Sample on January 8, 2010 at 1:40 pm

    I joked about this on Twitter earlier today, but now I think it’s not a half bad idea: Zotero should set up its own URL shortening service (think http://zote.ro), to take care of those awfully long illegible URLs generated by databases. Maybe this is something Zotero can incorporate into the upcoming Zotero Commons (sponsored in part by the Internet Archive).

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