Online Publishing and Malleable Texts: When Do Digital Publications Become "Permanent"?

At the 2010 Computers and Writing Conference at Purdue University (May 2010), I was privileged to be part of a roundtable with Michael Pemberton (Georgia Southern University), Kathleen Blake Yancey (Florida State University), and Nick Carbone (Bedford/St. Martin’s). Following is (mostly) what I said, just in case anyone is interested.

Traditional citation formats have focused on print sources which, once published, have remained relatively stable, and most online scholarly publications have retained this model. However, as scholarly publishing online allows—or even encourages—more malleable (literally, “to beat with a hammer,” according to Dictionary.com) texts, what kinds of challenges will this create for citation practices?

In his presentation on “E-Book Rhetoric” at a recent symposium at the Georgia Institute of Technology, L. Andrew Cooper discussed a custom e-book initiative between Georgia Tech and Bedford/St. Martin’s. Students purchase a 5-year subscription which, to use Cooper’s words, “evolves with the book.” That is, as long as the student’s subscription is current, the e-book s/he accesses online is continually updated, so that the “book” the student reads today may not be the same “book” s/he read last month. Of course, changes are probably not drastic or frequent—but they COULD be.

Traditionally, as Michael Pemberton noted, errors or updates in books, newspapers, magazines, journals, or other print media are noted in subsequent editions, often in fine print. Of course, even if errata were to be published in bright red, engorged font on the front page of a subsequent edition, when our students (or, for that matter, when WE) access articles in print or online, we usually don’t read subsequent editions to determine if there have been any amendments or corrections!

While allowing for edits to “published” work in online venues can help to ensure that scholars are accessing correct and up-to-date information, this could also wreak havoc on citation practices. Do we cite the date published, the date last modified, or the date of access—or all of the above? Will we have access to historical publication information (such as the “history” in WIKIs and shared Google docs, for example), or will we take a researcher’s word that the source USED to say thus-and-so? Will subsequent work that relied on the information ALSO need to be amended, and so on and so on and so on? And, of course, multimedia—video, essays, etc.—create further complications. (I believe it was Nick Carbone who further problematized this with the concept of “reflowable textuality,” for instance, reformatting various media to fit small screens.

Obviously, the date that information is accessed is essential. Unfortunately, styles such as APA eschew including online publication information for information accessed through online databases that the researcher BELIEVES to be the same as print editions (ouch!). APA does now encourage scholars to include the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for sources, which is MUCH more reliable (and realistic) that what MLA has done, of course. MLA now thinks we should just Google online sources rather than include a URL (MLA 182) so, even though they DO encourage scholars to include the date of access, I don’t think that’s enough if we don’t know which site the scholar may have consulted in the first place.

We’ve all seen what happens when we Google a source that is no longer available -- Google offers up a cache-memory copy. And the WayBack machine stores lots of no-longer-available sites. Many sites are mirrored, and even information in online scholarly databases may be available through different means (try Google Scholar versus EBSCO Host versus CompPile, for instance). In other words, it is entirely conceivable that multiple versions of an article may exist, such that the “googler” may end up with an entirely different (older? Newer?) version. If one site is amended, are all of these copies also updated? 

So, here are some of my questions for scholars and for editors of online publications: 

1. Include “errata” notices/corrections ON the original “page” for online publications.
2. When that is not feasible, retain historical documents and include links to these historical publications, perhaps with editorial or authorial notes about the necessity for amending.
3. Offer citation suggestions for authors that specifically note which “edition” (corrected or not) is being used, including the URL where feasible, or, even better, the DOI.
4. Ignore MLA…. (or at least turn our backs on it!)