eBay, Wikipedia, and the Future of the Footnote

{ 36 } \ eBay, Wikipedia, and the Future of the Footnote —MARGARET M. KNAPP This essay began as an attempt to explore the disconnect I perceived between the theoretical innovations in historiography that have occurred in theatre scholarship over the past few decades and the traditional scholarly structures in which most of us still deliver that thinking in print or through electronic media. Although most of us have abandoned positivist approaches to researching and writing history in favor of more situated, partial, and contingent strategies, we still employ footnotes and citations, positivist vestiges of an attempt to superimpose on humanistic inquiry the traditional scientific requirements of accuracy and reproducibility. But as I began to think about that conflict between theory and practice in our scholarship, I found I could not ignore the huge impact that the Internet has had, and will increasingly have, on our scholarly research and communication, and so I decided to trouble the issue of scholarly citation further by beginning an investigation of how the Internet can render traditional scholarly usage obsolete. I will briefly survey some of these digital transformations as a means to begin a disciplinary conversation about footnotes and citations in the digital world we now inhabit. First to the macrocosm in which our scholarship will increasingly reside. The May 14, 2006, issue of New York Times Magazine contained an article titled “Scan This Book!” by Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine.1 Kelly writes of current efforts by Google and others to scan all existing books into a digital format. Because of the reduced cost of scanning books, especially when outsourced to China and India, Kelly believes that in the future every book; every article in a newspaper, magazine, or journal; every film; every TV or radio broadcast; every painting, photograph, or piece of music; and every one of the billions of dead { 37 } THE FUTURE OF THE FOOTNOTE Web pages and blogs will be available on the Web. The obvious result is that billions of people worldwide who do not live in proximity to physical libraries can research in a universal, totally searchable library (assuming, of course, that they have access to computers). A further-reaching result, in Kelly’s estimation, will be that, once scanned, each word in a digitized source can be“cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.” Kelly points out that the reader of a digitized book will be able to turn to the book’s bibliography and click on a link that will lead to the entire book or article being cited, and then can click on the sources listed in that second book’s bibliography, and so on through all of the links that seem useful. The reader can then assemble his or her own bibliography or virtual bookshelf of sources on the subject. That capability may seem like Nirvana to scholars, and especially to students who can, for example, quickly discover the more important sources on a subject by using links to determine which authorities are most often cited.2 But the ability to access a seemingly infinite number of sources brings with it another tool with more fundamental consequences for scholarship: as Kelly puts it, “Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together.” Readers can take digitized snippets from books and remix them with other materials to create collections of reordered books, which can also exist on the Web and, in turn, be accessed and searched by other readers. When no two of these virtual copies are alike, the sources of information for a scholarly project will no longer be the physical library of stand-alone copies that we are used to dealing with but rather a universal library with seemingly infinite variations on a seemingly infinite range of materials. Every reader will be his or her own scrapbooker-archivist. When will this world of interrelated texts come fully into being? That depends largely on whether Congress and the courts are willing to take on the inconsistencies and oppressions of the present copyright laws, which have already stifled our traditional scholarly research and publication and now threaten to deny...