Why July 2nd is really Independence Day

On July 2, 1776, the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain when the Continental Congress finally approved (with twelve colonies voting yes and New York abstaining) this resolution:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and, of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connexion between them, and the state of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

That evening, the Pennsylvania Evening Post printed this notice: “This day the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States.”

John Adams, in his July 3, 1776 letter to his wife, Abigail, wrote:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival… It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

So what happened on July 4, 1776? On that date, the Continental Congress approved and formally adopted the final revised draft of the Declaration of Independence. (Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence between June 11 and June 28, the document was read to Congress on June 28, and over the next few days it was debated and many changes were made.)

The earliest printed versions of the Declaration of Independence begin: “IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776. A DECLARATION BY THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” The first was a broadside printed on July 5th by John Dunlap. On July 6, the Pennyslvania Evening Post was the first newspaper to publish the text of the Declaration. On July 19th, the Congress ordered that the Declaration be “fairly engrossed on parchment, with the title and stile of ‘The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America,’ and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress.” On August 2, this large engrossed vellum copy of the Declaration of Independence, dated at the top July 4, 1776, was signed by many (but not all) of the delegates. This is the copy that resides at the National Archives.

Here are a few additional links for your reading pleasure:

• The National Archives online exhibition “The Declaration of Independence,” including the article “Declaration of Independence: A History”
• Library of Congress online exhibition “Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents”
• Pauline Maier’s 1997 article “Making Sense of the Fourth of July”
• Pauline Maier’s 1997 book American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence
• Marshall Smelser’s article “The Glorious Fourth– Or, Glorious Second? Or Eighth?,” in The History Teacher, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jan. 1970), pp. 25-30.
• Ann Marie Dube’s 1996 online book A Multitude of Amendments, Alterations and Additions: The Writing and Publicizing of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution of the United States, by the Associate Curator of Independence National Historical Park.

So join me in celebrating both momentous days– July 2nd (the anniversary of American independence) and July 4th (the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence).

“Be skeptical and verify everything”: Fact-checking tips from PolitiFact

Through Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error blog, I discovered the YouTube Reporters’ Center, a new resource for “citizen reporters,” bloggers, or anyone interested in journalism to “help you learn more about how to report the news. It features some of the nation’s top journalists and news organizations sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting.”

The YouTube Reporters’ Center contains dozens of videos, including Nicholas Kristof on covering a global crisis, Bob Woodward on investigative journalism, Arianna Huffington on citizen journalism, Dean Wright on online journalism ethics, Katie Couric on how to conduct an interview, and Scott Simon on how to tell a story.

One video that may be of particular interest to readers of this blog is “PolitiFact’s Guide to Fact-Checking”:

The main points stressed in the video are relevant to all kinds of research: be skeptical, verify everything, use original sources, “love– and fear– the Internet,” and be very careful when using Wikipedia.

PolitiFact.com is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political fact-checking website run by the St. Petersburg Times, home to the “Truth-O-Meter” and “Obameter”:

Every day, reporters and researchers from the Times examine statements by members of Congress, the president, cabinet secretaries, lobbyists, people who testify before Congress and anyone else who speaks up in Washington. We research their statements and then rate the accuracy on our Truth-O-Meter – True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True and False. The most ridiculous falsehoods get our lowest rating, Pants on Fire….

We created the Obameter to help you assess the Obama presidency. Our reporters have compiled a database of more than 500 individual promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign. We research and rate their status as No Action, Stalled or In the Works and then ultimately determine whether it earns a Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.

Another political fact-checking website of note is FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

“Laziness is not an excuse for plagiarism”

There’s been a lot of commentary in the blogosphere about the “Chris Anderson plagiarizing from Wikipedia” kerfuffle. (See my previous post for a recap.) There are too many apologists for Anderson and his use (or misuse) of Wikipedia, and even some criticisms have missed the forest for the trees. Let me spell it out:

• It is simply not acceptable to quote or paraphrase from Wikipedia when writing a book or doing serious research. Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and a deeply flawed one at that. If high school students aren’t allowed to quote or paraphrase from Wikipedia or traditional encyclopedias, it is absurd to think that it’s acceptable for the author of a book to do so. It is not only intellectual laziness of the highest order, it ignores Wikipedia’s own warnings about its limitations and appropriate use. As I quoted in my previous post: “Most educators and professionals do not consider it appropriate to use tertiary sources such as encyclopedias as a sole source for any information… Wikipedia articles should be used for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research. As with any community-built reference, there is a possibility for error in Wikipedia’s content — please check your facts against multiple sources….”
• If you insist on using Wikipedia, you must track down the original reference sources cited and verify the information. Errors (including transcription mistakes) in the original Wikipedia entries that Anderson used are reproduced in his own writing, meaning he never looked at the original cited sources, and he apparently didn’t verify or fact-check the information with additional primary or secondary sources. [Note to Chris Anderson:  If you don't have the time to do the research and check sources yourself, you can hire a freelance researcher or journalist to either do it for you or check your work before publication.]
• It is ridiculous for Anderson to claim that he removed his footnotes because he was “unable to find a good citation format for web sources.” As I mentioned in my previous post, there are many authoritative citation standards which can easily be found in style manuals and websites. Even Wikipedia itself gives you nine different citation formats (including Chicago and MLA) for each entry. Anderson says his publisher insisted on a timestamp for each URL, which Anderson found “clumsy and archaic,” so he cut out the footnotes. WRONG!  And don’t even get me started on the whole “write-through” thing.
• Given Anderson’s background and his role as editor-in-chief of Wired, I find this all rather shocking, and it makes me wonder about the editorial standards of Anderson himself, his magazine, and his book publisher (Hyperion).

Yesterday Seth Simonds, in a delightfully snarky post titled “Laziness is not an excuse for plagiarism,” demonstrated (with screen shots and step-by-step instructions) what Anderson could (and should) have done to find a source listed in a Wikipedia entry. Here’s an excerpt:

Anderson took a last-minute 5th grade approach to writing. He found the Wikipedia listing for “Usury” and pasted the text into his manuscript…

5 Steps From Wikipedia To A Reliable Source…

Step 1: Find the citation link for the portion of the Wikipedia article you’d like to quote. (Don’t quote it. Not even if you’re a famous editor and you’re really busy.)

A. Click on citation link in the Wikipedia article.

B. Identify the key portions of the citation. In this case, author last name and date of publication.

Step 2: After finding the citation, launch a web search including the author name and original search term. Many bloggers would stop at the citation of Moehlman and use a “^Moehlman, 1934, page 7” attribution. As a professional editor conducting research for a print publication, I’m holding Anderson to a higher standard. Note: pasting from Wikipedia is a bad idea because you’re trusting a stranger’s transcription. Don’t be lazy…

“Can’t decide which is more embarrassing — failing to cite Wikipedia as a source or using Wikipedia as a source.”

From the Virginia Quarterly Review blog, a post by Waldo Jaquith titled “Chris Anderson’s Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism”:

In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don’t have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia. Anderson is the author of the best-selling 2006 book The Long Tail and is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. The official publication date for Free is July 7.

Examples of the passages in question follow. The words and phrases that are found in both Free and the apparent original source are highlighted…

Though reproducing words or original ideas from any uncredited source is widely defined as plagiarism, using text from Wikipedia presents an even more significant problem than reproducing traditional copyrighted text. Under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, Anderson would be required to credit all contributors to the quoted passages, license his modifications under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, note that the original work has been modified, and provide the text of or a link to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Anderson has not done any of these things in Free.

Anderson responded personally to a request for comments about how this unattributed text came to appear in his book, providing the following remarks by e-mail:

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions, in three groups:

* Long passages of direct quotes (indent, with source)

* Intellectual debts, phrases and other credit due (author credited inline, as with Michael Pollan)

* In the case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia), do a write-through.

Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

I think what we’ll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place….

5:15 p.m. update: Hyperion has provided us with the following statement.

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

Hyperion says that they intend to have the notes online by the time that the book is published.

Make sure you also read the comments to the post, which are fascinating, especially the smackdown between Chris Anderson and Edward Champion.

Carolyn Kellogg, in the LA Times Jacket Copy blog, comments:

As citations for Web sources have been established for some time, this seems an odd explanation from Anderson, who is no publishing novice. His previous book, “The Long Tail,” was a bestseller, and he is currently editor in chief of Wired magazine…

The lack of attribution may indeed have been a combination of mistake and lack of oversight. But as one commenter on Gawker lamented, “Can’t decide which is more embarrassing — failing to cite Wikipedia as a source or using Wikipedia as a source.”

Wikipedia is one of the resources Anderson lauds — in “The Long Tail,” he called it a phenomenon. In this one, he writes, “there is the amazing ‘gift economy’ of Wikipedia,” later explaining, “Wikipedia makes no money at all, but because an incomparable information resource is now available to all at no cost, our own ability to make money armed with more knowledge is improved.”

The whole point of Anderson’s “Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price” is to explore what he calls “the paradox of Free,” in which “people are making lots of money and charging nothing.”

Anderson’s hardcover costs $26.99. Wikipedia is still free.

And within hours, Anderson’s Wikipedia’s entry had been updated — with attribution — to reflect the charges of plagiarism. Updates to “Free” are expected to take a while. Which proves Anderson’s point — I think.

Edward Champion decided to investigate himself:

Unfortunately, I have learned that the VQR’s investigations only begin to scratch the surface. A cursory plunge into the book’s contents reveals that Anderson has not only cribbed material from Wikipedia and websites (sometimes without accreditation), but that he has a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes — in some cases, nearly verbatim.

By the way, recent editions of style manuals contain detailed information on how to cite websites and online sources, most notably the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. (See my post “The writer’s bookshelf (part 3)” for more information on style manuals.)

Update 1: Today Chris Anderson posted an explanation on his blog:

First, as readers of my writings know, I’m a supporter of using Wikipedia as a source (not the only one, of course, and checking the original source material whenever possible). I disagree with those who say it should never be used. But the question is how to use it.

In my drafts, I had intended to blockquote Wikipedia passages, footnoting their URL. But my publisher, like many others, was uncomfortable with the changing nature of Wikipedia, and wanted me to timestamp each URL… which struck me as clumsy and archaic… [I]n most cases I did do a writethrough of the non-quoted Wikipedia text, although clearly I didn’t go nearly far enough and too much of the original Wikipedia authors’ language remained… This was sloppy and inexcusable, but the part I feel worst about is that in our failure to find a good way to cite Wikipedia as the source we ended up not crediting it at all. That is, among other things, an injustice to the authors of the Wikipedia entry who had done such fine research in the first place, and I’d like to extend a special apology to them….

This is totally lame. Somewhere Research Cat is crying…

Update 2: My husband pointed out that every Wikipedia entry has a link called “Cite this page,” which contains permanent page links and nine different citation styles, including Chicago, MLA, etc. Here’s the citation page for the Wikipedia article on Chris Anderson. Please note what’s written at the top of the page:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Most educators and professionals do not consider it appropriate to use tertiary sources such as encyclopedias as a sole source for any information — citing an encyclopedia as an important reference in footnotes or bibliographies may result in censure or a failing grade. Wikipedia articles should be used for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research.

As with any community-built reference, there is a possibility for error in Wikipedia’s content — please check your facts against multiple sources and read our disclaimers for more information.

“The small details of common life give actuality, aliveness, and thickness to a historical story…”

John Crowley, the author I blogged about last month, has written an excellent essay for the Powell’s Books website on doing historical research for his new novel, Four Freedoms. Here’s an excerpt:

How much did a condom cost in 1944? What did the package look like? Where could one be bought? Were there machines in the toilets (we called them toilets) of bars, as there were in the late 1950s? I was writing a novel about the U.S. home front in World War II (Four Freedoms, just out), and I needed to know. Why not just skip the detail, and say, “He bought a condom” or “He produced a condom”? Because the small details of common life give actuality, aliveness, and thickness to a historical story in the same way they do to a present-day story. The difference is you have to go find the details of the past; you can’t just draw on experience.

The writers of historical fictions, just like real historians, do (or ought to do) a huge amount of research before beginning on their works, and then continue doing research until the very end. They are, however, often looking for different stuff. The reasons for things, the reasons that people believed they had for acting as they did, the forces pressing on them that they dimly grasped or didn’t, a chronology that puts cause before effect — that (I imagine) is what the historian spends her research time looking for. Except when tiny details of action matter very much (at exactly what hour was that telegram sent?), the minutiae of dress and dinner, how a character spent his morning or evening, the maker of her gown and how much it cost, aren’t the goal. The fiction researcher’s work is the opposite, or mirror image (as historical fiction is the mirror of history — the same stuff but not). What the fiction researcher wants is masses of actual detail, whether pertaining to his characters (if his characters are historical) or to others like them. He cares less what everybody did, or what masses of people did, than about what was possible to do. He cares less about what an actual person did than what any person could have done: could someone like the one I am imagining have thought this thought, owned this gun, remembered this event, worn this hat? He needs the stuff to help him make a world of the past that is as believable as one made out of the present.

Of course, writers of fiction can be more or less conscientious about their research. (Though, they can’t be exposed as frauds if they get the details, or even the big picture, wrong; they start out as frauds.) Some care a lot, others less; Walter Scott, who in a sense invented the historical novel, often footnoted his stories, to back up his inventions with evidence. Fiction writers can always claim that detailed research is unnecessary or peripheral to their work — but they can no longer claim that it’s too hard. I don’t know if the Internet in all its glory and some of its shame has changed things utterly for professional historians — if it has, they may not be telling — but it has made research for a writer of historical fiction a piece of cake: that sweet, that delightful, that filling.

And it’s not only Google and Project Gutenberg and JSTOR. I used those tools almost every day, following leads from place to place and having strange adventures with collectors, memoirists, visionaries, merchants, and obsessives (try writing anything about old cars, railroads, airplanes, World War II, or comic books, without turning them up). But I also had the help of the readers of my blog (John Crowley Little and Big on Live Journal), who are an inordinately smart bunch, I think, and ready to go look things up and bring them in. We’ve had some wonderful interchanges — like the time I needed to know how much a condom cost in 1944…

The great danger in all historical research, for the lover of trivia and oddity, is distraction; it’s one of the rewards, too….

You can read the whole essay, titled “The Accu-Thump of Googletarity,” here.

“That’s one of the many reasons I love writing historical fictions. The research is fun.”

The fabulous Justine Larbalestier has been blogging and answering questions from readers about her research and writing processes. She’s currently working on a novel set in 1930s New York City, so she’s been immersing herself in historical research and having lots of fun (well, except for the Lindy Hop situation).

Here are links to a few of her posts for your reading pleasure:

• On Research (posted today, May 14th)
• Researching NYC in the early 1930s
• A most excellent research tool
• JWAM reader request no. 20:  Research
• Here’s the link to her collected writing process posts, including her excellent series of “January is writing advice month” posts
• Here’s the link to her Writing FAQ

I really enjoyed Justine’s last YA novel, How to Ditch Your Fairy, and she has a new YA novel coming out in September called Liar.

“I just love looking at old pictures of people who are now dead.”

My thanks to Gwenda Bond for the tip about the fascinating interview with author John Crowley in the current issue of The Believer magazine.

John Crowley has been a major influence on so many writers (including my husband, Matt Ruff), and he’s written nearly a dozen novels, including The Translator, the four-book Ægypt cycle, and Little, Big, one of Matt’s favorite books, which he described as  “a sprawling family chronicle that William Faulkner might have written, if he’d written about fairies.”

Here are some of John’s comments on research from the interview:

BLVR: So many of your books have a strong research element to them, whether it’s written into them with characters who are themselves researchers, like Pierce Moffett, the main character of Ægypt, who scours the world finding materials for his own book, or simply because the novels themselves are obviously the result of meticulous, extensive research. What’s the relationship, if any, between research you do for your novels and doing research for documentaries? Do they feed off one another in any way?

JC: Maybe I just have a taste for research. Most of the films that I have worked on and enjoyed doing have been based on archival footage. And I’ve found that I just love looking at old footage. I just love looking at old pictures of people who are now dead. There’s something intensely attractive and gripping in looking at these pictures of people who are gone…

I don’t know whether this research actually combines with my writing, but I do know that there is a real thrill to it. I’ve completed a book [Four Freedoms] set in the 1940s about people who are building a bomber in a war production plant, and the research I’ve done for that offers the same kind of fascination with the lives of ordinary people. You can find lots of memoirs of people who worked in these factories, especially women, how they felt about it, what they did every day, how their husbands viewed it, how scared they were to go to work, how they learned to do things they thought they never would. It’s enormously touching.

BLVR: Did you dig through even older materials for the Ægypt quartet? Did you look at old manuscripts? Was there any tactile element to your research?

JC: [Laughs] Not really. I did handle a few old books but I never went into it to that degree. There was never the kind of experience that I ascribe to some of the characters in those books, where they actually go in and palpate old books and turn old dusty leaves and things like that. Most of that, I have to say, I constructed for them to experience. Most of my research for those books came out of secondary sources; a lot of the books I read are full of printed reproductions of old imagery and texts, and I enjoyed looking at those. But I never did the kind of deep manuscript research that might have given me that kind of a thrill. Somehow I felt I was doing enough just creating all the universe around them!

John has more to say on research, genre, his books, and other subjects, so read the whole interview.

By the way, John has a blog, and his new novel, Four Freedoms, will be published at the end of this month. Matt and I heard John read from the manuscript when he came to Seattle last year, so we are very excited about reading the book.

You can still register for my Research for Writers class

Registration is still open for my May 9th Research for Writers class at Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

Here’s the class description:

Research is an important part of the creative process for writers of fiction and nonfiction. Research can help with inspiration, storytelling and world building whether you are writing about the past, present or future, about life on earth or an imaginary world. The instructor will share advice about research, discuss the kinds of research writers may need to do and help students find useful sources of information in print, on the Web, in libraries and in unexpected places.

The class will be from 1pm to 5pm on Saturday, May 9th, and the cost is $95 ($85.50 for Hugo House members).  You can register online or by phone, mail, or fax.  Here are links to the spring 2009 course catalog and registration information.

Update (4/28): Thanks to Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post, my May 9th class is almost full. I checked with Hugo House this afternoon and there is one spot left. (Due to a glitch, their website lists the class as full, so you’ll have to call them at 206-322-7030 to register.)

World Digital Library launches April 21st

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), the Library of Congress, and over 30 institutions from around the world have partnered to created the World Digital Library, which will launch on April 21, 2009.

From the World Digital Library website:

The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

From the UNESCO press release:

The WDL will function in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, and will include content in a great many other languages. Browse and search features will facilitate cross-cultural and cross-temporal exploration on the site. Descriptions of each item and videos with expert curators speaking about selected items will provide context for users, and are intended to spark curiosity and encourage both students and the general public to learn more about the cultural heritage of all countries.

The WDL was developed by a team at the Library of Congress. Technical assistance was provided by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina of Alexandria, Egypt. Institutions contributing content and expertise to the WDL include national libraries and cultural and educational institutions in Brazil, Egypt, China, France, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Examples of treasures that will be featured on the WDL include oracle bones and steles contributed by the National Library of China; Arabic scientific manuscripts from the National Library and Archives of Egypt; early photographs of Latin America from the National Library of Brazil; the Hyakumanto darani, a publication from the year 764 from the National Diet Library of Japan; the famous 13th century “Devil’s Bible” from the National Library of Sweden; and works of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish calligraphy from the collections of the Library of Congress.

The National Archives (NARA) has created a web page highlighting the digital copies of documents it’s contributing to the World Digital Library, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Civil War photographs.

My thanks to the Librarian and Information Science News blog for the tip.

I’m shocked to discover there’s gambling in this casino…

I recently read the February 2009 Project Information Literacy Progress Report from the Information School at the University of Washington, titled “Finding Context: What Today’s College Students Say about Conducting Research in the Digital Age.”

The goal of the project is to “understand how early adults conceptualize and operationalize research activities for course work and ‘everyday use’ and especially how they resolve issues of credibility, authority, relevance, and currency in the digital age.”

While I admire these goals and am obviously interested in the subject, I wasn’t surprised by the findings, and I found some of the quotes from students unintentionally funny.

The report begins by asking:

What is it like to be a college student in the digital age? In a world teeming with information technology and overflowing with access to data, how do students find the information they need? How do students conduct research for course-related assignments? How do they conduct research for use in their everyday lives? What frustrations and obstacles do they encounter? What strategies have students developed to meet their information needs?

Their conclusion?

So far, we have found that no matter where students are enrolled, no matter what information resources they may have at their disposal, and no matter how much time they have, the abundance of information technology and the proliferation of digital information resources make conducting research uniquely paradoxical: Research seems to be far more difficult to conduct in the digital age than it did in previous times… In general, students reported being challenged, confused, and frustrated by the research process, despite the convenience, relative ease, or ubiquity of the Internet. In our sessions, frustrations included the effects of information overload and being inundated with resources, but more. Participants also reported having particular difficulty traversing a vast and every-changing information landscape. Specifically, participants greatest challenges were related to finding the materials they desired, knew existed, and needed on a “just in time” basis.

Some specific findings:

• Students treat everyday life research and course-related research differently, and they put a lot more time and effort into the former. “Students reported that searches for everyday life information could last for days, and were driven by curiosity, as students clicked on Google results or Wikipedia citations and unfolded layers of information.”
• Students “reported almost twice as many frustrations, overall, with conducting course-related research than with everday life research, though the nature or type of participants’ frustrations had underlying similarities.” Everyday life frustrations included: too many results from a Google search and the need to sort through them; knowing the “answer” is online but not being able to find it; figuring out whether a source is credible; knowing that everything is not online; and never can find enough information on the obscure topic being searched. Course-related frustrations included: information overload; too much irrelevant information, can’t locate what is needed from online results; trying to find the “perfect” source; not knowing what to look for, yet still sifting through articles that might fit; trouble finding books needed on library shelves; and conducting research to meet another’s expectations.
• Students begin their course-related research with Wikipedia. They begin their everyday life research with Google, followed by blogs and Wikipedia.
• “The majority of the students we interviewed did not start on an assignment–thinking about it, researching, or writing–until two or three days before it was due.”

The study authors note that for students, conducting research “may feel a lot like being an inexperienced sailor heading directly into an oncoming wind, sails wildly flapping, and not being able to maneuver and get to a desired destination.” They believe this is because students are struggling to “find context,” and they go on to describe four types of context students seek: big picture; language, situational, information gathering.

But what do students do to find context? They use Wikipedia, despite its flaws and warnings from their professors. “We found the majority of students ignored the negatives and went to the site anyway. Most students depended on and used Wikipedia for information cited in papers, but just never included Wikipedia entries on their Works Cited page. In our sessions, students also discussed concerns over Wikipedia and accuracy. However, most participants believed that they, themselves, had the ability to discern the credibility of a Wikipedia source, based on their ‘gut level’ interpretation of Wikipedia’s rating system.”

Surely it isn’t a surprise that:

• Students always procrastinate and are looking for quick and easy answers.
• Students spend an unlimited amount of time and effort on things that interest them, but do the minimum necessary on academic assignments.
• Students universally use the two tools that are the most convenient, familiar, and useful to them– Wikipedia and Google– and they will continue to do so regardless of what their professors say.
• Students don’t know or haven’t been taught how to do research, think critically, find and evaluate sources (online and in the library), and efficiently sift through the overwhelming amount of available information to find what they need.

I wrote in my very first blog post, “Research is like treasure hunting, and to do it well you must be skeptical, curious, discriminating, persistent, and willing to look beneath the surface.” Research also requires time and patience, but it is a skill that can be learned with a little knowledge and practice. However, research is much easier to do when motivated by a love of learning, intellectual curiosity, and passion for your subject, rather than obligation.  Even I don’t like researching subjects I find boring. So while we clearly need to teach students how to do research, we should also be giving them assignments that not only educate them, but also interest and inspire them.

A fascinating post last month in the blog In the Library with the Lead Pipe gave a librarian’s perspective on this, discussing some of the “questionable assignments” given to students by well-meaning faculty members:

Every semester there is at least one assignment that comes across my reference desk that makes me throw my hands up in exasperation (such as: a scavenger hunt that was written before we moved much of our content online or the requirement that the student must have at least one print source, library databases and ebooks do not count)…

We kept getting students who had the same (admirable) weekly assignment: find and read a newspaper article covering the event they were studying that week. The article (or possibly other primary source document) had to have been written during the time of the event and from the perspective of the people involved. We had been doing fine helping them find historical and foreign papers as needed, until they came to the Ottoman Empire. And it didn’t stop there. The class was a survey of world history. They continued to have topics that simply might not have ever been documented by the people involved, unlikely in newspaper article form, certainly not in English, and may not have ever been translated into English if it did manage to get written down and preserved. African events were also particularly difficult…

Scavenger hunt assignments are frustrating for everyone. Looking up trivia is not the same as conducting research and without a meaningful application of the process of using the library anything they learn through the scavenger hunt is less likely to stick…

Often the student, the faculty, or both don’t differentiate between the free web and resources that the library has purchased, but are available electronically…

Librarians are on the front lines of this battle, and both students and faculty would benefit from using them more as a resource.

It looks like I now have lots of subjects for future blog posts…

Online registration is now open for my research class

Today is the start of online registration for my May 9th Research for Writers class at Richard Hugo House in Seattle. (You can also register by phone, fax, or mail.) Enrollment is limited to 15 people.

See my earlier blog post for a description of the class, or go to the Hugo House website for more information.

Measuring Worth

If you’ve ever wondered about the relative worth of something over time, the present value of a past amount of money, or what a historic price in British pounds is worth in US dollars today, you should check out the Measuring Worth website:

We are concerned with measuring the worth of items with which both a monetary value and a past time period are clearly associated. Examples are: A loaf of bread sold for seven pennies in 1915; what is its “value” today? Your great-grandfather’s estate was $1000 or £200 in 1900; what is that worth today?

Created by economists, the site contains historical data sets and calculators to help measure things like comparative relative values (of the US dollar from 1774 to the present, the UK pound from 1830 to the present, the Chinese Yuan from 1952 to 2007, and the Japanese Yen from 1879 to 2007), comparative growth rates of economic variables, historical inflation rates, growth rates of daily stock indexes, etc.

Comparing the value or worth of something over time is very complicated (the site has six different ways to calculate the relative value of a US dollar amount), so there’s an essay, a user guide, and other detailed information to help you figure out which calculator to use and interpret the results.

My Research for Writers class

I will be teaching a one-day Research for Writers class on Saturday, May 9th from1 pm to 5 pm at Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

Here’s the description from their spring 2009 course catalog:

Research for Writers

Research is an important part of the creative process for writers of fiction and nonfiction. Research can help with inspiration, storytelling and world building, whether you are writing about the past, present or future, about life on earth or an imaginary world. The instructor will share advice about research, discuss the kinds of research writers may need to do and help students find useful sources of information in print, on the Web, in libraries and in unexpected places.

Enrollment is limited to 15 people, and the cost is $95 ($85.50 for Hugo House members). Registration begins on February 24th for members and on March 3rd for nonmembers. During the first week of member registration you can only register by phone (206-322-7030) or in person. Beginning March 3rd you can register online or by mail (download and print the registration form). This page has links to the course catalog and detailed registration information.

Digital collection news from two of my favorite libraries

Last month the Library of Congress digitally scanned the 25,000th book in its “Digitizing American Imprints” program, which “scans aging ‘brittle’ books often too fragile to serve to researchers.” From their January 14, 2009 press release:

The Library, which has contracted with the Internet Archive for digitization services, is combining its efforts with other libraries as part of the open content movement. The movement, which includes over 100 libraries, universities and cultural institutions, aims to digitize and make freely available public-domain books in a wide variety of subject areas.

Books scanned in this pilot project come primarily from the Library’s local history and genealogy sections of the General Collections. For many of these titles, only a few copies exist anywhere in the world, and a reader would need to travel to Washington to view the Library’s copy. Now, the works can be accessed freely online or downloaded for closer inspection or printing. Readers can search the text for individual words, making the digital copy an even more valuable research tool than the original…

All scanning operations are housed in the Library’s John Adams Building on Capitol Hill. Internet Archive staff work two shifts each day on 10 “Scribe” scanning stations. The operation can digitize up to 1,000 volumes each week. Shortly after scanning is complete, the books are available online at www.archive.org. Books can be read online or downloaded for more intensive study. The Library of Congress is actively working with the Internet Archive on the development of a full-featured, open-source page turner. A beta version, called the Flip Book, is currently available on the Internet Archive site…

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization founded in 1996 to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages…

The Internet Archive is also home to the Wayback Machine, an archive of 85 billion web pages “from 1996 to a few months ago.”  Type in a web address and choose from the archived dates available. It’s kind of like digital time travel.

The Folger Shakespeare Library “is expanding access to its digital collection by offering free online access to over 20,000 images from the library’s holdings.” From their January 15, 2009 press release:

The digital image collection includes books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, art, and 218 of the Folger’s pre-1640 quarto editions of the works of William Shakespeare. Users can now examine these collection items in detail while accessing the Folger’s rare materials from desktop anywhere in the world.”Digital initiatives are an important and ongoing part of our mission to provide access to the Folger collection,” said Gail Kern Paster, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. “Cherishing the past has never been in conflict with embracing the future. The promise of digitization is one more powerful case in point. We now have opportunities to bring the Folger’s extraordinary collection to more users than ever.”

Julie Ainsworth, the Folger’s Head of Photography and Digital Imaging, said, “We began digitizing the collection in 1995. By making the collection available online, we are giving researchers and the public an important tool.”

The Folger’s digital image collection provides resources for users to view multiple images side by side, save their search results, create permanent links to images, and perform other tasks through a free software program, Luna Insight.

Stephen Enniss, Eric Weinmann Librarian at the Folger said that “These features will create more ways for researchers, students, and teachers to experience the collection. They can share images with each other, generate online galleries, and examine items from Queen Elizabeth’s letters to costume sketches. As a library we’re continually seeking ways to expand access to researchers and students across the country and around the world.”

The Folger is also collaborating with the University of Oxford to create the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, which will provide free online access to interactive, high-resolution images of the 75 quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Other participants include the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Library of Scotland, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities which is designing a special interface for the Hamlet quartos in the archive. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is funded by a new Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grant awarded jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joint Information Systems Committee. In addition, Picturing Shakespeare will make 10,000 images from the Folger collection – including prints, drawings, and photographs relating to Shakespeare – available to teachers, scholars, and the general public through an initiative from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both projects join a fast-growing body of podcasts, videos, and other online content produced by the library.

Here’s the link to the Folger’s Digital Image Collection.

As I wrote in my blog post about library resources you can access from home, rare book library websites offer extraordinary and unique digital collections, online exhibitions, virtual galleries and showcases, essays and articles, collection and research guides, and bibliographies. So go explore.

Research and Documentation Online

Diana Hacker’s Research and Documentation Online is a website about finding, evaluating, and documenting reference sources. The site is based on one of Hacker’s handbooks for college students, Research and Documentation in the Electronic Age, but the information she provides would be useful to just about anyone who does research. I particularly like her tips for evaluating print and online sources and the annotated lists of specialized sources (databases and indexes, web resources, and reference books) for over 30 disciplines in four categories (humanities, social sciences, history, and sciences). She also includes guidelines for documenting print and online sources (Chicago, MLA, APA, and CSE styles) and a comprehensive list of style manuals for different disciplines.

Reference link collections (part 4)

An excellent reference link collection for humanities research is Voice of the Shuttle, created by Alan Liu, an English professor at UC Santa Barbara. The site is an annotated guide to online resources that can be searched or browsed by the following categories:  general humanities resources; postindustrial business theory; anthropology; archaeology; area and regional studies; art (modern and contemporary); art history; classical studies; cultural studies; cyberculture; dance; gender and sexuality studies; history; legal studies; literature (in English); literatures (other than English); literary theory; media studies; minority studies; music; philosophy; photography; politics and government; religious studies; science, technology, and culture; and technology of writing. Each category is further divided into extensive and useful subcategories to make browsing easier.

Richard Hugo House needs an Executive Director

Richard Hugo House, a nonprofit center for the literary arts in Seattle, is searching for a full-time Executive Director.

About Hugo House:

Richard Hugo House is a home for writers and readers. Our mission is to provide writers of all ages and backgrounds with the resources they need, connect audiences with the world of writing, foster the creation of new work and promote the literary arts as a vital part of our culture.

Richard Hugo House offers classes, residencies and events. Through our classes, including our flagship program, Hugo Writing Classes, we provide opportunities for writers from age eight to eighty to practice and build their writing skills in supportive, creative and stimulating classrooms. Our residencies offer established writers stipends and/or space to support their work; in exchange, these writers hold office hours and consult free of charge with anyone in the city and region who seek their expertise. Events include our annual Hugo Literary Series, which invites established and up-and-coming writers to create new work and debut it here; the Hugo Writers Fund, a granting program that provides new and emerging writers with space and/or honoraria to produce their own events and premiere new work; and the Hugo Zine Archive and Publishing Project, which maintains a library of over 11,000 handmade and independent publications.

They are looking for someone with the following qualifications:

• A demonstrated passion for the arts and a love of literature;
• A proven ability to lead and mentor staff with integrity, enthusiasm and a commitment to results;
• A minimum of four years of progressively responsible management and supervisory experience;
• Strong communication, listening and relationship-building skills;
• A demonstrated ability to raise funds from a range of sources, most notably individual donors and foundations;
• A solid grasp of human resources and financial management practices and concepts;
• An understanding of marketing, outreach and communications concepts;
• An appreciation for collaborative decision-making processes coupled with the ability to be decisive when required;
• Knowledge of nonprofit board structures and principles of governance;
• The ability to work a flexible schedule to accommodate the organization’s schedule of events; and
• An appreciation for community-based organizations and the organization’s relationship with the greater Seattle community.

Follow this link for the full job description.

Hugo House commissioned a story from my husband, Matt Ruff, for the October 2008 Hugo Literary Series event on the theme “Road Trip.”

I will be teaching a “Research for Writers” class on May 9th for Hugo House’s spring quarter. I’ll post the details and registration information soon.

Europe puts its cultural treasures online

Europeana, a new digital library of Europe’s cultural treasures (including literature, art, history, music, and cinema) launched today with over 2 million items from over 1000 institutions (museums, national libraries, archives, and galleries) from 27 European Union countries.

The “About Us” page has information about the project, a list of participating institutions (including the Louvre and the British Library), and details about the kinds of items that have been digitized and are available on the site:

• Images – paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
• Texts – books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
• Sounds – music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
• Videos – films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

This website is a prototype, with plans to launch the full version in 2010 with over 6 million digital items.  I suspect their servers are currently overwhelmed, as I haven’t yet been able to successfully complete a search, but I look forward to exploring the site over time.

Update: According to news reports, the Europeana website crashed after receiving an unexpected 10 million user requests per hour, so the site will be out of commission until mid-December.

Millions of historic LIFE photos now on Google

Here’s a great new research tool– you can now search or browse through millions of historic photographs from the LIFE magazine photo archive on Google Image Search.

An excerpt from the announcement on Google’s blog:

We’re excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive…. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.

See masters like Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White documenting pivotal world events, capturing the evolution of lifestyles and fashions, and opening windows into the lives of celebrities and everyday people.

Great news about Google Book Search

Like everyone else, I use Google dozens of times a day. Their web search engine is still the best I’ve found, but Google also has a number of more specialized search functions that I like and use regularly. By far my favorite is Google Book Search, which is not one of the main functions listed on Google’s home page, but it will appear if you click the “more” link.

Google Book Search enables you to search the full texts of all of the books stored in its database, which is made up of books scanned from the collections of cooperating libraries (including Harvard University, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library, to name a few) and digital book files submitted by publishers. For books in the public domain (published in the U.S. before 1923), you can read as much of the text as you like online, download a PDF file of the entire book, and print as many pages as you want. For books still under copyright, if the author or publisher has given permission, you may be able to view a limited number of pages (though you cannot print or copy any of the text), but most books are restricted to only a few lines or no preview at all. Google displays detailed information about each book, and you can see a list of libraries that have it or buy a copy from an online bookstore.

I love Google Book Search because it helps me discover extremely useful and interesting books of all kinds– old and new, in-print and out-of-print, primary and secondary sources, and valuable sources of information long neglected or forgotten. I love having instant access to complete works in the public domain that are out of print and not available through my local libraries. I love being able to search the texts of millions of books simultaneously for words or phrases– names, places, dates, subjects, titles, historical events, etc.

Google Book Search has always been controversial because it scans books still under copyright without obtaining permission from the authors and publishers, and Google has been sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over it. The great news is, according to Publishers Weekly, the lawsuits have been settled, and everyone wins– millions of books under copyright will be searchable online, there will be a way to purchase full online access to many copyrighted works, the full texts of out-of-print books will be viewable for free on library computer terminals, authors and publishers will control whether or not their works are included and share in the revenue generated through online access to their works, a nonprofit Book Rights Registry will be set up, etc. As both a researcher and the wife of an author, I am thrilled.

Here are excerpts from the AAP statement detailing the settlement:

The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search….

The agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form, by significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books searchable via the Web. The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works.

If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:

• More Access to Out-of-Print Books — Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online;
• Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books — Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
• Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online — Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world’s most renowned libraries;
• Free Access From U.S. Libraries — Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
• Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works — Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.

Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling $125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees. The settlement agreement resolves… lawsuits [that] challenged Google’s plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.

Holders worldwide of U.S. copyrights can register their works with the Book Rights Registry and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions, book sales, ad revenues and other possible revenue models, as well as a cash payment if their works have already been digitized.

Libraries at the Universities of California, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Stanford have provided input into the settlement and expect to participate in the project, including by making their collections available. Along with a number of other U.S. libraries that currently work with Google, their significant efforts to preserve, maintain and provide access to books have played a critical role in achieving this agreement and, through their anticipated participation, they are furthering such efforts while making books even more accessible to students, researchers and readers in the U.S. It is expected that additional libraries in the U.S. will participate in this project in the future….

“It’s hard work writing a book, and even harder work getting paid for it,” said Roy Blount Jr., President of the Authors Guild. “As a reader and researcher, I’ll be delighted to stop by my local library to browse the stacks of some of the world’s great libraries. As an author, well, we appreciate payment when people use our work. This deal makes good sense.”

“This historic settlement is a win for everyone,” said Richard Sarnoff, Chairman of the Association of American Publishers. “From our perspective, the agreement creates an innovative framework for the use of copyrighted material in a rapidly digitizing world, serves readers by enabling broader access to a huge trove of hard-to-find books, and benefits the publishing community by establishing an attractive commercial model that offers both control and choice to the rightsholder.”

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor,” said Sergey Brin, co-founder & president of technology at Google. “While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips.”

Updates:

Here is Google’s blog post about the settlement.

Here the future changes to Google Book Search resulting from the agreement are explained.

The writer’s bookshelf (part 4)

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the references writers and editors should have on their physical or virtual bookshelf.

Usage Guides

Usage guides explain issues of confused or disputed use of the English language. The best ones provide historical perspective on usage problems, give advice on present-day usage, and provide quotations to illustrate usage and show changes over time. 

Usage can cover a wide range of issues, such as grammar, syntax, commonly confused words, capitalization, alternative spellings, and idioms.  Here are a few examples of common usage issues:

• they/them/their as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, as in “A person can’t help their birth.”
• “alright” vs. “all right” 
• “shall” vs. “will”
• “that” vs. “which”
• “it is I” vs. “it is me”
• “less” vs. “fewer”
• “different than” vs. “different from”

My favorite usage guide is Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. After I bought the book, I showed it to my husband, but he didn’t show much interest at the time. The next day he happened to ask me a usage question, so I grabbed the book and read him the answer. He took the book from me and started to browse through it, and ever since the book has lived on the reference shelf in his office. He even included it in his end of 2007 recommended books list for the Chasing Ray blog, and this is what he wrote:  

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage- Forget Strunk and White’s flimsy little style pamphlet. What you’ve got here is nearly a thousand pages of distilled commentary on the most vexing grammar and usage questions of our time, such as whether it’s OK to say that one thing is different than another, or whether “my friend and I” can be used as the object of a sentence. The way you judge such a book, of course, is by seeing how often it supports your side of an argument, and so far, the Dictionary has been right every time.

You can browse some sample pages using Amazon.com’s “Look Inside” feature. For those readers who took issue with the David Foster Wallace quote calling utilize a “puff-word,” here is the M-W entry for utilize, which expresses a different view:

Usage writers dislike utilize because they regard it as a needlessly long and pretentious substitute for use. They generally recommend either that it be disdained altogether or that it be used (not utilized) only when it has the meaning “to turn to practical use or account.” That is, in fact, almost invariably the meaning of utilize in actual usage:

“Scientific knowledge, for example, is developing exponentially–faster perhaps than our culture can… utilize it wisely.” –Milton S. Eisenhower, Johns Hopkins Mag., February 1966.

“…women who want to work at jobs that utilize their full potential.” — Bella S. Abzug, Saturday Rev., 7 Aug. 1976.

Use could certainly be substituted for utilize in any of these passages, but not without some loss of connotation. Utilize is a distinct word having distinct implications. More than use, it suggests a deliberate decision or effort to employ something (or someone) for a practical purpose. Its greatest sins are that it has two more syllables than use and that it ends with the dreaded -ize. It is a common word, nevertheless, and every indication is that it will continue to be one. 

 

Another good usage guide is Garner’s Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner. Garner includes both word entries and essays addressing larger questions of usage and style. You can browse a few pages on Amazon.com, and Garner’s website has reviews and links to two sample pages from the work.

Here’s an interesting sample entry:  

Cummings, E.E. The poet Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), a shy man, early in career used the lowercase i for the first-person singular pronoun. (This habit, now commonplace in Internet exchanges, was highly unusual.) Cumming’s critics then began referring to him sarcastically in print as e.e.cummings. The practice stuck, and that was how his name appeared on book covers. Does this mean we should all use lowercase letters in spelling his name? Those most familiar with the man think not, and they use ordinary capitalization. Norman Friedman, the founder and then president of the E.E. Cummings Society, summed up the poet’s “philosophy of typography” this way: “that he could use caps and lowercase as he wished, but that when others referred to him by name they ought to use caps.” Spring: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society, 1992, at 114-21. Nor is it true that Cummings legally changed his name to lowercase letters. That story appeared in the preface to a biography about Cummings, but his widow angrily denied it.

In contrast with M-W, Garner has little to say about utilize:

use; utilize; utilization. Use is the all-purpose noun and verb, ordinarily to be preferred over utilize and utilization. Utilize is both more abstract and more favorable connotatively than use.

 

There are, of course, other usage guides. Fowler and Follett each have their fans (some are particularly attached to the old 1965 second edition of Fowler, which is very British). As I’ve said before, you should compare different references, find those you like, and use them.

The writer’s bookshelf (part 3)

This is the third in an ongoing series of posts about the references writers and editors should have on their physical or virtual bookshelf.

Style Manuals

Style manuals are all about consistency in writing, editing, and publishing. Style includes rules for when to spell out numbers, how to deal with abbreviations and acronyms, which words should be capitalized, and punctuation issues (whether to use a serial comma, when to hyphenate compound words), to list only a few examples.

Anyone who writes or edits books in the U.S. needs The Chicago Manual of Style, the 15th edition (the current edition, extensively revised in 2003). The Chicago Manual of Style calls itself “the essential reference for authors, editors, proofreaders, indexers, copywriters, designers, and publishers in any field,” and that’s not an exaggeration. Though the main focus is on the needs of writers and editors of books and journals, the new edition was revised to assist ”the increasing proportion of our users who work with magazines, newsletters, corporate reports, proposals, electronic publications, Web sites and other nonbook or nonprint documents. Computer technology and the increasing use of the Internet mark almost every chapter.” If you are still using an older edition, you should upgrade to the 15th edition, as style preferences have changed over time.

The Chicago Manual of Style includes chapters on the parts of a published work, manuscript preparation and editing, proofs, rights and permissions, grammar and usage, punctuation, spelling and compounds, names and terms, numbers, foreign languages, quotations and dialogue, illustrations and captions, tables, mathematics in type, abbreviations, documentation, and indexes. It also includes appendixes on design and production (basic procedures and key terms) and the publishing process for books and journals.  A more detailed table of contents can be found on the CMS website (www.chicagomanualofstyle.org).

The Chicago Manual of Style is available in multiple formats: hardcover book (priced at $55, but available at a discount online), CD-ROM for Windows ($60), and web subscription ($30 per year at www.chicagomanualofstyle.org). The web version is fully searchable and has extra features, such as the ability to add notes, bookmark paragraphs, and create personalized style sheets.

There are also many specialized style manuals for particular types of publications:

• Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications
• Modern Language Association Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing
• Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law
• New York Times Manual of Style and Usage
• American Medical Association Manual of Style
• Scientific Style and Format: The Council of Science Editors Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers
• American Chemical Society Style Guide
• Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
• United States Government Printing Office Style Manual
• The Bluebook: The Standard System of American Legal Citation

Publishers and companies will specify which style manual they use, and many also have in-house style guides or style sheets to reflect individual company preferences and create consistency throughout all of their written material.

Reference link collections (part 3)

Still more reference link collections:

www.intute.ac.uk: Intute is an annotated collection of web resources for education and research, created by a network of UK universities. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites and write detailed descriptions. This site contains over 120,000 resources in the arts and humanities, health and life sciences, social sciences, and science, engineering, and technology. You can browse through the “Subject A-Z” list of hundreds of specific subjects,  or use the search functions. The advanced search function will allow you to limit your results by the type of resource.  

www.nytimes.com/navigator/: The New York Times Newsroom Navigator is a collection of web resources used by journalists and editors at the New York Times “as a starting point for their forays into the Web…  without forcing all of them to spend time wandering around to find a useful set of links on their own.” In addition to the Newsroom Navigator, there are separate Business Navigator, Politics Navigator, and Health Navigator link collections.

A question for my readers about software

I received an email question from Kevin that I’d like to open to the floor, as I’m curious about this subject myself. Can anyone recommend software to store and organize research material and notes while working on a project? I’ve heard writers rave about Scrivener, a word processing and project management tool for writers to help them keep track of ideas and research, but it is only available for Mac, so I have no personal experience with it (I use Windows).

If you’d like to share your software recommendations or describe your experiences with these types of programs, please do so in the comments to this post.

Library resources you can access from home

If you haven’t visited a library website recently, you may be surprised to learn there are a wealth of free reference sources and research tools which you may be able to access from the comfort of your home, any time of the day or night.

If you have a library card, many public library systems give you free access to a wide range of electronic resources through their websites, including subscription databases, reference books, newspapers, magazines, and journals. For example, the Seattle Public Library offers free access to the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford Reference Online (which allows you to search hundreds of Oxford University Press reference works in all subjects), the New York Times historical archive dating back to 1851, Britannica Online, and the AP Photo Archive, to name only a few. Many libraries also allow you to download digital audiobooks and ebooks to your home computer.

If you don’t have a library card, most libraries will allow you to use their onsite computers to access their electronic resources.  This is true for many colleges and universities as well. You won’t be able to access their resources remotely unless you are a current student or faculty member, but if you visit their campus libraries you can use their public terminals. University libraries tend to have a far wider and deeper range of electronic resources than public libraries, so if you are doing serious research, it may well be worth the trip.

Many libraries throughout the world offer free online resources available to everyone, such as their own ”best of the web” link collections. One of the most surprising free services offered by some libraries is “Ask the Librarian,”  which allows you to ask research questions by email or live web chat. Look for terms like “Ask the Librarian” or  ”Chat with a Librarian” on a library website, or use a search engine to find one.

Rare book library websites offer extraordinary and unique digital collections, online exhibitions, virtual galleries and showcases, essays and articles, collection and research guides, and bibliographies. Some of the best include the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the British Library, to name a few.

To find links to libraries around the world, check out Library Spot.

The writer’s bookshelf (part 2)

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts about the references writers and editors should have on their actual or virtual bookshelf.

Dictionaries 

You should have– and use– a good dictionary. (You are only asking for trouble if you rely on spell-check.) A recent edition is preferable, as new words are added over time, and changes can occur in spelling, hyphenation, plurals, usage, etc. For example, the current edition of my dictionary lists the word “online” (both the adjective and adverb) as one word, no hyphen. The previous edition of the same dictionary published a decade earlier lists the word (adjective and adverb) as “on-line,” two words, with a hyphen.   

There are a number of good dictionaries out there, but many copy editors prefer Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition  (the most recent edition, revised in 2003), which is what I use. It is available in multiple formats: hardcover book (in various bindings, generally priced $22 to $27, but available online for $15 to $20), CD-ROM (which allows you to save the entire dictionary to your computer and easily search it without ever having to load the CD again), and web subscription (for $14.95 per year at www.merriam-webstercollegiate.com). You can also get them in combination– the edition of the book I bought included the CD-ROM and a free one-year subscription to the website for a total of $27 (less than $20 online).  

If you need an unabridged dictionary (most people don’t, though copy editors sometimes do), Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary is a classic, but it is expensive. It is available by web subscription at http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com for $29.95 a year.  

The mother of all dictionaries is, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary, which provides the meaning and history of over half a million words, past and present. The OED tells you when each word entered the language and provides over 2.5 million quotations illustrating word usage over time. The OED is available in many formats, all of which are expensive: book form (the 20-volume full set, a two-volume abridged set), CD-ROM, and web subscription (monthly or annually) at www.oed.com. The great news is that many public libraries subscribe to it, so if you have a library card, you may be able to access it for free from your home computer through your library’s website. (For example, on the Seattle Public Library website, the OED is in their list of databases and websites, so if you enter your library card number and PIN, you’ll have full access from home.)

 There are many free dictionaries on the web, but I’ll only list a few here:

• Merriam-Webster offers free web access to an online dictionary and thesaurus at www.m-w.com, though access to their premium works (the Collegiate and Unabridged dictionaries) is by paid subscription only.
• OneLook Dictionary Search (www.onelook.com) is a special search engine which has indexed over 1000 online dictionaries. By entering a word or phrase into one search box, you can view results from many different online dictionaries.
• A free online dictionary and thesaurus can be found at www.yourdictionary.com.

Choose the dictionary that best suits your needs. For the casual user, a simple print or online dictionary may suffice. If you write or edit, you should use something more substantial and authoritative. If you are a professional writer or editor, check with your publisher or employer, as they may specify one as part of their house style.

Advice for writers about research

Research is an important part of the writing process for authors of fiction and nonfiction.

A few of you out there may be wondering why fiction writers need to do research at all. Can’t they just make everything up? Research is important for world-building, storytelling, detail, and inspiration whether you are writing about the past, present, or future, whether your characters are living on earth or on an alien world, or whether they are using magic or technology. 

My advice for writers about research:

• You don’t need to know everything about a subject in order to write about it. Think about what you really need to know, why you need to know it, and what you can just make up.
• Do not wait until you have done all of your research to begin writing. Writing and research should be interconnected, and each should fuel the other.
• Don’t become obsessed with details that aren’t important to anyone but you, but take the time to confirm the accuracy of information you do use so you can avoid obvious bloopers and preventable errors. 
• Allow the research to lead you in unexpected directions. If you find out something that conflicts with your plans, don’t view it as an obstacle, figure out how to use it.
• When writing, don’t stop if you are missing details. Mark the spot, keep writing, and go back and fill it in later.
• Don’t put everything you know into your writing. Backstory and worldbuilding are great, but don’t put it all in the finished work. Avoid data dumps. To quote Ernest Hemingway, “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If the writer omits something because he doesn’t know it, then there is a hole in the story.”
• Know when to stop– don’t let research interfere with your writing.
• Be open to serendipity, and allow yourself to discover information in unlikely places.

Reference link collections (part 2)

Here are two of the more interesting specialized link collections.

www.martindalecenter.com:  Martindale’s Reference Desk has an unusual collection of links with a strong emphasis on science and technology. Subject categories include cyberinfrastructure and the Internet, agriculture, livestock, engineering, astronomy, chemistry, geosciences, materials science, physics, mathematics, archeology, aeronautics, maritime, languages, and health sciences. The site also links to over 23,000 online calculators.

http://home.comcast.net/~dflawson/: Deborah Lawson’s Historical Research Page is a great site.  Subject categories include many different periods of history, maps, money, weapons, clothing and accessories, transportation and travel, food and drink, etiquette, language and slang, government, law, occupations, inventions and technology, postal history, crime, sexuality and marriage, household matters, religion, medicine and illness, the military, architecture, diaries and letters, historical newspapers and magazines, and advertising.

 

New Update:  Deborah Lawson’s Historical Research Page recently moved to a new web address. I’ve changed the link above and on the sources page accordingly.

Reference link collections (part 1)

There are a number of reference sites containing collections of links to selected websites organized by subject or category. They are sometimes described as online reference directories, web indexes, or “best of the web,” but I just call them link collections. They can be a good way to discover useful sources of information that you otherwise might never find. Some of the best link collections have been created by librarians who carefully choose which websites they include.    

I suggest taking time to explore link collections when you aren’t actually looking for specific information. As each contains links to hundreds or thousands of different websites, they can be completely overwhelming. In reality, only a small number of the individual websites they link to may actually be of use to you. Browse through a specific subject area of interest, see which websites look potentially useful to you, then bookmark and organize those websites you want to keep track of for future reference. By familiarizing yourself in advance with individual reference websites and putting them where you can find them again, you’ll have a much easier time of it when you do need information. 

Here are a few general link collections to get you started:

• www.refdesk.com:  Refdesk.com is a truly vast and headache-inducing site, with links to thousands of websites. It may be better for finding quick facts than doing in-depth research.
• www.nypl.org/links/:  The New York Public Library’s “Best of the Web.”
• www.loc.gov/rr/main/alcove9/:  The Library of Congress’ annotated list of reference websites.
• www.digital-librarian.com:  A librarian’s choice of the best of the web.
• www.lii.org:  Librarians’ Internet Index.

 In future posts I’ll write about more specialized subject link collections.

The writer’s bookshelf (part 1)

Anyone who writes or edits should have at least a few essential references close at hand. This is the first in a series of posts about useful reference works for the writer’s bookshelf. 

The references I’ll be posting about are in book form, though some may also be available on the web or on CD-ROM. These different formats have their strengths and weaknesses, and though I generally prefer having books I can keep within arm’s reach of my desk for easy access and browsing, you should use whatever works best for you.    

Some references, such as dictionaries and thesauruses, are available in a dizzying number of editions and formats, in print and online. I may recommend a particular edition I like and use, but you should compare a few directly (pick some sample words, look them up in different works, and compare the results) and choose the ones that meet your needs. The best references are ones that have the information you need in a format you find easy to navigate so that you’ll actually use them. 

 

Thesauruses

For years I used a classic Roget’s Thesaurus, the kind that arranged words in categories according to their meaning rather than in alphabetical order. I never gave it much thought, and I wasn’t looking for a new thesaurus, but a few years ago I discovered something much better, and I haven’t opened poor Roget’s since. 

The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus has become my thesaurus of choice for a number of reasons. It contains over 300,000 synonyms, arranged alphabetically, and features contributions by working writers, including Simon Winchester, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, David Auburn, Francine Prose, Michael Dirda, and Stephin Merritt. This work places a great deal of emphasis on distinguishing between the different word choices and explaining how they should be used, making it much easier to find just the right word. I particularly like the special features, the notes and mini-essays giving a writer’s perspective on particular words and their usage, explaining fine distinctions in meaning among closely related synomyms, and clarifying easily confused words.  The book also contains concise guides to grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, as well as important points of American English usage by Bryan Garner. 

Here are a few examples to give you a sense of the style and usefulness of this work:

From the “word note” for utilize*:

This is a puff-word. Since it does nothing that good old use doesn’t do, its extra letters and syllables don’t make a writer seem smarter. Rather, using utilize makes you seem like either a pompous twit or someone so insecure that he’ll use pointlessly big words in an attempt to look smart… What’s worth remembering about puff-words is something that good writing teachers spend a lot of time drumming into undergrads: “Formal writing” does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clean, clear, maximally considerate writing.

From “the right word” note for plot:

If you come up with a secret plan to do something, especially with evil or mischievous intent, it’s called a plot (a plot to seize control of the company). If you get other people or groups involved in your plot, it’s called a conspiracy (a conspiracy to overthrow the government). Cabal usually applies to a small group of political conspirators (a cabal of right-wing extremists), while machination (usually plural) suggests deceit and cunning in devising a plot intended to harm someone (the machinations of the would-be assassins). An intrigueinvolves more complicated scheming or maneuvering than a plot and often employs underhanded methods in an attempt to gain one’s own ends (she had a passion for intrigue, particularly where romance was involved).

From the “easily confused words” note for incredible and incredulous:

Believability is at the heart of both incredible and incredulous, but there is an important distinction in the respective uses of these two adjectives. Incredible means ‘unbelievable’ or ‘not convincing’ and can be applied to a situation, statement, policy, or threat to a person: I find this testimony incredible. Incredulous means ‘disinclined to believe, skeptical’–the opposite of credulous, gullible– and is usually applied to a person’s attitude: he managed to look simultaneously incredulous and bored by her story.

This work is not only informative, it is also fun to browse through, which isn’t true of any other thesaurus I’ve ever seen.  

The first edition of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus was published in 2004 and it is still in print. (The retail price is $40, but Amazon sells it for $24.) A second edition is scheduled for November 2008.

There are, of course, many other thesauruses, in print and online, so find one you like and use it.

 

* The word note for “utilize” was written by David Foster Wallace. To read some other word notes by him, see my September 14th blog post.

Don’t believe everything you read

“The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.” — Samuel Johnson

I thought this famous Samuel Johnson quote would be an appropriate way to begin my blog. The problem is that Johnson never actually said this, despite the fact that you’ll find this attributed to him on a number of different quotation websites. None of these websites identified the original source of the Johnson quote, so I decided to dig a little deeper. The Apocrypha section of Frank Lynch’s Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page identifies this quote as a corruption of something Johnson did say, which was recorded by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson. The actual Johnson quote is:  “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” I confirmed this by searching the text of Boswell’s Life of Johnson online.

This illustrates a few important lessons about evaluating sources of information:

• Don’t believe everything you read, especially on the Internet. Just because the same information appears on multiple websites doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Bad information spreads like a virus.
• Not all sources of information are equal. Don’t rely on only one source for an important piece of information. You should always try to find multiple sources, as well as different kinds of sources.
• Use reputable sources and find out where or who the information is coming from. Is the author or source identifiable, knowledgeable, and credible? What are their qualifications or credentials? Are they biased, do they have an ax to grind, or are they selling something? Are sources for the information cited, or does information appear in a vacuum without any way of knowing where it originally came from?

Research is like treasure hunting, and to do it well you must be skeptical, curious, discriminating, persistent, and willing to look beneath the surface.