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Footnotes Vanishing:William Maldonado

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What I got out of reading this is that to be careful how to save online citations although online tools like the wayback machine offer a way to securely save your citations they can’t always save the what all websites in the world wide web looked like at a certain time. The reason being that the wayback machine mostly saves what high profile websites looked like also they need to get more servers if they do wanna cover every single website. The only secure alternative I think would be approved by more people as an online citation is if we take screen shots of resource and add it as an extension of our citation just in case.

Vanishing Act!

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Reading Chapter 5 of the “Vanishing Act” I was a bit confused, because with the multiple papers I write every semester and never used any footnotes nor did I pay attention to any information about the changes. The authors information provided information I was not aware of.
Footnotes obviously have come a long way according to the authors; “some have survived and some hasn’t”. When citing newer websites in recent times; the authors mentioned that the older the website the more accessible it will be.
It was also interesting to learn about top level domain (TDL) this means the ‘Internet page with a parent URL”: for example “com,” “gov,” “org”. “net” which are some of the most common top level domains. The authors also give information about the most reliable and most stable of all the top level domains.
All of the information in chapter 5 of this book give more information that will be helpful in citing and collecting information for my research paper.

Vanishing sources on the Wayback machine.

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Chapter 5 of the Vanishing act explained in a way why it is important to put the date accessed on a citation, it is mainly because of the half-life of the citations. This whole time I thought that the date accessed section part of a citation was just for teachers to make sure their students weren’t procrastinating on a project.  It never occurred to me that the Wayback machine could be used to find disappearing citations and to find those disappearing citations the date when you accessed the web page would be required. Thanks to the Wayback machine’s archival of the web it is able to give us at least a glimpse into sources that may have disappeared due to their half-life.  I also now understand why journals are so highly valued in academic research besides being peer reviewed they also have a very high half-life an average of 5 years according to chapter 5.  With their high half-life it takes a while for them to disappear from the web; which helps them to get archived and to back up our papers.

Rationale for documentation and citation

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The reading somehow- covers different aspects toward the significance and importance conduct between the author and the reader.

Documentation and citation academically- play a great role as a connection between a writer and readers in particular contexts. Citation and documentation for sources should be in a way that is familiar to the readers in terms that addressing them as ones have intellectual relations and approaches with the writer.

There is strict reasons and standards for citation and attribution, wanting to know where the knowledge comes from, and wanting to be able to check it . Such aspects approach through tracing and validation.

Why we document

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It was quite interesting to read why we document things we write. I knew about the reasons Protection and Acknowledgment, but I never thought about Commentary, Tracing, or Validation. I always cited sources because I had to and to not get into trouble when it came to plagiarism, but now it makes sense that it also helps out readers in understanding a document more. Documentation adds credibility and further reading for those interested. With commentary the documentation can also add the author’s voice to the piece, without taking away from the main part of the document itself.

Documentation and Purpose

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In the excerpt on Documentation by Robert Hauptman, the various applications of documentation are explored. These include: acknowledgement, attribution, tracing, validation, protection and commentary which are sometimes inter-related. Depending on the nature of the work and by what type of individual,  whether an expert in the field or a just a mere mortal such as myself, the purposes for documentation and citation varies. For expert researchers, most if not all of these applications may be used in his or her work for reasons such as giving credit to those that influenced his or her work, aswell as for an attribute or proof for a new discovery.

With the existence of copyright law and what it means to owners of intellectual property, the purpose for documentation by average users may be differ from experts. For fear of being accused or threat of a suit, non-expert researchers may use documentation mainly for the acknowledgment and protection purposes.

 

Renovating everything, including the internet information…

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The assigned reading was very interesting to read, simply because it is relevant to current events. The criteria used to judge a site’s credibility isn’t the same as years ago. When I first entered college, I remember being told that .org, .gov, and .edu sites were pretty credible and accepted to be used in papers. However, although some are still credible, there are more criteria that are looked at. One of these is mentioned in the list of the five mutations. I also enjoyed how they utilized the word mutations. The internet has definitely mutated to fit into today’s world. The fact that constancy and permanency is no longer the goal and, updating, revising, and correcting are the goals, is something good to hear. I have noticed in my journey to write my research papers for this semester, that journals and articles are likely to have a “revised xx” somewhere on it. To me this is better because it shows that someone found mistakes and edited it or took the time to do further research regarding the topic. We can’t really blame anyone for thinking the permanency of an article to be important. Remember, editing printed information is more difficult than editing an electronic source.

Google=Truth?

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There’s been an online trend that if its not on Google, it doesn’t exist. This can be thrown into several proportions as people tend to believe too much into search engines. One in particular is Google as its been relied on for countless purposes. Admittedly I am a victim of this as well as I tend to rely on google for alot of work that I do and sometimes even just for basic task. This is a clear example of how people can be taken in by using it. Not all the time it can be true however as even though it holds alot of information, the government has a sturdy hand over what is kn the site as well. So sometimes things can be inaccurate but at the same time its so heavily relied on by the public which puts to question how useful it truly is. And its a clear example of how mass media is a issue in our society.

The Google World

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While in the article, James Grimmelmann explains how companies, individuals and even the  government tries manipulate google to make their job easier, its safe to say that google has a control of what people see, hear and read. In order to find what one is looking for, one must have the exact url, if not they just get off tracked and sent to many there websites that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for. Also while one might think they’re a internet sensation because of the hits they have accomplished, google doesn’t see it the same way in facts they focus on themselves and who’s using google and to google what. On another note, google has gotten bombed (googlebombs). But no matter how many bombs they throw at google, google will still keep doing what it does best and that feeding the servers and waiting for the results. More information on how google is in control, look at how they have destroyed the search king search engines from number 8 to number 4. Even though people might not like it google is at the top of search engines.

Search engine and sources

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Joseph Goebbels told once that lie repeated million times became a true. Apperently that’s what happened in case of ‘ritual abuse’  and ‘google dilemma’. People always believe in what they want, and they always need somebody to blame too. Mass media is the tail which is swinging with the dog of course, but it’s still a dogs tail, in other words, media not reflected something, which is not appropriate by society , and society on the other hand, always use mass media as a mirror. In case of search engine precedents people should not to forget that actually web structure created by people, same as tools for searching information in the web and control quality of information, it’s all man maid and as a result not perfect at all.