The Future of Scholarship: Easier, Harder, and With More Charlatans
Alan Jacobs:
It’s at least possible that in this new knowledge environment we’ll be able to take more of the research as a given — not all of it, but more of it — and will demand from researchers some of the literary virtues: lucidity of style, subtlety of argument, liveliness of narrative. Maybe when readers will make it clear that they know how easy it is to multiply sources, writers will cease to try to impress through numbers of footnotes.
“Until scholars really believe that publishing on the web is as valuable as publishing in print — and more importantly, until they believe that their institutions believe it, too — few will be willing to risk their careers on a new way of working, with the result that that new way of working will remain marginal and undervalued.”
Truth.
(From Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence).
