stéfan sinclair :: scribblings & musings

Geoffrey Rockwell and I have been giving considerable thought recently to how we might facilitate the integration of text analysis tools and results into (mostly scholarly) writing. Scholars feel compelled to cite ideas and texts that come from other authors, but they are much less likely to recognized tools that have contributed to their work (and we would probably not want every scholar to cite search engines such as Google that have been used during research). We feel strongly that text analysis tools can represent a significant contributor to digital research, whether they were used to help confirm hunches or to lead the researcher into completely unanticipated realms. Whether or not scholars do make it more of a habit to cite tools is beyond our control, but we want to design our upcoming tools to make it easier for them to do so. At the very least this includes:

• providing a preferred general citation for the tool suite
• providing preferred citations for specific results including references to the tool and the source text(s)
• making it easier for users to extract static or dynamic results and include them elsewhere (a web-based blog editor, an HTML editor, a word processor article, etc.), with a reference

An important component of academic knowledge is reproducibility, and providing scholars with more information on the processes followed during research – including the text analysis tools and digital texts used – is sure to be important.

I was prompted to write this post by a recent notice in a Globe and Mail article that provided several statistics:

These figures have been compiled by Patrick Brethour, the Globe and Mail’s British Columbia editor, drawing from the 2006 census with the help of special software from Tetrad Computer Applications Inc.

The figures referred to are mostly present in the text of the article as well, but I wonder if the editor would have been as likely to include this notice if there hadn’t been the inset with the concentrated statistics. The distinction is important because it’s about recognizing what contributed to the research regardless of how the results are presented (though ironically, journalism tends to have very different standards of citation that academic writing, and yet it’s in a newspaper article that we find a software tool cited). Will standards for citing digital tools in the humanities shift in the coming years?