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tamsin recently wrote about her "ethically questionable citation practices" [1] that she intends to apply on her gemini capsule. i think she is rightly conscious of citation practices being central to knowledge construction and conventions of expression, and how gemtext (and gemini itself) allow us to think differently. she notes that her style — in actuality, methods — will evolve, so my terse comments are really limited to the version as it existed on 2024-04-09.
we hear a lot about the "politics of citation" and "citation as a feminist act" through references like those she includes in her page. these discourses, at least in terms of my own experience of them, are typically situated in academic-professional contexts. while i'd argue that both tamsin and i are embedded and intimately familiar with these contexts (😏) my assumption she's not attempting to have her writing on gemini within the discourse register of these contexts.
my take is her approach seems as though it glosses over the intent of certain kinds of citational practices in a wider variety of registers, in a space, as it were, /for the dolls/. at least in my own writing regardless of genre, citation and reference serve at least three major functions: 1) attribution, 2) aesthetic, 3) aide memoire. the motivations of these forms of citation and reference are arguably more important than the specific convention used to express them
attribution is the most obvious - it operates in the mode of academic-professional discourse, and is typically leveraged to construct and connect knowledge, to wash one's hands of plagiarism, and for these grander political ends. i probably find it the least interesting of the three.
aesthetic is a fun one. in my view, aesthetic "citations" can often be anything but typical citations outside the context of a critical edition. they're often oblique references - from time to time, they can also co-exist as attribution (see, for instance, the work of chaun webster [2]). i use it in some of my own writing, too (like pulling a line from an oscar wilde work into a larger poem). it seems like at least some of tamsin's intended uses of epigraphs serve this function.
aides-memoire in some cases may also serve as attribution if i'm trying to remember the provenance of the idea. at the same time, there may be cases where i'm actively trying to track my own (timebound) disagreement with a particular idea or argument - and as such, a citation alone would typically be accompanied by some sort of note documenting this.
this was all fairly rambling, but my intention was to help get tamsin think about the ways that she wants citations to /do/ things. (yeah, of course i'm going to bring it back to austin, butler, and derrida by way of hypertext theory.) [3], [4] maybe that's what should inform the style guide - how does she recall the kinds of flourishes she took when she attempts to do something different with citation(s) on her gemini capsule?
[1] 〈ethically questionable citation practices〉
[2] chaun webster, "Wail Song: or how a presumed corpse practices breathing"
[3] constantine v. nakassis, "citation and citationality." signs and society 1(1), 2013.
[4] terry harpold, "the contingencies of the hypertext link"
--- posted 2024-04-09 tags: writing, citation, theory, speech acts ---
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