Hi Ernesto,

I'm really not sure about your privacy paragraph. It seems to me difficult to believe that anybody posting to a publicly archived list with an open membership could understand what they are saying as anything but meant for public consumption. Does that mean, for example, that Humanist is not a public record since it doesn't explicitly say it is? That seems hard to believe, since a lot of important things happen there. I'd have thought the same of this list.

Moreover, it isn't a question of the "list owner" having special privileges. Since the records are publicly available to anybody on the web, and were distributed to all members of the list, anybody in the world can cite anything sent to a public email list. There's no additional level of access that the owner has on a public list.

I can see a couple of places where there might be an expectation of privacy or where good manner might cede privacy to a public posting.

Listservs with a closed archive, for example, might be considered prima facie private, especially if the membership is restricted and known. It is dangerous for a writer to assume that something posted to such a list will remain private. But I can certainly see how one might be ethically obliged to confirm with the poster before citation. Even there, however, the lists I'm on that are really meant to be private indicate it: our department list, for example, has a header on every message that says the contents of the list are to be considered confidential and not to be redistributed without prior permission.

Even on an open list, it seems to me to be good manners not to cite clearly accidental postings--e.g. the kind of private messages that people sometimes send to a list in error. I don't think the sender can have any expectation that a publicly archived message-sent-in-error like that will not be cited by anybody; but it seems to me that the citer has a duty in that case to check.

But for most things on a public list, it seems to me that the whole point of the list is to build a kind of gray scholarly literature: a lot of our discussions on this list, for example, contain discussions that are clearly meant to be generalisable and influence debate (like this conversation here, for example); others, like announcements, cfps, job ads, etc., are clearly meant to be redistributed.

Because it exists in a border area between the formal and the informal (it is like formal publication in that it is available to the community--and probably more widely read--but unlike it in that there is no editorial process), I think we owe a duty of respect to the people we cite, meaning not to be too critical of word choice or minor inconsistencies. But I know I've never thought my participation on any public scholarly email list (e.g. tei-l, humanist, dm-l, digitalclassicist, globaloutlookdh-l) was private.

Do others feel that the default for contributions to public scholarly listservs is that they should be considered private? I confess that had never occurred to me before.

-dan




On 14-02-03 07:14 AM, Ernesto Priego wrote:
 It is an interesting question. I suppose some minor typos resulting form typing too fast could be correced "silently". I do these typing mistakes all the time; especially when replying form a mobile phone.

As for citing emails I would think a related question is equally important, that of privacy. Even for listservs, I assume we are saying some things "in confidence", i.e. we write and send certain things because we are writing them for and sending them to a particuar list which means particular receivers, even when we sometimes don't know who are all the members. It's not the same as when posting openly on Twitter for example, when one assumes it's all public and anyone can read and therefore cite.

So before citing anything anyone said via email I would check with the sender if it's OK to cite them, unless there are some terms and conditions somewhere that say the owner of the list is entitled to cite any messages sent to the list.

Best,

e

Dr Ernesto Priego
Lecturer in Library Science
Acting Course Director, MSc/MA Electronic Publishing, City University London

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On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 10:20 PM, Daniel O'Donnell <daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca> wrote:
It really is pretty cool, eh?



On 14-02-01 02:43 PM, Yasmín S. Portales Machado wrote:
¡Me encanta esta lista!

 

 

Yasmín S. Portales Machado

--------------------------------------

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Mi blog: http://yasminsilvia.blogspot.com/

 

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Carlo Frabetti

 

De: globaloutlookdh-l [mailto:globaloutlookdh-l-bounces@uleth.ca] En nombre de Daniel O'Donnell
Enviado el: Saturday, February 1, 2014 1:47 PM
Para: globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca
Asunto: Re: [globaloutlookDH-l] When citing emails, do people silently correct typos?

 

I like that idea for 3), though I think I'll leave the explanation in now, because it needs to go through a press and editors. I confess, I don't even like the idea of correcting them: that is what email is.

On 14-02-01 11:34 AM, Nishant Shah wrote:

Hey Dan,
This is a great question, and one that a lot of us working with online transcripts and with non-standard Englishes constantly face.
With a collection I was editing, working with writers from Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the writers were not native speakers and also not professionally used to writing, we faced a similar dilemma which eventually, we resolved in the following ways:
1. Except for when the syntax was so irregular that the citation was unintelligible, we contacted the sources and checked if they want to re-write it, or if our corrections were still representing what they meant.
2. Like in oral ethnography projects, we retained the irregularities of 'written speech', and we used that as a precedence for retaining these 'errors'.
3. With different registers in the language, we retained them without even high-lighting or italicising or pointing out those irregularities, because that is a judgment call we did not want to make, and we also thought that the onus of bias was on the reader.
Hope this helps resolve some of your queries,
Warm regards
Nishant
On 01-02-2014 19:21, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:

I have a question for advice from this group that might have political implications.

In an article I'm about to submit, I cite a number of discussions on this list and humanist about the use of language, especially English. The authors are both native English speakers and non-native speakers and, as is typical in emails, there are a number of small typos. solecisms, and the like.

Currently, I have a note at the first citation indicating that "as is normal in as conversational a medium as email correspondence, the quoted passages have small typographical errors and other solecisms. These have not been corrected or otherwise noted." My reason for this is that I don't want to put in a lot of sic or corrections in square brackets. Although I'm a terrible typo offender myself, the case can be more politicised it seems to me when dealing with non-native speakers. I'm uncomfortable acting either as judge or, worse, in my case, calling attention to "errors"--especially since I think they are really more issues of register than actual errors.

I could silently correct them, of course, as well, but I don't like that either, in case what I think is an obvious correction turns out to misrepresent something.

What do other people think? I've seen sic used before as a form of ad hominem attack and so I generally really hate using it if I can avoid it. But since it also seems nuts to pepper the correspondence with square brackets (and since that could have the same effect as a lot of sics), I don't want to do that either.

Is there a better solution than simply flagging the register difference, as I currently do?

-- 
--- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada
 
+1 403 393-2539




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--
Dr. Nishant Shah (Ph.D. Cultural Studies)
International Tandem Partner , Centre for Digital Cultures Lüneburg, Germany
Director Research , The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore
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-- 
--- 
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Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada
 
+1 403 393-2539

-- 
--- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada

+1 403 393-2539

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-- 
--- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada

+1 403 393-2539