Hey Dan,
I did not mean to say to that "the default for contributions to public scholarly listservs should be considered private", but that the way one writes in an email is not the way one would write on a public blog post, or a journal article.
Not all listservs are alike, and some offer public access to the archive, and others don't (the latter require a membership).
So I see my replies (that are conversational) between members in a given email lsit as precisely in a grey area, where I am not necessarily writing with the awareness that I will be cited publicly by others. If this happens on places like Twitter, where people often get surprised to discover the reach of their postings (because they more or less assume, with different degrees of self-conciousness, that their postings are public), it seems reasonable to me that when one feels one is chatting amongst friends then discovering one has been cited publicly (making typos for example) could be a reason to be surprised.
If one wants to be really strict about it yes, I believe that a listserv that will be completely public should contain a terms and conditions document stating that members are OK with their postings a) being completely public and b) being subject to citation, reuse, etc. without previous consent. I am a CC and OA advocate so I would be more than happy to subscribe to that; I am saying this because I am aware that perhaps this is something that not everyone is conscious of (otherwise there wouldn't be such panic sometimes when some people discover Facebook's or Tumblr's Terms and Conditions for example). Maybe this sounds boring and paranoid, but if email is going to be a form of publishing we need to start thinking about the ways users are expecting to license their postings.
When I write these words, for example, I am replying to you, Dan, knowing that everyone else in the list will be reading, and that the list is the ADHO DH Global Outlook Community. My words are addressed to you and the list, and even if in some region of my mind I am at the same time aware these words might be read by others outside this list, I am always writing for this list. Otherwise I would just post it elsewhere; my blog for example.
If email listserv postings are going to be subject to research by third-parties, then all members need to be aware of that their right to confidentiality is being waived. In the majority of research surveys, respondents should be fully informed about the aims of the survey, and the respondent's consent to participate in the survey must be obtained and recorded.
I am also saying this because not all people are equally safe when being cited. This means that some scholars can be very critical publicly and face little risk, whilst other scholars in other settings might be more vulnerable. Often email listservs offer a level of confidentiality (even if it is just perceived as such) that the open web does not offer (one can feel one is chatting in cofindence, amongst friends, even if this is not the case and one is going on the record at all times).
So I'd say that when it comes to citing what someone said in an email (to a listserv or not) it's always better to be safe and ask if it's OK to share/cite than sorry... but that's just my personal opinion.
Best,
*Dr Ernesto Priego*Lecturer in Library Science Acting Course Director, MSc/MA Electronic Publishing, City University London
City University London offers a wide range of postgraduate courses delivered by world-leading academics. Register for our Open Eveninghttp://www.city.ac.uk/events/2014/feb/postgraduate-open-eveningon Wednesday 19 th February to find out more.
MediaCommons' THE NEW EVERYDAY is happy to announce the publication of a cluster on THE MULTIMODALITY OF COMICS IN EVERYDAY LIFE, curated by Ernesto Priego of City University London and David N. Wright of Douglas College. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/cluster/multimodality-comics-eve...
http://epriego.wordpress.com/ @ernestopriegohttps://twitter.com/ernestopriego Editor-in-Chief, *The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship * http://www.comicsgrid.com/ Subscribe to the Comics Grid Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iOYAj
On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Daniel O'Donnell daniel.odonnell@uleth.cawrote:
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
City University London offers a wide range of postgraduate courses delivered by world-leading academics. Register for our Open Eveninghttp://www.city.ac.uk/events/2014/feb/postgraduate-open-eveningon Wednesday 19 th February to find out more.
MediaCommons' THE NEW EVERYDAY is happy to announce the publication of a cluster on THE MULTIMODALITY OF COMICS IN EVERYDAY LIFE, curated by Ernesto Priego of City University London and David N. Wright of Douglas College.
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/cluster/multimodality-comics-eve...
http://epriego.wordpress.com/ @ernestopriegohttps://twitter.com/ernestopriego Editor-in-Chief, *The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship * http://www.comicsgrid.com/ Subscribe to the Comics Grid Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iOYAj
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
Marxista, Feminista y Bloguera
Twitter: @nimlothdecuba
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=663817529
Mi blog: http://yasminsilvia.blogspot.com/
Parte de Proyecto Arcoiris
Colectivo LGBT, anticapitalista e independiente, de Cuba
http://proyectoarcoiris.cubava.cu/
Parte de Observatorio Crítico de Cuba
¡A la izquierda, pero por la izquierda!
http://observatoriocriticodesdecuba.wordpress.com/
"El feminismo ha puesto en evidencia, mejor que ninguna otra corriente de pensamiento, tanto la arbitrariedad del psicoanálisis como la insuficiencia del marxismo, es decir, ha cuestionado los dos grandes modelos totalizadores del siglo XX."
Carlo Frabetti
*De:* globaloutlookdh-l [mailto:globaloutlookdh-l-bounces@uleth.caglobaloutlookdh-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:
- 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
globaloutlookdh-l mailing list
globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca
http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/globaloutlookdh-l
You are currently subscribed to this list in NON-digest mode. This means you receive every message as it is posted.
If this represents too much traffic, you can also subscribe in DIGEST mode. This sends out a single email once a day containing the entire day's postings. To change your settings go to http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/options/globaloutlookdh-l You can request a password reminder from this page if you have forgotten yours.
-- *Dr. Nishant Shah *(Ph.D. Cultural Studies) *International Tandem Partner *, Centre for Digital Cultures http://www.leuphana.de/en/zentren/cdc.htmlLüneburg, Germany *Director Research *, The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore http://cis-india.org *Phone*: India: +91-974-007-4884; Germany: +49-176-841-660-87
globaloutlookdh-l mailing list
globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca
http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/globaloutlookdh-l
You are currently subscribed to this list in NON-digest mode. This means you receive every message as it is posted.
If this represents too much traffic, you can also subscribe in DIGEST mode. This sends out a single email once a day containing the entire day's postings. To change your settings go to http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/options/globaloutlookdh-l You can request a password reminder from this page if you have forgotten yours.
--
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
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
globaloutlookdh-l mailing list globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/globaloutlookdh-l
You are currently subscribed to this list in NON-digest mode. This means you receive every message as it is posted.
If this represents too much traffic, you can also subscribe in DIGEST mode. This sends out a single email once a day containing the entire day's postings. To change your settings go to http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/options/globaloutlookdh-l You can request a password reminder from this page if you have forgotten yours.
--
Daniel Paul O'Donnell Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Canada +1 403 393-2539