On Sources – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, the fourth in several scribblings about my research: borrowing from Oscar Wilde, the importance of being earnest with one’s sources.
Over the weekend when I was chatting with some friends in my parish choir about the rallies and political protests ongoing in our city and around this country, I made a joke that I went about making my own protest sign, something I’ve been slower to do. I said the sign fit my temperament and was useful for a wide range of protests. This sign, conceived for the sake of a joke, reads “I am rather miffed.” One of my friends retorted that she expected any protest sign of mine would include citations. I laughed and retold one of my favorite stories from my History Master’s program when I wrote a footnote that traced the historiography of a particular concept back through at least four generations of the scholarship to the early nineteenth century; I described this particular citation as a footnote within a footnote within a footnote within a footnote, much to the bemusement of my friends.
This got me thinking more about citations, something I often tend to think about anyway with my work. I do honestly love writing footnotes, it’s one of the more technical aspects of my work that gives me a great sense of pride at accomplishing manually, that is to say without the help of any extra software built to keep track of citations. One of our professors at UMKC introduced my cohort to Zotero, for example, and I flatly refused to consider using it saying, “I memorized the basic formulae in the Chicago Manual of Style in my undergraduate, I don’t need a computer to help me with this.” That’s been my take on this kind of software since. I see the benefit of it, yet I don’t feel the need to adopt it in my own work. I’ve seen so many student essays that copied & pasted text into their footnotes where something went wrong with the formatting that I’d rather just type the text out character by character. There’s something delightfully personal about taking this slower approach because it means I’ve considered every character in the document, and by and large I can avoid typos and errors as a result.
The format of my citations will vary slightly depending on the publication. A proper peer-reviewed article or book chapter will get the full treatment, sort of like the top of the line all-inclusive package they offer at a high price at my local car wash. In contrast, my book reviews rarely include citations beyond those to the book being reviewed, and in that instance, they are mere in-text citations with the page number listed alone. That could be seen as the quick and cheap package at my car wash. Here on the Wednesday Blog, I endeavor to include hyperlinks in all of my citations and in the text of the blog where I first reference a given source. I’ve begun to see more hyperlinks included in peer-reviewed journals as I suspect the vast majority of us who read Isis or Renaissance Quarterly do so on their computers as I do, and thus can click on those links, rather than reading the journal in print when it’s mailed out with each issue. I make an effort to include any citations in the text description box on each of the Wednesday Blog podcast episodes as well, for the benefit of listeners who access this publication through any of the podcast platforms where it is found. I’ve seen the likes of Ologies do this as well, in fact I was inspired by Alie Ward’s thorough efforts at citing her sources on Ologies to do the same on the Wednesday Blog. In my case, it was a question of whether I needed to have the same rigor in this publication as I do in my scholarly writing. I concluded that it was not only needed but that it would be something that could set my work apart from my peers.
My footnotes are the hard workers of my writing, the double-checked cross-references that populate the bottom of my work yet add such vitality to it all the same. Without the footnotes the rest of the essay would lack the depth of meaning that they provide. They root my sentences in a rich soil of past scholarship which can enlighten even the densest lineage. Yet the footnotes require clarity in the text which they elaborate. For them to work I need to ensure that my own text makes sense and is readable, something which often needs a bit more thought after the first draft. I think of the relationship between the text and footnotes in a manner similar to the stratified society in Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction masterpiece Metropolis; the footnotes are the hands to the text’s head, the evocation of thought that elaborates on the essay’s thesis.[1] Yet without the footnotes’ deeper connection to the human experience the world above soaring high into the heavens with the foolhardiness of the biblical Babel would awaken to find its words meaningless.
Citations are a form of cross-referencing that was engrained into me from even my elementary school years. I remember seeing footnotes in some of my favorite childhood books, in particular in Watership Down and I believe in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I wanted to use them on my stories from as early as elementary school but didn’t have a proper need for them until I was an undergraduate writing essays that needed full and clear sources for their work. It’s funny to me now because I do often read peer-reviewed articles that don’t have the same rigorous citation systems in place as the one that I committed myself to over a decade ago now. My rule is that if I make a fact-based claim then I cite it, regardless of how important it is to the argument. I know from my own experience scouring academic databases for secondary sources on André Thevet (1516–1590) and his contemporaries that even the smallest off-hand mention of the man in a source that may have very little to do with him could nonetheless lead me to another source that has a great deal more to offer the Thevet scholar. It made me laugh earlier this week reading one such book that made a fairly large claim about its subject without providing sources for all of the historical figures mentioned in a given sentence, just the ones the author clearly thought were more important.
The way I think of citations resembles how Surekha Davies, one of the leading experts in the field of Renaissance monster studies, described the category of the diagram in a 2020 essay for Aeon. Like Davies’s diagrams, citations “are devised by interpretative communities made up of readers, makers, and practitioners. Each interpretative community has its own distinct pictorial language.”[2] In this context, that language is the style guide for citations in use. Access to the information contained in my citations is eased by using an accepted and standard style, in this case the notes-bibliography system set by the Chicago Manual of Style, which just published its 18th edition last November. There lies the rub of this: citations embed a strong sense of subjective importance in their nature. I try to cite anything and everything that goes into my work, while others will only cite those things which they deem to be the most valuable to their reader. I’ve always looked toward a wider readership, maybe hoping to catch the eye of my colleagues, graduate students, and the odd bookshop aisle walker alike who happens to see my work on the shelf. My more liberal use of footnotes reflects this preference for a wider readership; I try to have enough information in my citations to go around for anyone who may be curious about the connections between my work and its peers and ancestors. I understand the argument that older secondary literature often has less to contribute to contemporary conversations, my dissertation committee for instance asked me to write a new historiography document that only focused on the literature that I’ve used which was published since the millennium. Yet in the twin magnetic poles between which lies my field, Renaissance Studies and the History of Natural History, my historiography begins in the former with Jacob Burckhardt’s 1860 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and in the latter with the likes of Linnaeus adapting new understandings of the natural world from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century perceptions of it which include Thevet’s own cosmography. This is to say that my historiographic timeline begins far earlier than many, and I have to take the full scale as well as the particular scope of it into account.
The earnestness with which I approach my sources is reflected in the quality of my work. I’ve long heard words of warning about particular institutions as places that promote competition between graduate students and between faculty in order to keep the flow of a high level of research and writing. I for one initially heard this and felt a sense of trepidation, why not if I couldn’t keep up with the best of my colleagues. And yet, when I’m in the flow of my writing, things are magnificent. I wrote the first draft of an article of mine that’ll be coming out in the December special issue of Terrae Incognitae in the period of about a week last summer; it uses sources that I’m very familiar with, in fact an expert on, and it makes an argument I’d been thinking about for some time when I sat down to write it. That article’s gone through several rounds of revision since, yet from the beginning one area that needed minimal rewriting were my citations. Today I have another paper I plan on writing in the next few weeks that I initially conceived of in a proposal to another journal special issue, yet I decided to go ahead and write anyway; after all, if that first journal rejects my proposal, I can always send the finished manuscript to somewhere else.
The rub of all of this is that by getting my citations down early, I’ve started my work in a strong place that’s only grown stronger and more resolute with each essay that I write.
[1] S.T. Kane, “Metropolis,” in Wednesday Blog 3.20, (11 January 2023).
[2] Surekha Davies, “Here be black holes: Like sea monsters on premodern maps, deep-space images are science’s fanciful means to chart the edges of the known world,” Aeon (13 July 2020), https://aeon.co/essays/how-black-holes-are-like-sea-monsters-at-the-edge-of-our-vision.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 