A few readers sound off in detail:
Contrary to what Tim Parks may say, footnotes are not simply a “protocol for checking the quotation.” Rather they are the steel in a scholar’s argument. I’ve always imagined texts I read to be like a ship. Good scholars (the best ones I was lucky to know, anyway), like good shipwrights, need only “go below” into the notes to discover if the arguments have been put together thoroughly and whether the structure of the analysis is sound. Far from being pointless, over-long lists to “cover one’s rear end,”as Parks claims, a thorough footnote with a sizable number of sources can give away the game: has this person mastered the relevant literature, and if they have, whose design are they building on to navigate this topic? Are there any major sins of omission?
And, yes, the pesky details of publication matter.
The year of publication says a lot about what trends in the field influenced the writers’ intellectual development, and the state of their discipline at the time of publication. And presses have agendas: editorial directors and staffs at university presses are curators who sign books to build their press’ reputation in certain sub-fields (criticism of nineteenth century French literature, say). Seeing a press name in the notes makes a good shorthand for discerning biases and points of view. Even the city matters. Of course Oxford University Press is in Oxford, England, but if the footnote reads, Oxford University Press, New York, then that is a whole different shop within the organization.
Celebrity scholars like Doris Kearns Goodwin, who abandon the plodding craft of meticulous citation for the art of a ripping yarn, and then leave the details to their research assistants, who think footnotes are just hyperlinks to library databases, run leaky ships and get entangled in plagiarism accusations brought by eagle-eyed peers. Their academic reputations get sunk.
Another has a very different take:
Hear, hear to Tim Parks! Here’s my story: I completed an M.Litt degree (essentially 1/2 a Ph.D, or in other words a 50,000 word thesis of original research) in Medieval History (specifically 15th century English military history) at Oxford in 1999.
What, you may ask, was the most daunting aspect of my work? Finding and painstakingly unrolling yellowed muster rolls from the 15th century at the Public Record Office? Trawling the works of chroniclers long forgotten for tidbits on important events? Deciphering Latin or French as well as the handwritten shorthand of scribes working on horseback for an impatient Henry V of England?
No, the most daunting aspect of my work was keeping track of all of the footnotes. Here’s an example:
If I was to write a sentence such as “Henry V’s fleet left port on the morning of July 30th with approximately 600 ships and 50,000 men in his army” I’d need a footnote citing every source that substantiated those facts, and in addition explain those who varied (unless that explanation was of enough interest to require more main text). That was tough enough. But what if I broke that sentence apart? I would need to keep track of which sources confirmed it was July 30th, which mentioned it was in the morning, and which sources recorded the numbers of the ships and/or men.
For a 50,000 word these I ended up with over 600 footnotes, almost each one containing multiple citations. In many cases my prose was stilted due to a need to avoid breaking up sentences and having to review the footnote attached to place the references where they needed to be. Eventually, as I was writing, I developed a significant aversion to any revision of what had been written so far, probably to the detriment of the writing.
That’s not all. A mere 10 years before I did my work (i.e. predating the World Wide Web) it was considered adequate in my field for you to consult sources readily available in the Oxford and Cambridge libraries, the British Library, the Public Record Office and maybe the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. But by the time I was working if an article was published or thesis pursued anywhere in the world that was even tangentially related to my area of study, I was expected to have considered it.
Here’s the kicker: once you are finished and have submitted your thesis for review, you are scheduled for what’s called a “viva”, where you are interviewed by, in my case, 2 fully-fledged experts in the field. In my case one professor was an Oxford don who was a 20th-century giant in the field. The other was a budding giant in the field. They spend the first 30 minutes asking minutiae questions to, as I was told, “confirm that you actually wrote the thesis” and then past that it’s a more congenial conversation regarding your findings.
I enjoyed my time at Oxford and will always be proud of the work I did and degree I obtained, but this was one of the many reasons I did not stay in academia. I hope the increased number of texts actually available online is making this work somewhat easier for the postgraduates of today, but I kind of doubt it.
The Dish 