[research] Fellow academics, you can cite tweets now! Badly, but you can.

[unjapanologist]

The MLA (Modern Language Association), has updated its widely-used citation guidelines for academic papers with a citation style for tweets:

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

It's kind of baffling that the URL for a tweet isn't supposed to be included. The point of references in a paper is to enable the reader to locate and verify the sources used, and to locate a tweet, a URL seems almost indispensable. URLs are required for citing websites, why not for tweets? Since the MLA guidelines are used as rules rather than guidelines by many academic publishers, an individual researcher who tries to "fix" this by including a tweet URL may encounter quite a bit of hassle trying to get the references published the way they want.

And I must admit to experiencing a small fit of giggles as the Atlantic article where I first read the news used the phrase "The Modern Language Association likes to keep up with the times" in a totally non-ironic fashion. It is now March 2012. Twitter was launched in July 2006. The page about tweet citation on the MLA's site isn't dated, so I briefly hoped that it was actually published earlier and the Atlantic only noticed it just now. But no, the MLA announced the new guidelines on its own twitter account a couple of days ago.

It took the MLA until March 2012 to a) conclude that academics might need to cite tweets, and b) come up with a broken format? Of course the MLA is not a representative of academia or academics, but sometimes I wonder if those kids on their intertubes might be on to something when they whine that the gears of our academic machine turn a tad slowly.

Comments

[branchandroot]

MLA sucks at web citation, and always has. First they wanted you to use the full url in-line, ignoring just how long urls were already getting. Then they wanted you to not use the url even in the works cited, just the title, totally ignoring the demonstrated rate-of-change on the web. Now they think it's enough to give the full text, ignoring the potential for fabricated tweets. Who knows what brilliant twist will be next?

*she says, glaring at her membership renewal form*

[unjapanologist]

use the full url in-line

*contemplates the possible results of that* I almost want to write a full paper like that. Interspersed with strings of symbols and gibberish, boring plain text would almost look like art.

I seem to have OPINIONS

[cathexys]

yes. That!

I stopped using MLA when they changed the last time and DROPPED ALL URLs. Like, i'm a big fan of giving abbreviated URLs when it's searchable and the web site is dynamic, but as far as MLA is concerned, the entire web is accessible via search engine? Think again!!!

Also, even though I get why they have the PRINT now after every book, print article, etc (and ideologically kinda support it), it looks ridiculous!

CMS owns my heart, though 16 did a bunch of stuff that makes it look MORE like MLA (adding quotation marks to articles, capitalizing title words) when I'd just finally learned how it was different :)

[concinnity]

IKR. I died when I saw it. I mean. Kathleen Fitzpatrick (new DH person for MLA)....tweets. I can only assume this was put forward before she started.

[unjapanologist]

Probably. Poor her. I kind of wish they'd just quietly slipped the new guidelines in, instead of announcing it like they'd invented a better kind of sliced bread.

[angrymermaids]

IIRC as of 2007 providing the full URL for websites is only required in MLA format if whoever you're writing for wants it. I've never had a professor who required it, probably because it's (clearly) awful and clunky. But yeah, tweet citations NEED to have the URL and not the whole freaking text. (I'm imagining cited tweets complete with ridiculous hash tags.)

MLA is pretty behind-the-times. Seems to be the case with everything academic where literature is concerned. All of the "reputable" websites I can ever find look like they came from 1998.

Actually, can we just use Turabian for the bibliography and MLA for in-text citations only? That would make my life so much easier. Turabian citations actually make sense, as I learned recently. Oh, History minor. It is going to save my sanity.

[unjapanologist]

providing the full URL for websites is ... awful and clunky.

In the text itself, definitely. But in the references section? Or in footnote citations? References are meant to be useful, they don't need to look pretty.

Ha, I just read a book on making class presentations in Japanese that had a "how to chose your topic" section recommending that you should a) chose something you know a lot about, b) ask an expert, or c) go to the library. It was a 2008 reprint from a nineties book. One would think they might catch that one.

I'm not familiar with Turabian, why is it good?

[angrymermaids]

I probably should have looked it up before commenting. durrr

That said, their reason for not including the URL seems stupider than my reason, not to put too fine a point on it. "URLs can change"? Probably not often enough to justify changing the whole guideline. (Though as someone who usually has to use MLA, I'm really glad they made it optional. Now my bibliographies are not littered with endless strings of numbers and symbols that make every citation take up a quarter of the page! :D

I asked one of my professors about including URLs this morning, and apparently it's best to skip it unless the site is inaccessible or extremely hard to find without it.

(It just occurred to me while I was writing this. Since MLA is primarily used in literature, maybe their lack of a sense-making electronic citation is a Luddite ploy to get people off the internet and into print sources. "Screw this! I'll just open a book!" :P)

Turabian is basically Chicago (plus some minor changes), but with a specialized manual which our history department uses. I like MLA's method of parenthetical documentation, though, so I say combine the two.

[samjohnsson]

Only reason I could think of is that Twitter has changed their infrastructure once, breaking a whole lot of links.

I wonder how they'd feel about t.co links.

[unjapanologist]

Nearly all references to sources are changeable to some degree, though. Other web links besides Twitter's break all the time, books and magazines go out of print, copies of personal communication are lost, and so on. The fact that a particular reference to a source may no longer be useful at some point in the future is no reason to make that source as easy to locate as possible right now.

t.co might make them issue a call for somebody to take charge of this out-of-control internet.

Now I'm wondering what they'd think about a bunch of things. I rather want to ask them how I should reference a torrent, but maybe I'll wait a couple of days until the "lol MLA" tweets have been driven off my profile by other stuff.

[samjohnsson]

::cuddles his CMS and APA closer::

[kimboo_york]

Given my field I use APA almost exclusively and have little concern with MLA guidelines, but since I work with Humanities people a lot I saw this retweeted quite a bit and found it hilarious.

Although tbh it's not like the APA is *that* far ahead of the curve.

While I'm hardly a kid *cough-42-cough* I totally agree that the gears of our academic machine turn slowly. FFS I'm in information studies, you'd think we'd be ON IT with jazz hands, embracing the change, but...not so much. Certainly not in the coursework we are being taught, which is all mid-90s insofar as adaptation is concerned.

I think most entrenched academics and academic resources are simply threatened by the level (and pace) of technological change that they just sit around blinking a lot, looking stunned.

[unjapanologist]

I think most entrenched academics and academic resources are simply threatened by the level (and pace) of technological change that they just sit around blinking a lot, looking stunned.

That's a pretty apt description of a lot of my colleagues :) These changes just seem happen faster than the system is designed to handle. By the time we've discovered Twitter and gotten past dismissing it as a fad/a Threat to Culture and learned to use it ourselves and set up some committees to talk about using it in classes and actually used it in classes and had some more talks about it and convinced uni authorities that it's useful and and and, THE NEXT THING WAS HERE TWO YEARS AGO.

[juniperphoenix]

A comment on the Atlantic article pointed out that this style yields citations longer than the cited works themselves, which I find rather amusing.

And yeah, the no-URL thing is ridiculous.

[unjapanologist]

Indeed. It's pretty amazing nobody noticed that and found it odd at any point in the process. And that other thing. And that. And... The MLA must be a fascinating place to work.