Co-creating and debating knowledge: Citing literature, citing people

I wrote this in 2015 the first time I tried to unpick my difficulties with the concept of doing a literature review before doing the research, and privileging published academic work over conversations when thinking about theory and meaning. I rediscovered it as I trawled through past fragments and notes as I start writing my thesis. This won't make it into my thesis, but I'd like to put it 'out there' in the public domain. So here it is.

I like thinking and I like my thoughts. I learn by debating and discussing, especially with people who disagree or who approach to topic from a radically different perspective. I want to be able to order and lay out my thoughts to encourage further debate.

I don’t want to cite experts to justify my thinking, as if my thoughts have no value because I am not eminent. I do not want to hide behind experts in an attempt to abdicate personal responsibility for what I’ve written.

I do have to be careful in case the above is an excuse for trying to avoid citing because I find it difficult to develop the discipline of knowing where ideas have come from. I’m pretty eclectic and I’m getting old. I usually couldn’t tell you where I picked up an idea – it might have been a newspaper article, tweet, book I read in 1983, something overheard at a conference, a conversation, a lecture or something I scan-read when looking to see what others have read. And I’m not just eclectic, I also struggle to separate my immediate interaction with someone’s words and the words themselves.

But I digress. Whatever my beliefs and (limited) capability for citing, my thoughts are not my thoughts. They are a constantly evolving product of interaction with other thinkers. I need to keep notes so I can cite others in order to:

• give credit to those co-creators (at all stages of research)
• provide pointers to how my thinking evolved (when I get to the point of fixing my thinking in a thesis)
• signpost people to things I think worth reading (at all stages of research)

We have an established route for citation when we interact with texts, with rules for how to cite within the writing and how to reference that citation in the bibliography. That’s fine if the knowing or unknowing co-creators of your thinking are written, disembodied texts. And once I’ve learned the discipline of keeping accurate records…

There are newer rules for citing television programmes, videos, websites – almost anything can be cited as long as what we are citing could be accessed by others in the same way that we accessed it.

But how do we cite when our co-creators are encountered not as written texts but as conversations, debates, email exchanges, tweets? My reasons for wishing to cite are as valid for now as any encounter with a written text.

Back in the 1980s when I wrote a science dissertation, it was permitted to cite the odd 'pers comm' if it were from a respected authority. It was viewed as needing a strong argument for including a personal communication as, although it credited the person and directed you to someone of interest, it did not let other people reflect independently on that communication. In other words, how could others access the information, the data, that I cited?

It’s at this point that my thoughts moved to the concept and language of Open Data. After all, what is a citation but a way to access data? And in Open Data Institute terms, data (in my case, things needing citation) come as open, shared and closed.

Open is available to all on the same basis.

Shared is available to some (like publications behind a pay wall or personal communications).

Closed is private communication so shouldn’t be cited at all.

Some within the Open Data world argue that as much data as possible should be shifted to ‘open’ or ‘closed’, as ‘shared’ is where privilege is maintained. (As I said, I’m ill-disciplined in documenting where I hear things; all I can say is I believe this comes from articles I’ve clicked through to from Twitter that were written by proponents of Open Data, and conversations over dinner before a Gov Camp with someone from an Open Data Institute. If anyone reading this wants to direct me to something I can cite, that would be amazing)

If the language of Open Data applies to things a researcher might want to cite, does Open Data thinking show us a way to move personal communications out of ‘shared’ and into ‘open’? Possibly. One route is to shorten the time between finding something out or developing a new idea and publishing about it. It might be interesting if academics could add a ‘please publish’ button to their blogs to help work out which blogs need refining from a work-in-progress into a publication. Or perhaps we need to revisit the status and purpose of blogs.

Maybe, in this world of DOI (Digital Object Identifier; a code that means your information can be found even if the web address changes), there is scope for preparing a mutually acceptable version of a personal communication and deliberately moving it out of the shadows into the ‘open’ by uploading it digitally in a way that complies with guidance on what makes ‘good open data’ (http://theodi.org/guides/what-open-data).

This might make both parties think twice about how transparent they wish their communication to be. But if transparency is a problem, the communication probably needs to be shifted to the ‘closed’ category and therefore not cited at all.