April 24, 2008

The Future is Now

While attending an interesting Victorian Studies conference honoring Eliza M. Moser Distinguished University Professor Martha Vicinus last weekend I ran into an interesting example of how scholarly research is changing and how the young may end up overtaking the old, although they usually do anyway don't they?

One of the conference presenters, Melanie Hawthorne of Texas A & M talked about Natalie Clifford Barney, a most interesting woman, know as the amazon who strove to be Oscar Wilde's successor. According to Professor Hawthorne she was married twice but the second time was illegal in a number of ways, 1.) she wrote and signed the marriage contract when she was already married and 2.) the marriage contract she signed was with her female lover Elisabeth de Gramont, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre. Since same-sex marriages were not legally recognized in France in 1918 this marriage was doubly illegal.

Well, back to library research. One of the Victorian Studies scholars attending the conference mentioned he had never heard of the marriage contract between Barney and the Duchess before to which the presenter answered this was a relatively new discovery.

The next day on a whim I decided to perform a Google search on Natalie Clifford Barney and the word “contract” to try and get a sense of if and how well this bit of information has migrated into general knowledge. The first link on the list of results was for a Wikipedia article on Barney which mentioned this same contract and gave a correct citation to a 2005 article in South Central Review by Francesco Rapazzini. I am not necessarily condoning students use Wikipedia for their research but I couldn’t help but consider that a possible expert in the field of Victorian Studies didn’t have this information while, likely an undergraduate English student might easily trip on it, using a resource many scholars and librarians consider inappropriate.

Having LibX installed in FireFox I was able to link directly to the full text of the article cited in Wikipedia and confirm the finding of the marriage contract between these two remarkable women.

Research has come a long way, baby!

Posted by swortman at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2007

Wall Street Journal Article on Wikipedia comments

The Wall Street Journal had an article a few weeks ago about the discussion tab in Wikipedia. I've never really bothered much looking at this background information related to the articles but I could see where this might become an actual area of research in the future. While you may have to slog through a number of inane comments of little consequence from people whose entire lives are Wikipedia, some comments also represent scholarly dialog and debate on some important issues and can be traced by date and time stamps. Scholars and non-scholars contribute to Wikipedia and the comments made in articles represent an interesting take on the scholarly process. Encyclopedia Britanica doesn't have an open process for justifying to the public the thought and research behind an entry. People have always assumed what was published was "truth." Now there's a more transparent process.

Here's another interesting note about Wikipedia. There has long been the suspicion that interested parties go into Wikipedia and anonymously edit entries to make themselves, their constituents or their companies look better. Using a database called Wikipedia Scanner it is now possible to track the IP address of these anonymous edits to articles on Wikipedia which makes for some interesting finds. Using Wikipedia Scanner you can look up an "anonymous" editor's IP address and see where their computer is located. Editing an article which bad mouths Allstate Insurance? You're in trouble if your IP address is included within that corporations range. Better be careful. University of Michigan IP addresses are listed on the database.



Here's an example of an unsigned edit with an IP address of 71.214.240.169.


A Wired blog lists a number of examples of questionable edits within Wikipedia and asks readers to vote for the most flagrant conflict of interest.

Posted by swortman at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)