Chapter 5b: Distribution

Whereas a book would usually end with a ‘list of references’ or 'works cited', this book’s final chapter concerns the practice of ‘referencing’ – the reference as a verb and not a noun. This change of perspective underlines how the creation of references, configurations of authorship, indexing of knowledge, and other scholarly activities – that are usually considered mundane and less important than the actual knowledge itself – are in fact an intrinsic and important part of the constitution of knowledge: What we know cannot be excluded from the formats of knowing. To use another word, academic referencing is part of creating what Celia Lury has referred to as an ‘epistemic infrastructure’ – the organisational structures and facilities by which knowledge becomes knowledge. Like other formal cultural expressions, also academic referencing follows formal properties of circulation, composed and upheld by technical infrastructures with specific features.

As also mentioned in the introduction, and hopefully clear at this point, ServPub explores self-hosting as an infrastructural practice, the potential for autonomy in the publishing process, and not least the role of communities in this. Referencing is to be seen in the same perspective – as an exploration of the potential for social and technical autonomy in the process of making knowledge, knowledge.

Referencing is part of a constellation of practices such as quoting, indexing, paraphrasing, annotating, writing footnotes, selecting, etc. Inherently, they can take many forms and do not necessarily work together. For instance, if I write an email to a friend saying, “my neighbour told me the traffic has dramatically increased in the street these last two years”, I am quoting and referencing. But I am not making my reference explicit (I am not naming my neighbour) and I do not index my reference. Academic publishing, in turn, establishes fixed and formal procedures to quote, index, annotate, etc. What are the logics of referencing and formatting knowledge in academic publishing – considering social, technical, epistemic or other forms of autonomy?

Radical referencing

A reoccurring term in the collective process has been ‘radical references.’ The notion comes from a distributed collective of library workers in the United States. An important task in librarianship is to seek and make available information, a process deeply dependent on the existence of catalogues; that is, an infrastructure of references, indexes and data. Many of the formal requirements in referencing (i.e., the stating of authors, publishers, years of publication in the correct manner) simply come from the need to build and maintain an infrastructure where one can identify and access publications.

Radical Reference (RR) question the existing infrastructure from an activist perspective. They argue that the librarian is both a professional and a citizen, who have come to realize an activist potential in their profession. As librarians Melissa Morrone and Lia Friedman put it “RR rejects a ‘neutral’ stance and the commercialization of data and information, works towards equality of access to information services,” and therefore actively seek to form coalitions with activist groups. RR is by no means a new thing. Members of the American Library Association (ALA) also took part in the ‘Freedom Libraries’ in the 1960ies, addressing the racist based inequities in American library services. In the time of its existence, RR would assist journalists and the public in anything from finding information of the radical right on college campuses to providing references on cycling in London. In this sense, ‘the library’ is not just a building with shelves, but potentially everywhere.

What has appealed to many of the participants in the writing of this book is the recognition of this wider and living library of references. There is a collective interest in situations where references are not always identifiable as objects of knowledge suitable for a conventional library (ascribed an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), for instance) – let alone listed at the end of a book. This would, for instance, include the practices of activists and others, who are not always considered ‘proper references’ in academic writing, and where the formal standards (or ‘styles’) of references can be hard to meet because the knowledge relies on collective efforts or is dynamic in nature (preserved in a wiki, or other technical system).

To some, there is also an appeal in the recognition of the librarian’s labour as an activist; or perhaps rather, the activist as a librarian. RR resembles other library projects found in grass-roots software culture, where it is common (also to the authors of this book) to use Calibre software to access and build ‘shadow libraries’. That is, for hackers and activists to become their own ‘amateur librarians’, building and sharing catalogues of publications – not only to distribute knowledge, but also to curate knowledge on particular subjects, and to preserve knowledge prone to erasure or other types of discrimination. Proper referencing here becomes a question of care and maintenance of an epistemic infrastructure, such as a catalogue or an index of references at the end of a book, in the pursuit of autonomy.

In the following, we take these appeals as points of departure for an exploration of the logic of referencing, and the potential implications for autonomous academic referencing. In other words, if referencing is a compulsory formality in the publication of research, we ask what purposes, and whose, does this formality serve? Referencing in a radical perspective is not just a matter of autonomy from certain references, or types of referencing (like the formal academic one), but rather an examination of the condition of all referencing, and potentially also an exploration of the forms that a liberation from referencing would potentially take – in recognition of other collectivities than the one that occur in a, say, a research community (connected by a network of references), and also in recognition of the various technical infrastructures (such as the wiki used for collective writing) that make referencing in the ServPub community possible in the first place.

Academic akribeia and citation styles

Writing culture extends more than 4,000 years and making reference to other manuscripts has always been practiced. For instance, Aristotle would often reference his mentor, Plato, but as Ancient Greek scholar Williams Rhys Roberts has argued: “The opening chapters of the Rhetoric do not give Plato's name, but I wish to suggest that they contain some verbal echoes of his Gorgias which are meant to be ‘vocal to the wise.’”. Referencing does not inherently involve a direct mention of a name, and the study of ancient texts involve much debate on these intertextual relations. Not until the 19th century was there a need to specify the ways in which one speaks of others. As readers of scholarly articles will know, there are nowadays set traditions of references that all authors will need to abide by, formulated as ‘styles’ of referencing. The organization of citing, listing, and other tasks finds, in other words, its form in a pre-defined template. This template is much more than a mere formality and belongs to an academic history of knowledge governance and an intellectual history of epistemic infrastructuring.

One widely used standard for referencing within the arts and humanities is the American Modern Language Association’s standard, the MLA format. MLA, along with several other standards like the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM format) or the American Psychological Association (APA format), indicates that the act of referencing belongs to an institutional practice of ‘scholarly’ work and academic akribeia; that is, a rigorous keeping to the letter of the law of the institution (and not just its principles). With a certain ethical undertone (‘the right way’), it performs as a marker of ‘proper’ knowledge within a particular field of knowledge, serving to demarcate it, exactly, as a field of knowledge. The Modern Language Association was, for instance, founded in the late 19th century when programs in language and literature were being established at universities to promote and preserve a national cultural heritage and identity. Formatting references was a way for librarians to index reliable and useful knowledge in a field, and to provide insights into a network of scholars referencing each other, as well as into what and whose knowledge mattered the most. Such practices of demarcation and impact cannot be separated from the governance of research and are no less important in today’s austerity measures of knowledge production.

Besides librarians (as mentioned above) and academic associations, also publishers were keen to build epistemic infrastructures for referencing. The Chicago Manual of Style (used in this book) was historically the first attempt to specify clear principles for making references – quoting in a text, and listing the works quoted. It was first invented by the University of Chicago Press in the late 19th century to streamline the work of editors who had to produce books out of handwritten manuscripts and therefore drew up a style sheet and shared it in the university community. Over time, it has become one of the most widely used reference guides for writers, editors, proofreaders. It comes in two versions: The “notes and bibliography” where sources are cited in numbered footnotes or endnotes, and the “author-date” where sources are referenced briefly in a parenthesis that can be matched up with the full biographical information in a concluding reference list. As we will discuss later in this chapter, a practice of making footnotes, and also of ‘bracketing’ references are more than anything a particular cultural practice that has become naturalized within an academic publishing world but also comes with particular histories and assumptions that reflect hierarchies of power, knowledge and knowledge production. For, after all, what is a reference? And under what terms and conditions does an academic reference and authority occur?

Authorship and research ethics

One place to begin is with the obsession of origin in scholarly akribeia: knowledge has to come from someone, somewhere, sometime. The typical bibliography encodes limited entities: time in the form of dates, spaces in the form of locations (sometimes), people or collectives of people in the form of names, organisations in the form of publishers. Here the figure of the author, treated as a self-contained unit, plays the most central role. The scope, here, is much broader than merely establishing ‘the letters of the law’ (to cite the formally correct way); it has to do with a more idealistic research ethics. Establishing authorship is a question of acknowledging the origins of knowledge, but it is also a scientific community’s promise of holding people accountable for knowledge, and for guaranteeing the validity of that knowledge: at all times, knowledge must be ready to be verified by others, and authors must be prepared to accept contradiction.

This type of research ethics was the topic of the acclaimed ‘Vancouver Convention’ in 1978, where a group of medical journal editors decided to establish a rule of conduct for scientists, editors and publishers, known as the ‘Vancouver Guidelines’. Although, these ethics standards were developed within the medical sciences, they have been applied within all the sciences, and also the arts and humanities. But are they easily applicable in a book such as the one you are reading now?

The Vancouver guidelines outline four criteria, by which all listed authors must abide:

1. An author is someone who has made a substantial contribution to the work.
2. An author must have reviewed the work.
3. An author must have approved the work.
4. An author is accountable for the work.

These ethical standards clearly bring a level of order (letters of law to abide by, in academia), but a critique often raised, is that they do not sufficiently consider the extent to which authorship, and making reference to authorship, are situated within cultural communities of practices. In some types of knowledge production, like particle physics, for instance, it will make perfectly good sense to include hundreds of authors who have all contributed with specific tasks, but who cannot all possibly have read the final proved version and therefore be held accountable. In other research traditions you would credit people who cannot read, like in some areas of social anthropology, acknowledging the productive role of local ‘informants’. In interdisciplinary research, an author within one field may have read and approved a section contributed by a researcher within another field, but with no authority to determine the validity of the knowledge.

In other words, even in the established world of research writing and research publication, the question of where an author is, and who speaks in a text, is central. This complexity of enunciation points to a different type of research ethics, where one is less concerned with the validity and verification of the content, and more with the ethics of textual production itself; that is, an attention to the often unorganized patchwork that knowledge sharing is and becomes in a text (including the writing of this one). As once pointed out by Roland Barthes, text functions as textile:

“a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”  

Not only in literary writing, but also in research writing, one might argue that language does not always refer to some-thing, but – in the extreme – also to a commonality, something shared; a set of conditions for common ground where the question of ownership and authority remains undefined, where meanings swerve, and new sensibilities and habits arise. In similar ways, the stipulated originality in science and research (‘The Vancouver Guidelines’) is partly refuted in this publication; the wiki4print is not only a repository tool for print but contributes to a larger whole and network of voices. No authorial voice can be raised fully; rather, it is a chorus of collective voices that takes on a name – ‘Systerserver’, ‘Ingid’, '"Creative Crowds", ‘ServPub’ – in full recognition of the wider ‘tissue’ of a culture’s immeasurable voices of people and collectives (including Martino Morandi's work wiki-to-pdfenvironments (TITiPI), Constant and Open Source Publishing's (OSP) work on web-to-print, and much more, mentioned in this book).

Intervention // The Demonic grounds for referencing

As we have seen, scholarly akribeia is tied to the assignation of an origin which takes the form of the author’s figure for tracking the origin of discourse as well as for verification. Rather than a fully coherent technique, this form of referencing falls short of accounting for the academic contexts in which knowledge is produced and cannot grasp the ‘textile’ dimension of discursive production. This has even stronger implications for those who produce knowledge outside of academia and those whose knowledge has been historically erased or appropriated. Indeed, referencing’s epistemic dimension cannot be separated from a larger problem of symbolic capital production. It is a key instrument in an economy of visibility central to the contemporary knowledge factory and a vector of exclusion of the subjects that are not deemed good “referents”.

In that perspective, scholarly akribeia needs to be challenged on a political ground as well. Katherine McKittrick’s discussion of Sara Ahmed’s intervention in the politics of referencing gives a sense of both the urgency of interventions and their complexity . In her book Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed adopts a citation policy that excludes white men . To absent white men from citations and bibliographies opens up a space for the inclusion of other scholars. It simultaneously emphasizes the pervasive reproduction of a gendered and racial canon by contrast. What is naturalized under the routinely referencing of the same canonical authors as a useful procedure for attribution gets revealed as a conduit for white patriarchal authority.

In her Footnotes essay, McKittrick acknowledges the “smartness” of Ahmed’s proposal but problematizes it further. Is it enough to simply replace some names by others leaving the structure intact? And “Do we unlearn whom we do not cite?” McKittrick’s proposal is that we “stay with the trouble” of referencing, that we suspend the urge to make the cut. Writing should acknowledge its unstable foundation on demonic grounds :

“the demonic invites a slightly different conceptual pathway—while retaining its supernatural etymology—and acts to identify a system (social, geographic, technological) that can only unfold and produce an outcome if uncertainty, or (dis)organization, or something supernaturally demonic, is integral to the methodology.” 

The reason for this goes beyond a mere post-structuralist stance. The reason is an insisting question that needs answering: what kinds of collectives are implied and elicited by different forms of referencing? How to relate and do justice to the kinds of collective attachments and entanglements that cannot be resolved by assigning a name? How to balance the generosity and necessity of acknowledging, expressing, nurturing one’s relations and resisting at the same time the form of interpellation that is inherent to the naming, the assignation? How to acknowledge one’s debt without any simple recourse to “credit”?

There isn’t really one satisfying answer to this question. Any answer is context-specific. A strategy that works in the citational economy of academia might simply fall flat in an activist context where fluctuating forms of presence are integral to a practice. Not to mention the problem of networks of collaboration that straddle different worlds with their different citational practices. This publication is a good example of this conundrum. We opted to attach all our names to the publication as a whole rather than by chapters. We aim to emphasize the collective nature of the effort. Indeed, if we didn’t all write actual words in every chapter, all chapters are the results in some form of a collective discussion and inspiration. There is a kind of diffused authorship that permeates the publication. Nevertheless, we belong to varying degrees to worlds where citational practices are part of an economy of visibility. Therefore, we still attach our names to the publication. This form of balance is an attempt to engage with the collective who worked on this manuscript whilst acknowledging our dependencies on modes of production such as academia. (here it could be interesting to list other forms of dependencies) This addresses only a part of the problem. The part of the problem that we can answer with a reassuring investment in indexicality where a name points to a delimited and singular well-bound entity. When it comes to the demonic ground what kind of practices do we mobilize? Before we get back to this question, concludingly, we must introduce another set of agents who weave the tissue of references: the machines, networks and protocols underlying the ServPub collective.

ServPub as a referencing technical ecology

To summarize, the exploration of the logics of referencing, in an autonomous perspective, implies a questioning of the authority of the text. When referencing, there are debts with credits, but also more demonic ones, without credit – exceeding the restricted economy of exchange found in academic conventions of referencing (such as the Vancouver Guidelines). However, this is only a partial answer. Textual authority cannot be excluded from the technical systems, intrinsic to the epistemic infrastructure of referencing. Referencing of text is maintained not only be authors, librarians, editors and publishers, but also by a range of software products, such as Endnote or Zotero – automating and reassuring the indexicality of the text, that quotations are formatted, their origins identifiable in the larger repositories of text, and that they are listed correctly; keeping the ledger and minimizing the risk of debts without credits, so to speak. But when it comes to the demonic ground of a text, what kind of socio-technical practices do we then mobilize?

This "book" is not only printed material, but it also exists in a technical layering, or what N. Katherine Hayles would call "postprint" Unlike previous publishing infrastructures, the subreptitious "code" of the book positions it as a product of its technical epoch and modifies its nature. Hayles underlines that the difference in the postprint This is evident in the content and skeleton of this project, where the book exists in a series of technical and social infrastructures, that afford different materialities (the server, the wiki, the html code, the pad), but it is also reflected in the social practices related to these materials. The former associations are what Hayles refers as a cognitive-assemblage framework, which enables a discourse " that focuses in individuals, but more importantly "on the more abstract flows that bind entities together into a collectivity" (p. 3). Hayles provides as an immediate example the XML code used in her own book: the code enables the cognitive-assemblage of humans and machines to function by enabling communicating between them.

The practice of referencing within this book is explicitly embedded in a technical ecology in a relatively traditional way, where for example a bibliography generated within Zotero both enacts the spirit of openness while encoding the information in a suitable “vancouver-complying" standard. This is not too different to the XML example: it enables indexicality and structures formats of reference. However, while in other projects these tools are merely instrumental, or even invisible, most of the technologies that make this book possible have been not only carefully selected but also built. The technical ecology of this project is very much a milieu with its own sense of accountability, verification and ethics. A self-hosted wiki for collaboration is not (only) an instrumental endeavor, but (mainly) a political and ethical stance. In a perhaps more complex setup, the server, the online meetings, the pads, and the CSS layouts, are "the collective" that this book both is and is about.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is the series of pads, where referencing practices exist but in a highly unstructured fashion: the pads (etherpad instances) traverse the whole production process, not only for each chapter, but also for coordination, planning, and communications. The post-print practice of referencing is also manifested here, yet in more subtle forms and without specific standards. Each pad brings a communal authorship (as there are no straight ids associated with the comments) and acts as a free-floating space for lineages, a variety of ideas, authors, remembrances, and even affective elements. A highly demonic ground for referencing beyond standards.

Both Ahmed’s strategy for inclusion, and our negotiated relation to authorship and communal authorship, are traversed by these infrastructures, which enrich and complicate how we integrate production. On the one hand, we play with the demonic inherent to any technological system by choosing a certain ecology of systems that prioritizes care, openness, transparency, and collaboration (e.g. Calibre, Zotero, the wiki format for referencing, and the pad). On the other hand, we are aware of the perhaps inevitable ways in which larger infrastructures capture our labor as a community of authors and practitioners.

Unconsensual indexing

However, technical infrastructures for collaboration, even if resilient, are not immune to un-consensual indexing enterprises, due to its capturable nature. As such, for example, the bibliographical reference is also modified to some degree by the infrastructures that mediate the assemblage. Embedded in networks, referencing takes place under a condition of general indexicality. If we index others (by referencing them), we are also indexed. Using a wiki as a format for writing allows for bibliographic automated tools to expand the ecology and sociometrics of an article. Zagorova et al, for example, monitor 55+ million references on the English wikipedia, to undersand the dynamics and temporal evolution of these objects. An obvious advantage of the former is to expand and monitor so-called "alt-metrics" as well as understanding where the references are pointing towards. For example, Singh et al identified, interestingly, that only 2% of all the referenced articles (that have a DOI identifier) are indexed in the Web of Science. Thus, showing some disconnection between these two knowledge archives. These are but a few examples of the index-capture relationship inherent to computational platforms, whether we talk about the neoliberal subject and the corporate software, or collaborative and open alternatives.

This testifies to the fact that there are multiple frames of reference for indexing and that the largest indexing operation is performed by search engines. Exposed to the scrapers of the likes of Google or Bing, words published online are ranked and indexed. This is the main condition through which digital texts are searchable. In this sense, the condition of referentiality cannot be limited to an economy of citations. It is also an economy of links. To the difficulty of formalizing a citational politics and its problematic assignation of names, we need to add the difficulty of formalizing a politics of the integration of our text in a politics of search engine discovery and ranking. Once this document circulates as a pdf with active links or as a wiki, it condenses a network of references redirecting to other (bound) objects.

In recent years, this condition of general indexicality created the basis for another form of textual production that culminated with the chatbots of generative AI. Indexed texts became components of datasets. Interestingly they undergo a different process. The search engine outputs links which connect a query to an actual page whereas the chatbot mostly absorbs the referent. Here to be exposed to scrapers means being digested into a statistical model that cannot reliably refer back to its constituent pieces. To expose one’s content to scrapers means to participate (unwillingly maybe) to the production of a mode of enunciation that is controlled by those who have the means to train AI models at scale (refer to Lury’s “epistemic infrastructure” that Christian introduced earlier). In that case, writing robots.txt files becomes an essential part of a practice of referencing as much as a list of references or footnotes. And a reminder that looking for a position regarding referencing also implies looking for versatile modes of opacity. (perhaps something about shadow libraries)

Conclusion

In that sense, this book is not about metrics and exposure only. Perhaps quite the contrary, the wiki (the vpn, the server, etc) where it rests, is more of an intimate space. As such, we can ask: what does our technical interfaces, the ServPub cognitive assemblage, allows for, that more scholastic bibliography does not? If there is no space, in Chicago, MLA or APA, for an affective dimension, the collective elaboration of this publication needs an approach of referencing that allows for the expression of admiration or tension. Approaches to a more affective approach to bibliographic production also state both the importance of a community of care and shedding more light into the emotional work associated with the labour of academic written production.21 While opening the space for queer within textual representation, Malcom Noble and Sara Pyke organized a gathering dedicated to discussing queer tools, methods, and practices within bibliographers. Queer Critical Bilbiography, notably, does not entail only a topical gathering, but also emphasises the intersectionality of the "academic" and the "practitioner", alongside the "emotional nature of queer bibliographic work". On that line, ServPub ... [something on community work, affective dimensions, and interfaces but also formats?]´

This emphasis on emotional labour has wider implications. For instance, if formats are not be simply thought as practical templates, how can they be invested with other energies? Erik Satie, the composer, was aware of the limitation of formatting. His music sheets, filled with notes for the performer, deviate from the expected notation (e.g. "pianissimo"), and instead take a sort of emotional and highly specific instructions: "Tough as the devil", "Alone for an instant. So that you obtain a hollow", "The monkey dances this air gracefully" or "If necessary, you can finish here." While there is a dadaist humor tinge in this example, Satie's scores break with the format, even in the form of annotations, of classical music, and allow for unconventional references. Perhaps in a similar fashion, the format for references has to represent better the practices of referencing. Escaping the format is a lost art in the realm of bibliographies... (Aristotle)

(Transition towards the practices of referencing of the contributors)

Questionnaire

Dear ServPub book’s contributor,

We, Christian, Pablo and Nicolas are busy writing the chapter on referencing. You can see its current version here.

In the discussions that prepared the writings of this chapter, the term radical referencing was used many times. In the text, we start with a genealogy of this concept and its connection to the figure of the librarian activist. We attempt to address the condition of referencing in recognition of other collectivities than the one that occur in a, say, an academic research community (connected by a network of references), and also in recognition of the various technical infrastructures (such as the wiki used for collective writing) that make referencing in the ServPub community possible in the first place. We discuss the various tensions inherent to mechanisms of attribution, the role of authorship and the need for transparency as well as for opacity traversing the practices of referencing and indexing. We would be very interested to weave into the chapter some examples of your practices of (or thoughts about) referencing. Could you look at the following questionnaire? Your contribution would be highly appreciated. (And don’t forget to tell us how you want it to be referenced :-)

Consider the following questions and answer in one or two (or three) lines:

• What does the term ‘radical referencing’ mean to you?
• How do you make ‘radical referencing’ visible in your text?
• How do collaborative infrastructures relate to referencing?
• How to refer to a text that is behind a paywall? Should we also engage in absenting our references using that criterium?
• How to refer to transient and conversational content that doesn’t have an identifier such as a stable URL?
• How to refer to content hosted on hegemonic platforms without feeding them traffic and therefore offering them value? (Think about X where you need to create an account to access content)
• When you are writing a text, when do you make your reference? Do you begin with a list of references in mind? Do you think of different degrees of referencing? Are you looking for references along the way?

Misc

the reference list is here: https://wiki4print.servpub.net/index.php?title=References