This post is part of a series. Please also check out the other posts:
Part 1: What is the Web 2.0
Part 2: The challenge

Literature in humanities and blogs have one thing in common: they both like to quote and reference excessively. However blogs have the advantage of not being stuck on paper. They are not static. They can change over time. Blogs haven used this to introduce the trackback, which has most probably been central in the rise of the blogosphere, as the collectivity of all blogs is called. The trackback is a simple method which works basically like an inverse footnote. While a footnote is showing what the author is basing his argument on the trackback shows you who is basing his arguments on this text.

How would the trackback work in a specific text? Blog posts are rather short and therefore they can rely on a list of trackbacks at the end of a post. This would not work in humanities, especially with books. However humanities have the advantage of precise footnotes. Rarely someone is just referencing a book in general, but a specific chapter or page. When quoting directly you can actually pin the reference to a number of lines. The visualisation of trackbacks would have to take this into account and try to anchor the trackback as precisely as possible in the text. A good visualisation of trackbacks which guarantees a high usability would most probably be the major challenge when trying to implement this concept in humanities.

How would the trackback system work? Blogs have proved that an open standard system is a practical solution to implement trackbacks. In the case of blogs the trackbacks are send out by individual blogs and are completed through central search engines. Technorati which is an important search engine for blogs is at the same time automatically making blogs aware of trackbacks. This has the advantage for Technorati that it is interesting to register your blog with it to find trackbacks. At the same time this enables Technorati to have a broader knowledge of the blogs on the internet. A similar approach would be thinkable in humanities where repositories are sending out trackbacks to other papers and at the same time register with central search engines to be more accessible. These humanities search engines would complete the trackbacks sent out by the repositories. However I have to refer to one technical difficulty: To make this possible we would need a machine readable format for footnotes. Knowing how sacred certain footnote formats are to their adherents this seems impossible. Therefore I propose that this should be solved by adding a hidden second footnote which would then be machine readable.

Why would the trackback be useful for humanities? The trackback is increasing accessibility of literature mainly in two ways. Firstly, when a certain passage in a book, a source an author is using or a table of numbers he is presenting is useful for my research I have a high interest to see who else has made use of this fragment. If an other author is using these numbers or this source or is referencing a certain conclusion it will be interesting for me to see his interpretation. The other author will combine this fragment with his research and therefore allow me to get a broader understanding of the fragment. Trackbacks could similarly be used for archival documents.

Secondly, the trackback is levelling the playing field and is simplifying access to lesser known texts, such as most PhD theses. A text which is often referenced will be well known and therefore be referenced even more often. Of course a text which has not been referenced yet will have a difficult time to get known at all. Except it is published with a well known publishing house or a famous author. The trackback however works indiscriminately. By referencing a text you create a trackback, no matter if you are a famous author or not. Of course a page in a book with too many trackbacks would use a certain system of hierarchisation when visualising trackbacks. But that is not a big issue, as the trackback is not primarily useful when looking at a sentence which sparked a extensive and well known debate. The trackback is more interesting regarding less often quoted fragments. Therefore trackbacks allow for accessibility of lesser known texts when this accessibility is most needed.

Is digitisation necessary for trackbacks? Well, in a perfect world I would imagine to have access to everything online. But we are far from that and at least historians will never have all their sources digitised. Therefore one would have to find a way around that. But I believe that this is possible. One only needs a “fake repository” which pretends to have all texts other repositories do not have. This “fake repository” would serve to collect trackbacks to all non-digitised texts and sources. While these trackbacks would be less easily accessible than other trackbacks, it would still suffice as a “back-up” solution for all cases when you really want to check the trackbacks. When a text is digitised the repository which did so would take over the trackbacks from our “fake repository”. That way, all future attempts of digitisation and every text which is published digitally would feed into this system of references and trackbacks.

A note of caution is however necessary. I have mentioned multiple times the use of repositories. For one thing repositories, which are basically servers with collections of texts published at a certain publishing house or university seem to be the way of choice in science and humanities today. But more importantly a system of mutual recognition of repositories would be necessary to avoid trackback spam. This is a phenomenon we also encounter in the blogosphere, but here each individual author has an interest in keeping his blog spam free. In case of an archival document or an older book one can not expect any institution monitoring spam. Therefore there would have to be a system of automatic spam control which most probably would be based on the idea that certain institutions are certified to generate trackbacks. These institutions would be the repositories, which in turn are very interested to keep themselves spam free.