The Late Great Kate

While taking a quick second read of Gert Himmelfarb’s “Where Have All the Footnotes Gone?” this weekend I was struck by her comments regarding the late Kate Turabian (Kate Larimore Turabian, Feb 26 1893-Oct 25 1987). The former University of Chicago doyen of manuscript minutiae is still renowned for her permanent imprint on the rules governing the publication of theses and dissertations. A copy of her Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses and Dissertations sits on my bookshelf nearly alone, its only companion is The Little, Brown Handbook. The other books seem to shun them both. But in thinking of the strict rules of compliance that Turabian produced and which possess “the quality and authority of a covenant” I began to consider digital composition. In a structural sense I think that we as new media historians are still bound by rigid strictures of form that Turabians of the past have laid down. CSS style sheets provide the structure for digital creators much as the Chicago Style Manual does for the pen and parchment crowd, and just as Turabian could be a cruel mistress with a red correction pencil stuck in her graying bun the CSS can be even less forgiving - one mistake can net you 22 cascading errors. So, not very much seems to have changed. But there the similarity ends. Creative freedom enters along with html and the ability to modify, color, re-color, resize, insert, crop, and generally derive gestalt from our web creations without fear of punitive punishment. Veracity of content can remain but it is in the presentation that it departs from the surly bonds of analog styling and gives flight to the creativity of the imagination and inspires new scholarship without fear of trespassing on limiting “arcane and inviolable rules.” Perhaps a new Turabian will one day appear to place the governors on web creativity. Yet lest we mourn her passing there’s already a link to the eTurabian Citation Generator! Link to eTurabian 

Comments

[Dan Gifford]

John, I totally agree with one exception. I don't think it is the tyranny of CSS, but of the validators. Before this class I was blissfully unaware of W3C or even the validation function on my Dreamweaver. And yet, my personal website seemed to plug along just fine without ever have been validated. No one ever complained about how it rendered.

Now I'm suddenly a slave to that W3C red box screaming "Errors found while checking this document as XHTML 1.0 Transitional!"... Cruel mistress indeed! I know Wyke-Smith made a big deal about why we should validate, and obviously it is a core requirement of Clio. But I can't help but be skeptical. It just seems like another construction that we all believe in because we are told to believe in it.

[Lynn Price]

I agree with you, John. We as a society are obsessed with rules. I worked as a proofreader for several years. If you had to follow every rule of the Chicago Style Manual exactly right (and please note the most updated edition, because they are always changing), your life would be spent marred in rules and regulations (which mine was). I don't know how often anyone has used Chicago, but in my personal opinion, it is an arrogant (yes, I think a book can be arrogant!) tool that stymies creativity. I am 100% for correct grammar, but at the same token, it doesn't have to be our prison. Do you think Chicago Style Manual would have approved of James Joyce?

Anyway, I feel the same way about the CSS, but part of it is because of my own ignorance. Basically I'm not designing a page I'd love to see. I'm designing whatever I can figure out that CSS will let me do. And that is limited.

Now for my Luddite comment of the class: I'm just glad - and I'm sure our art historians are, too - that there were no "validators" for the great painters we so admire or strict rule structures they had to follow. And on that note, I'll have to say that at this point, I in no way see websites as an art for exactly that reason.

Lynn