MLA

A few days ago Laura and I discovered that we could look up many of Provo’s historic buildings online.  Even more surprising was the fact that one of our favorite old houses, the Reed Smoot House, we could actually look at the paper work that was filed in 1970’s that allowed the house to become an historical landmark. 

 

Among the many interesting things on this paper work were some research citations, which I was astounded to see were done with MLA formatting.  As an English major and then master’s student, I’m very familiar with MLA, having had to use it to cite all of my research.  Initially, then, I was vaguely pleased that I was able to immediately recognize MLA formatting on a document more than 30 years old.  Quickly however, I became even more astonished that MLA had changed so little in all that time.  Though there were slight differences, was basically the same.

 

This experience points out to me the idiotic backwardness of all things MLA today.  In the 30+ years since the Smoot House papers were filled out the world has experienced a digital revolution that arguably has changed the world as much as the printing press centuries before.  Texts themselves are different, people’s access to information is different, and the way we think about information is different.  Unfortunately (or fortunately if you’re a lazy old scholar), MLA has chosen to disregard all of those changes and pretend like typewriters are still an author’s weapon of choice.  This is somewhat akin to monks continuing to make illuminated manuscripts into, say, the 1600s; nice, but not really relevant anymore.

 

As a teacher of writing I often tried to get my students to understand that citation styles served a very real purpose.  Superficially, they obviously give different researchers a codified way of understanding and retracing others’ footsteps.  More importantly, however, they reflect the values of their discipline; each style implicitly makes an argument about what information is important, and where that information should go.  This, in turn, reflects the values of the people working in the particular discipline.

 

Today however, texts themselves are bucking the values that MLA embodies.  When was the last time you saw a website with an author?  Sure, certain websites include authors for particular articles, but who is the custodian of the entire cite?  Where is the website “published?”  How do you cite a Youtube video that has been embedded on a Facebook profile and was originally pirated from a DVD extra features disc?

 

The point is that in the digital age much of the information that MLA values is either nonexistent or irrelevant. That doesn’t mean that a reader doesn’t need any citation information, it just means that the information they need is different. Accordingly, why not just hyperlink everything?  It would be easier, less disruptive to the reading experience, and potentially much more fruitful.  Any old English professors who couldn’t handle this could be forced into early retirement for becoming irrelevant.

 

Obviously I’m fairly critical of MLA, but I say these things as someone who uses it all the time and who feels fairly comfortable with it.  I see its usefulness, but nearly all of the research that I’ve done would be better suited to a more contemporary citation style.  I also believe that the kinds of people who use MLA, people who are supposed to be on the cutting edge of cultural criticism and analysis, are stuck oddly in the past when it comes to documenting their research.