Metablogging

Blogs meet the Harvard system

John Quiggin17 Comments

Martin Pike at Northcote Knob:

I just got back a masters essay in which I used a reference to a post on John Quiggin’s blog. I got a distinction, and despite there being a rather large swathe of pedantic comments scrawled on the pages the blogref got through unscathed.

For nerds; I was using Harvard system (eg Pike, 2004) but added a footnote disclosing that it was a blog, and who Quiggin is (or claims to be!).

Anyone heard of this being done, or am I breaking ground here?

17 thoughts on “Blogs meet the Harvard system”

  1. I once submitted a masters essay which included a Gramsci quote from a Billy Bragg CD jacket! I think I used the Harvard system as well, and notwithstanding the “innovative” sources, my essay attracted an HD! Mind you, my marker was that well-known unreconstructed Marxist sympathiser, Jeremy Shearmur, and it was only a Masters of Political Correctness … err … Public Policy, so it probably doesn’t really count!

    🙂

  2. I’ve written undergrad essays that referred to blogs. I don’t see why it should be a problem, as long as you can easily track down the specific post and assess its worth.

    Having said that, some markers have an irrational fear of the internet.

  3. Any reference which is (a) accurate, (b) clear, (c) economical, and (d) consistent in style with other references, will bring tears of gratitude to your marker’s eyes.

    I require essays to be submitted electronically these days. This allows me to: (1) use macros for comments, (2) copy into paste into google to check for plagiarism, (3) check the internet sources just by clicking on the link, (4) speedily appropriate good links thus unearthed to my course web page.

  4. How do you reference a weblog? System I used was (I think) the Cambridge, ie

    John Blow, The Semiotics of Significance, Blatherbo University Press, Blatherton, 1994*

    (*I think I got that right. Long time since I’ve done it.)

  7. Hey, I once cited in an essay, comments scrawled in the margins of a second-hand copy of EP Thomson’s “The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age”, as an example of how English history itself was a hand me down pampliset, repossessed and reworked by each generation in a historically determined materialist framework.

    My tutor, who could see right through a desperate attempt to cobble together an overdue essay, wouldn’t have a bar of it.

    Damn I wish I was at Uni when the internet was around.

    Jimmy Farrell seems to have the right approach.

  12. Thanks John.

    Reference was based on my uni (Deakin)’s style guide for net references. I think it went something like:
    Quiggin, J, (date of post). ‘Lefty eco post title’, John Quiggin [this being the title of the website/publication], , accessed at [date I downloaded it].

    Then I put a footnote, and just said words to the effect that this was a weblog, Quiggin is a published academic…”

    On absurd references; in my year 12 exams I used James Hetfield, singer/lyricist from Metallica, as my ‘Poet’, and did better with that exam than any other. But with lines like “power wolves beset your door” and “begin whipping dance of the dead, blackened is the end”, they’re a more productive source than you’d first think…

  13. I just did my MA dissertation on blogs, which included quoting from comments. I passed!
    (There is an increasing amount of academic material on weblogs.)

  15. The only thing I know about Gramsci comes from Billy Bragg (sad but true). Here’s the quote, from “Workers Playtime”:

    “How many times have I wondered it it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one’s own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn’t this had some effect on my life as a militant – has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation”

    antonio gramsci, 1926

  16. And that is indeed the Gramsci quote I used in my essay, Wilful, although of course the best quotes on the CD are by Billy Bragg himself. For instance:

    “Between Marx and Marzipan in dictionary, there was Mary”

    “I love you so much, that sometimes its such [that] I’d walk a mile with a stone in my shoe”

    …and…

    “How can you lay back and think of England when you don’t even know who’s on the team?”

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