The digital library
March 5, 2007 | 12:00am
I was doing some research online last week for an essay I was writing on Philippine-American relations (yup, those one hundred years of love and hate) when I found myself wondering just exactly what words President Manuel Luis Quezon had used when he expressed a preference for Filipino misrule, however hellish, over American governance, however heavenly. (I know, I know  a lot of wags out there will say that Quezon got his wish many times over, but that’s not my present point.)
Quezon is often quoted as saying that "I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans." But, as it turns out, the quotation just as often says "I prefer a country run like hell by Filipinos, etc." So what was it  "country" or "government"? I thought the Internet would solve it for me, but it didn’t. No one seemed to know the exact source of the statement, which users quoted by their best lights.
In a flash of inspiration  something that often hits me a day or two before my deadlines  I turned to the next best thing to MLQ himself: his grandson Manolo, himself a commentator and lover of history, to whom I texted my query and who quickly replied: "I prefer a country…." Later, by e-mail, Manolo also sent me some illuminating pieces on Quezon’s legacy.
I realize that it isn’t every day you can pick up your cell phone and call or text for research assistance, and from such unimpeachable sources. That day will surely come, the way the digital future is shaping up, but not just yet. In the meantime we have Google and Wikipedia  indeed perhaps the best two things since sliced bread, and real godsends to people in need of quick answers.
But as useful as these two sites are, they’re far from perfect. By their very nature, they depend on what the public looks for and what the public provides  and while the idea of a free global marketplace of ideas is terrific, it also lends itself to misuse and abuse, to mistakes and distortions deliberate or otherwise.
As a search engine, Google’s speed and reach are hard to beat  but its strength is also its weakness, in that it brings up the most highly visited sites related to your search, not necessarily the most useful or appropriate ones. Wikipedia is a great experiment in democratizing access to and providing knowledge  you can contribute practically anything about anything  but despite some safeguards, it’s prone to errors or fact and interpretation. (And again, to digital mischief: while looking up a popular American writer, I went over his Wikipedia biography, which seemed pretty standard and straightforward, until I reached a short one-sentence paragraph that simply said, "His wife was a slut." Now, that may have been a fact  if a sad and ultimately irrelevant one  for all I knew, but as it was unattributed and probably maliciously tacked on, it wouldn’t pass scholarly muster.)
The main problem with using the Internet as a research library isn’t only that there’s simply too much out there you can’t double-check; for many people  especially students desperate to get that pesky term paper done  simply too much means more than enough, thank you, which means further that they can just help themselves to all that free information, attributions and citations be damned.
I’m talking here about wholesale and cold-blooded plagiarism, the bane of today’s teachers who have to deal with today’s students. I’m not even thinking of all those Web sites that offer pre-written term papers for the price of a few mouse clicks (leading, of course, to your dad’s or mom’s credit card account).
Or, well, maybe I am thinking about it, not quite sure whether to feel good or bad about the fact that one such Web site has an essay all written out on my short story "Penmanship," ready for downloading (you can get it and everything else you want  how many term papers can you use in a semester, anyway?  for 30 days at $19.95).
Of course the Web site properly proclaims that "All papers are for research and reference purposes only!" and that "turning in someone else’s work as your own is unethical and against the law." But if you believe that this is all that happens in this place, and that its clients take the trouble of citing its URL (Uniform Resource Locator  the Internet address, to the digitally-challenged) in their final papers, then I have three hectares of land smack in the middle of Fort Bonifacio to sell you, cheap (and no, I’m not even related to any retired Army general).
Some students will even claim that they just went ahead and copied material off the Internet (oh, the wonders of cut and paste) without citing sources because they don’t know how. (And guess what, Mom and Dad  all those "Ibid"’s and "Op. cit."’s we learned in college won’t help these kids now, as most of the rules have changed  toward simplification, to be sure, but you’ll still need to check out the new citation styles, as they’re called.)
Speaking of this problem and of citation styles, let’s take care of one item of business right now. How do you cite an electronic source  a Web page, an e-mail, a newsgroup message, and so on? Well, you can go here and learn all about it: www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html. (In the blog version of this column, these will all be live links you can click.)
Take note that most students and scholars will have to choose between the MLA (Modern Language Association  for language and literature types like me) and APA (American Psychological Association  for many social sciences) styles. The Chicago Manual of Style (on which the Turabian guide is based) and the CBE Manual of Style (for scientists) are other popular options.
I didn’t mean for this to be a lecture on bibliography, so I’m going to stop right here as far as citations are concerned. My real topic, which I’ve now hopelessly strayed from, was supposed to be having fun while doing work online. So just to deliver on that promise, let me introduce you to three Web sites I’ve personally visited and gotten both knowledge and pleasure from.
1. www.mobipocket.com/freebooks/default.aspx is a library of free books in many digital formats, usable on your PDA (Palm, Windows, Symbian, etc.). Many of these "ebooks," as they’re called, were generated by the Gutenberg Project, a massive conversion of books to digital format that has now covered over 20,000 titles. Interestingly, there are 37 Tagalog titles on this site, including Florante at Laura; my cell phone has that, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars.
2. www.digitalbookindex.org/about.htm is an even larger collection of 90,000 ebooks, including the Derbyshire translation of Noli Me Tangere.
3. www.skyscrapercity.com/archive/index.php?t-370975.html is a delightful little corner of the Internet that contains links to rare photographs of the Philippines from Spanish and American colonial times. A bonus was the discovery of a link that brings us right back to the man whose name started this column at http://members.aol.com/linggwistik/private/mlq.mp3. If you’ve never heard Manuel Luis Quezon speak, here’s a truly historic opportunity for you to do so, for nothing more than an Internet connection and a mouse click or two.
Following through on last week’s piece on recovered kidney patient Bong Ulep, I received this letter from his employer, Mo Ordoñez:
"Butch, Thanks for featuring Bong in your column. Just to let you know that he and his wife have been doing good works themselves. Bong’s nephew, Jonathan, about 6 or 7, had a harelip. (My daughter Ana asked him when she first met him, ‘Bakit dalawa ang ilong mo?’ They’ve been great friends since then.)
"Despite his inability to speak clearly, the little boy was vibrant and not self-conscious at all. Bong and his wife took the boy into their home and arranged for him to have corrective surgery, free, by good-hearted foreign and Filipino doctors. Just before leaving for the hospital, Jonathan told his uncle, ‘Pag-uwi ko, gwapo na ako.’ He’s back, bandaged, and jumping around.
"Bong told me that he thinks this is why he was allowed to live  so he could help others. And so he has. We are very lucky to have him."
If you want to support more people like Bong, please send some help to kidney patient Lita Peñaflor, whom I wrote about last week. She can be reached at 911-5887. Spread some goodness around; it’s the best way to counter all the bad stuff around us.
Lastly, let me invite you to an exhibition of drawings by a bright young artist named Mark Salvatus. Titled "Bibim-POP," the show goes on this Wednesday, March 7, 7 p.m. at Pablo, second floor gallery, Shoe Expo Cubao. Mark will be participating in an artist residency program at Goyang Art Studio in Korea from March to June, and proceeds from the exhibit will help support his stay there. For inquiries call Yo at 0917-8137138 or Osie at 0916-2459221.
E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.
Quezon is often quoted as saying that "I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans." But, as it turns out, the quotation just as often says "I prefer a country run like hell by Filipinos, etc." So what was it  "country" or "government"? I thought the Internet would solve it for me, but it didn’t. No one seemed to know the exact source of the statement, which users quoted by their best lights.
In a flash of inspiration  something that often hits me a day or two before my deadlines  I turned to the next best thing to MLQ himself: his grandson Manolo, himself a commentator and lover of history, to whom I texted my query and who quickly replied: "I prefer a country…." Later, by e-mail, Manolo also sent me some illuminating pieces on Quezon’s legacy.
I realize that it isn’t every day you can pick up your cell phone and call or text for research assistance, and from such unimpeachable sources. That day will surely come, the way the digital future is shaping up, but not just yet. In the meantime we have Google and Wikipedia  indeed perhaps the best two things since sliced bread, and real godsends to people in need of quick answers.
But as useful as these two sites are, they’re far from perfect. By their very nature, they depend on what the public looks for and what the public provides  and while the idea of a free global marketplace of ideas is terrific, it also lends itself to misuse and abuse, to mistakes and distortions deliberate or otherwise.
As a search engine, Google’s speed and reach are hard to beat  but its strength is also its weakness, in that it brings up the most highly visited sites related to your search, not necessarily the most useful or appropriate ones. Wikipedia is a great experiment in democratizing access to and providing knowledge  you can contribute practically anything about anything  but despite some safeguards, it’s prone to errors or fact and interpretation. (And again, to digital mischief: while looking up a popular American writer, I went over his Wikipedia biography, which seemed pretty standard and straightforward, until I reached a short one-sentence paragraph that simply said, "His wife was a slut." Now, that may have been a fact  if a sad and ultimately irrelevant one  for all I knew, but as it was unattributed and probably maliciously tacked on, it wouldn’t pass scholarly muster.)
The main problem with using the Internet as a research library isn’t only that there’s simply too much out there you can’t double-check; for many people  especially students desperate to get that pesky term paper done  simply too much means more than enough, thank you, which means further that they can just help themselves to all that free information, attributions and citations be damned.
I’m talking here about wholesale and cold-blooded plagiarism, the bane of today’s teachers who have to deal with today’s students. I’m not even thinking of all those Web sites that offer pre-written term papers for the price of a few mouse clicks (leading, of course, to your dad’s or mom’s credit card account).
Or, well, maybe I am thinking about it, not quite sure whether to feel good or bad about the fact that one such Web site has an essay all written out on my short story "Penmanship," ready for downloading (you can get it and everything else you want  how many term papers can you use in a semester, anyway?  for 30 days at $19.95).
Of course the Web site properly proclaims that "All papers are for research and reference purposes only!" and that "turning in someone else’s work as your own is unethical and against the law." But if you believe that this is all that happens in this place, and that its clients take the trouble of citing its URL (Uniform Resource Locator  the Internet address, to the digitally-challenged) in their final papers, then I have three hectares of land smack in the middle of Fort Bonifacio to sell you, cheap (and no, I’m not even related to any retired Army general).
Some students will even claim that they just went ahead and copied material off the Internet (oh, the wonders of cut and paste) without citing sources because they don’t know how. (And guess what, Mom and Dad  all those "Ibid"’s and "Op. cit."’s we learned in college won’t help these kids now, as most of the rules have changed  toward simplification, to be sure, but you’ll still need to check out the new citation styles, as they’re called.)
Speaking of this problem and of citation styles, let’s take care of one item of business right now. How do you cite an electronic source  a Web page, an e-mail, a newsgroup message, and so on? Well, you can go here and learn all about it: www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html. (In the blog version of this column, these will all be live links you can click.)
Take note that most students and scholars will have to choose between the MLA (Modern Language Association  for language and literature types like me) and APA (American Psychological Association  for many social sciences) styles. The Chicago Manual of Style (on which the Turabian guide is based) and the CBE Manual of Style (for scientists) are other popular options.
I didn’t mean for this to be a lecture on bibliography, so I’m going to stop right here as far as citations are concerned. My real topic, which I’ve now hopelessly strayed from, was supposed to be having fun while doing work online. So just to deliver on that promise, let me introduce you to three Web sites I’ve personally visited and gotten both knowledge and pleasure from.
1. www.mobipocket.com/freebooks/default.aspx is a library of free books in many digital formats, usable on your PDA (Palm, Windows, Symbian, etc.). Many of these "ebooks," as they’re called, were generated by the Gutenberg Project, a massive conversion of books to digital format that has now covered over 20,000 titles. Interestingly, there are 37 Tagalog titles on this site, including Florante at Laura; my cell phone has that, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars.
2. www.digitalbookindex.org/about.htm is an even larger collection of 90,000 ebooks, including the Derbyshire translation of Noli Me Tangere.
3. www.skyscrapercity.com/archive/index.php?t-370975.html is a delightful little corner of the Internet that contains links to rare photographs of the Philippines from Spanish and American colonial times. A bonus was the discovery of a link that brings us right back to the man whose name started this column at http://members.aol.com/linggwistik/private/mlq.mp3. If you’ve never heard Manuel Luis Quezon speak, here’s a truly historic opportunity for you to do so, for nothing more than an Internet connection and a mouse click or two.
"Butch, Thanks for featuring Bong in your column. Just to let you know that he and his wife have been doing good works themselves. Bong’s nephew, Jonathan, about 6 or 7, had a harelip. (My daughter Ana asked him when she first met him, ‘Bakit dalawa ang ilong mo?’ They’ve been great friends since then.)
"Despite his inability to speak clearly, the little boy was vibrant and not self-conscious at all. Bong and his wife took the boy into their home and arranged for him to have corrective surgery, free, by good-hearted foreign and Filipino doctors. Just before leaving for the hospital, Jonathan told his uncle, ‘Pag-uwi ko, gwapo na ako.’ He’s back, bandaged, and jumping around.
"Bong told me that he thinks this is why he was allowed to live  so he could help others. And so he has. We are very lucky to have him."
If you want to support more people like Bong, please send some help to kidney patient Lita Peñaflor, whom I wrote about last week. She can be reached at 911-5887. Spread some goodness around; it’s the best way to counter all the bad stuff around us.
BrandSpace Articles
<
>
