I have elaborated the theory, or theories, for many years with little intention of having them published as they hardly could be printed by any magazine. The internet, however, presents a welcome opportunity to have such ideas and theories distributed. That means that I alone am responsible for the entire work with no one else to blame for printing- or other mistakes.
These words by the very obscure Web writer Svend Palm can function as a charter declaration for thousands, probably millions of writers who are putting up pages of information or speculation on the Web. They are choosing to bypass the whole apparatus of referees, editors, reviewers, catalogers, and indexers to make a direct appeal to "the world" on the Web. If the cost of Web publication were that the pages remained un-indexed, few would choose it, for it would amount to being one drop in a sea of 1.5 billion pages: the chance of anyone with an interest in the topic finding the page would be infinitesimal. But along with all this unauthorized, uncatalogued writing has come the development of fast and powerful search engines, some of them indexing over one billion pages. And suddenly "to look something up" means "to run it by Yahoo!"
It is easy to make a case against the Web search engines, and from that a case against the Web itself as a medium, or even a tool, for making and exchanging public knowledge. The case can be made on anecdotal or theoretical grounds.
These outcomes of searches are not entirely scandalous, but none of them would be the result of a visit to the library catalog.
On a more theoretical plane, the order of discourse—the divisions, hierarchies, and exclusions that create weight and prominence and value amid the incessant chattering of voices—are based on separation, physical and institutional, between different and sometimes opposing discourses—the learned, the obscene, the hobbyist, the fictional, the commercial, the enthusiast, hot news, and cold facts—each is marked and concentrated in special places, but all come tumbling through the search engine portal. Do we know
You are informed on few or none of these points and yet you run terms by something under the Search button to see what will come up? Very well, you have a large body of information against which you can evaluate the engine's output, but what of someone—a student—who does not? Perhaps worst of all, the engines only index on-line documents, thus leaving behind the roughly 90 percent of the world's information that only exists in print. How will students acquire the will to truth if they have not been in its temples the libraries and to the very altars of the will to knowledge, the reference desks?
Librarians and their supporters have come out to defend their role as the curators of information, both in a number of new guidebooks to Internet research and on line.
These direct, to-the-student presentations, some even aimed at middle school students, employ the traditional story of bad information contaminating the good; Internet research is either treated as an instance of this more general ill that librarians have been combating for many years, or it is treated as a much more acute case resulting from the open opportunity for self-publication on the Net, or both, as in Janet Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate's Web Wisdom. Tate and Alexander list five traditional evaluation criteria (authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and coverage/intended audience), then discuss for each one the assessment of traditional sources and then of web sources. On every point the Web poses "new evaluation challenges," principally because the pages there have not been vetted or filtered or certified by the traditional publishing process and media. Since they do not offer any work-arounds or compensatory strategies, the entire section reads like a scolding indictment of the Web. Even when they do touch on strengths or assets of Web publication, it is only to explain how these strengths add to the problems of evaluation.
Tate and Alexander's view is perhaps a bit more negative than most Guides. If your computer is closer than your library, you can check on these university librarian's pages of advice and admonition:
Quick visits to these sites makes it clear that some librarians still regard the Net as a giant leap backwards in their struggle to review, rank, and select the information that deserves to be cataloged, preserved, and made available for researchers. One book not by librarians—The Netscape Guide to Internet Research—praises the news media (!) for patrolling "mainstream" information sources and blames the bad information on the un-monitored dark byways of the non-mainstream. In any case, the Internet is an info-swamp or whatever and it is up to us to be skeptical and wary so as not to be taken in by the hoaxes, legends, biases, and prevaricating greed that freely circulate amidst the good information. The paradox of course is that we usually seek information about things we know little about, and hence we lack that grounding which enables us to sift good from bad, mainstream from whacko. All of these guides enumerate the marks and traits of most information already established as high in quality: it acknowledges sources, refers to other work in the field, identifies its author by name, institution and credentials, it dates the document, it correlates with other information we do have, it is thoughtfully and carefully laid out and spelled, and so on. These traits are neither necessary nor sufficient to establish the quality of information on a page; at most, they are the traits of print documents that have traditionally authorized and authenticated serious (i.e. library-quality) contributions to public knowledge. Their presence is enforced by editors and referees. Through these handbooks and Internet Guides, librarians hope to filter the new outpouring of "pages" in the usual way that maintains the product and the power of the editing-printing- reviewing-cataloging institutional apparatus.
They would not agree with Foucault's claim that this very filtering and exclusion makes the information good or bad; rather, good information is made by individuals (or institutions) who are qualified to make it (by training, institutional placement, or previous work, honors, and recognitions) and have the commitment to the disinterested pursuit of truth that is the core of the will to knowledge and truth. Good thus retains its moral force: you do not pretend to be what you are not, nor pursue a goal other than finding and explaining the truth (no "ulterior motive" or agenda—e.g. "helping white people stand up for themselves"). The institutional apparatus sees itself in the role of recognizing quality which has already been created by acts of authorship before it began its work. It does not see itself as part of a social construction of knowledge; for that apparatus, there are no social constructionists in the foxholes of Internet infowar. Now that people seem to be choosing to get a good bit of their information from a source that does not submit itself to that regulation, they are rushing to teach the public the rudiments of recognizing a document with "definitive knowledge" when they see one on line.
They are also supporting the Gale Group's big search engine for newspapers, magazines, and periodicals, namely Infotrak (or Expanded Academic Index), where since November 1, 1999 you can search (for a price) by keyword, author, date, title, or journal and retrieve the text of articles in a wide range of publications including Time and Newsweek (or you can filter the list for "refereed publications" only). Infotrak closes the convenience gap: if the access fee is paid, you can run origin of language and get back 125 cites, 37 of them with text, 21 with text from refereed journals. Of course, nothing on line is indexed by Infotrak (even e-journals), so it is a portal back to print periodicals. Svend Palm and all who choose to publish on the Web will remain invisible to it. So it is hard to know when people use the Web search engines whether they are choosing to do so out of ignorance of alternatives, a small measure of convenience (free and no login), or a taste for the blooming buzzing freeforall of the Web.
James Sosnowski, "Hyper-readers and their Reading Engines," in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies, edited by Cynthia Self and Gail Hawisher, Logan/Urbana, IL: Utah Sate University Press/NCTE, 1999, p, 174. |
By now the reader may have thought of one or two (dozen) objections to this print-bound model. It is rather innocently rooted in a number of assumptions which we have learned to question. If the story we have to tell is "Boys and girls, there are deluded people out there, and people who are trying to sell you something, and gain your adherence to their beliefs, so you must watch out", we may expect the thunderous monosyllabic response "DUH!" Rather than critique the print-bound librarian's tale theoretically, however, I will take Jim Sosnoski's wise advice just to "thoughtfully" show others how it is we do what we do. I will reconstruct a search for information on the Web that I made on the topic of the origin of language, along with further searches to help evaluate what I found on the first round. These searches will illustrate the use of three tools (simple string search, a links-to-page search, and a deja search) which taken together locate a page in a web of intertextuality that greatly assists the work of evaluating it. |
The origin of language is a topic on the edge of knowledge, one which has long fascinated educated people and on which no standard line or received opinion exists. It is a topic, say the introductory linguistics books, that was banned for 100 years by the French Academy of Science as one hopelessly given to wild and unresolvable speculations; to this day it is not a question over which any discipline claims strong ownership. Philology owned it, but modern linguistics abandoned the diachronic and left language origin orphaned. It is one of several "origin of" questions that lay on the fringe if not slightly beyond what Noam Chomsky calls the human science forming capacity. A look in the library catalog (subject search: language and languages origin) reveals that a book on the topic has been published by a university press on the average of once a year over the last two decades from many academic perspectives and that rate has increased in the last few years to two books a year. A Language Origins Society was formed in 1983 and its Web page tells us that it has met annually at a truly diverse range of places. (This can be determined by clicking on the thumbnail in the margin.) Its membership appears small, but it is mentioned as a sign of vitality by one of our on-line authors and another is a major contributor to its conferences and occasional publications. There are no degree programs in the Origin of Language, partly because there are very few courses taught on the topic. It is thus not exactly clear what solid academic credentialing or "definitive knowledge" of the topic would be and the field appears to lie open to amateur collectors of facts and theories, the bird watchers, butterfly collectors, local historians, comet searchers, hybridizers, mineralogists, and other devotees of the will to knowledge that Big Science has yet to organize or supplant.
A quick scan of the first 1035 citations returned by several search engines to a simple "origin of language" query turns up a number of names of on-line authors that are unfamiliar to me. In fact, most of them are, since I lack an expert's knowledge, or even an amateur's, of the area. (Infotrak, by the way, knows only one of them.) Taken together, their sites are where you would start if you began research on the topic by such a simple search, and so a major part of assessing the quality of information on the Web on this question is assessing the quality of the sites by these five men: Svend Palm, Robin Allott, Cyril Babaev, Eric Gans, and Edo Nyland. This is the central task that will occupy us here.
| Svend Palm Robin Allott Cyril Babaev Eric Gans Edo Nyland |
Number of Referring Pages per Engine
|
| Engine | Palm | Allott | Babaev | Nyland |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FAST | 14 | 321(266) | 335(80) | 216 |
| iWON | 7 | 233 | 442 | 214 |
| 12 | 175(108) | 288(108) | 192 | |
| Altavista | 4 | 118(80) | 408(80) | 140 |
The search engines provide more than just the URLs to help us in our assessment, and here we begin to work out certain techniques that are special to the Web. We can use the search engines to investigate the Web's reception of the pages themselves, both by seeing who has linked the pages ("back-links") and, more broadly, who has mentioned the author in an online document (one, that is, that is indexed by the search engine). Further, we can use deja.com (aka dejanews), which is a search engine indexing a very great number of newsgroups and lists for at least the last five years. Running a person's name by deja gives a list of links to their postings to lists and newsgroups and the mentions of his/her name in the postings of others. Since the active posters constitute an audience of peers, we are able to see how an idea is received and the currency it enjoys among informed and interested people all over the world who have chosen to join the on-line conversation. So the method of our search becomes twofold: to examine the site to see what it says and then to see what others have said about it.
Though Svend Palm tells us nothing about himself—his age, education, or employment, for example—he makes a serious effort to formulate his intentions in choosing to publish four pages of evolutionary hypotheses on the Web: Dinosaur Origin and Extinction, The Warm-blooded Dinosaurs, The Origin of Flight in Birds, and Human Origin. In a "Preword" to Human Origin (which includes language), he says: home13.inet.tele.dk/ palm/homweb.htm
The validity of the theories depends alone on the validity of the basic evidences and of their consistency, not if they contradict other theories or other interpretations of facts which might be even as valid. Therefore it is up to the reader to be convinced or not.
Deliberately the essay is not garnished with notes and references which easily should have extended its volume several times; relevant literature is surely well known to anybody with a profound interest of the subject.
Publications on the internet for Palm can omit many notes and scholarly references that pad print publications, but he strengthens their claims to be real publications by obtaining ISBN numbers for them. (He does not omit notes and references for the "Origin of Flapping Flight", however.) He appends a similar note to the Human Origin page, and gives even more detailed information on the decision to publish the Origin of Flapping Flight. He has published a small orthinological treatise in print locally and an article on the bird illustrator Gerhard Heilmann in the Danish orthinological journal (subsequently translated into English and mounted on a Heilmann site by a Dutch historian of science Ilya Nieuwland.) Errors of English should not be attributed to carelessness or lack of schooling. He acknowledges the assistance of various scientists at the end of the bird page . Though these topics may appear scattered, they do in fact cohere under the general rubric of evolutionary biology and reinforce each other as evidences of a sustained and developed interest.
Part of being a Web author as Palm understands it is to solicit comments from readers and respond to them, with the correspondence attached to the page. He does attach a few queries and his responses for each page.
FAST results: Svend PalmThe best way to look for back links to a URL is to enter it following "link:" in the search term window of altavista. There we find no links to his main page (home13.inet.tele.dk/palm/). Checking for mentions of"Svend Palm" in FAST, (the engine with one of the largest databases), we find only 14 sites. That is barely above the horizon for the Web, and reflects a serious limitation of publication "by the internet." Palm has had a go at achieving visibility to the like-minded by joining three WebRings (Dinoland, Geoscience, and Paleo). Since many people have never heard of WebRings, a brief excursus is in order. WebRings are voluntary associations of people with similar interests and websites and exist to make their sites more findable to each other and to visitors. Each Ring has a Ringmaster who decides whether a site should fall within the area covered by the Ring and accords with its purposes. Each member must display a set of links on her page, namely, links to the previous and next 5 sites in the Ring, a random site link (in the Ring to be sure) and a link to the master list for the Ring. Rings are sponsored and the master lists maintained and served by www.webring.org, and this is a fairly hefty undertaking, since there were as of April 2000 80,000 WebRings with 1,800,000 member sites and they were growing at about 10% a month. In August of 2000 Yahoo! took over the WebRings and quite a number split off on their own. For the record, Dinoland has 26 member sites, Paleo 242, and Geoscience 118.
www.webring.orgDejanews turns up numerous postings by Palm to news groups, especially to sci.bio.paleontology and alt.dinosaurs. Here his offerings of his papers are well-received, his claims discussed, and his questionable statements challenged. He has also posted fairly regularly to Danish newsgroups, but I cannot read, hence summarize, them.
So should we entertain Svend Palm's ideas or brush them aside? His pages are certainly candidly presented with careful, modest claims, some of them quite fully citing and acknowledging the work of others. I do consider most of his claims worthy of discussion or checking should the opportunity arise, and that is perhaps all he is asking for in the slightly obscure sentences about contradicting other equally valid accounts. Palm may be taking a view of scientific discourse different from the prevailing one in which you must claim that your account is better than the received one, or any of the others proposed. Officially at least, science is not happy with the notion of plural, equally valid accounts of a phenomenon, even when for some period of time multiple accounts do exist and no consensus on the best one can be obtained. But Palm is writing rational reconstructions of evolutionary processes and it is not clear to me how such things can ever get decisively beyond the best hunch stage.
Robin Allott is among the most frequently cited authors on the origin of language. He (I think) provides no personal information except some unlabelled family pictures. Until recently his net URL was www.percep.demon.co.uk; it has now changed to members.aol.com/rmallott and www.percepp.demon.co.uk. There is no CV or resume on line and hence no information as to his academic education or employment.
What there is on line is a list of 28 of his publications on language and 8 on evolutionary biology, along with the titles of 15 short pieces and essays—all of these linking to the texts of the articles available on line. So there are all together many pages (about 180) of quite plain wall-to-wall HTML text. Allott's favorite theory is one linking gestures to phonemes and their orders in various languages to the meanings they express, and the theory is illustrated by a number of animated GIFS of people gesturing and associated words and phonemes. He also includes a fair number of audio clips. His initial publication The Physical Foundation of Language (1971) has as place and publisher "Seaford, ELB" —Seaford is a town which he listed as his address in one of the Linguistic Origin Society conference proceedings, and I suppose the book to be self-published. Quite a number of the other articles are published by the LOS. His evolutionary biology publication is mainly in the Journal of Social and Biological Structures (after 1991 called: Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems), collections of sociobiological papers, and presentations as ESS (European Sociobiological Society) conventions.
FAST: Robin AllottThe name "Robin Allott" turns up 321 times in FAST, 175 times in google, 233 times in iWON, for the other big data-base engines (118 in altavista, 129 times in MSN). There are numerous references from one of his pages to another (including most of the 160 some extra pages listed by FAST), and a goodly number are postings to the LINGUIST LIST, which is the main LIST that linguists post to. That is a sign than Allott considers himself and his theories mainstream. The www.britannica.com Internet Guide gives him a "noteworthy" rating (and he exhibits a Britannica Internet Guide Award seal on his page). There are 143 back links to the site from other pages (altavista). This is a fairly high Web profile for a writer on specialized academic topics.
Allott has posted to a number of newsgroups including alt.lang.artificial, sci.cognitive, bionet.neuroscience, sci.lang, and list.linguist. He announces new developments on his page, makes other claims, and asks for information. Responses to his claims about the gestural origin of phonemes and word order are generally respectful, though one regular poster to alt.lang.artificial, Jack Durst, calls him a "kook." There is not much discussion of his theses.
Allott's print medium profile is much lower. He has articles in two collections of papers published by Benjamins and Kluwer, large international printing houses that publish extensively in the language area. Citations in the printed academic journals indexed in Gale's Expanded Academic Database are one in number, a brief summary in a book review in Language of one of his articles in the LOS-sponsored collection published by Benjamins. His name does not appear in the index of any of the six most recent books on the origin of language. In the print world, it would seem, he is not a recognized player. On the other hand, the mention in Language is respectful and no one has attacked his views on or off line.
The Benjamins collection (of which he was also an editor) contains notes on the contributors, from which we can learn that, as we suspected, Allott never held an academic appointment. He was an Undersecretary of the UK Dept. of Industry before his retirement, which occurred before 1984. (He was born in 1927.)
Allott does not appear to have chosen Web publication as an alternative to print but as an extension of it because it allows him to display his gestural animations on any computer with an internet connection. Otherwise, his pages have all the visual appeal of reprints on recycled grayish paper. It is true that his online manuscripts and publications span the last twenty years, that he has responded to innovations in linguistics during the period and has pursued topics in sociobiology as well as his theories on natural gestural signification. And he has taken his ideas to meetings and presented them numerous occasions. He knows his main idea is not only unorthodox but outrightly heretical to linguists since Saussure, for whom semiotics begins with the arbitrariness of the sign, and he appeals for openmindedness.
So how shall we assess the Motor Theory of Language and Allott's linking of gestures to sounds and words? Quite a number of Allott's papers receive respectful citation on the Web in academically oriented sites, though not so much the ones on the sound-gesture mapping. We could develop a finer grained picture of Allott's reception on line by going item by item through the 144 back links to his old site (this is up from 115 in last week's draft of this article!), but I think the absence of reference or discussion of his sound-gesture linkage stands as an indicator that that particular idea has not won adoption as public knowledge.
Cyril Babaev is similarly unknown to the world of print—even less than Robin Allott, in fact—but he too has achieved considerable notice on the Web for his "CyBaLiSt" site of Indo-European pages. This list has been indexed at no less than 6 different URLs, including sites at xoom.com and geocities, but these all lead back to two sites in Russia (babaev.narod.ru and www.ropnet.ru/cyryllo). There are a very large number of pages (over 200 in all) on those sites bearing on one or another Indo-European language and other minor, non-IE ones. Recently Babaev announced the creation of a sort of webring of Indo-European sites (The Indo-European Database) which quickly recruited 10 "tied" members with various theories. This group mixes some with academic appointments with other non-academics, but most offer little personal information and have non-academic webhosts. They look very much like this group of Language Origin authors. Babaev has started a Forum (cybalist) with www.egroups.com which now averages several hundred postings a month. He has most recently opened an "Essays" page just on language origins where any fellow linguist can publish his or her works as a "contribution to the development of Internet free scientific resources."
FAST: Cyril BabaevThe name "Cyril Babaev" draws 335 links in FAST (many of them again links from one of his pages to another, complicated in this case by his having several addresses), 288 on google, 408 on altavista, and 442 on iWON. Among these are numerous links from academic pages (references, reading lists) to particular languages and the LINGUIST List FAQ lists his site as "the most informative site about Indo-European linguistics" and under "Indo-European" gives it a glowing 4 lines! He has an entry in the LINGUIST personal pages, but it is only a link back to "Cyril Babaev Linguistic Studies." He is linked by the online Bibliotheque National de France and given a two-star rating by the India Times,ߢall of this without having published any refereed work at all! Actually, the mentions in the LINGUIST FAQ are almost the reports of peer referees, since the FAQs of LISTS are generally regarded as very reliable, at least by list members, which in this case are a goodly sampling of the world's academic linguists. He is also prominently linked from the Proto Indo-European Language Demonstration and Exploration Website at the University of Texas, San Antonio.
Babaev has used the newsgroups heavily to publicize CyBaLiSt ("The Web No. 1 Indo-Euroepan Site"), posting not only to sci.lang but to soc.culture.___ (fill in the names of many nations). He is occasionally criticized for a shortcut or a factual error (as anyone attepting his range would be).
Babaev is a difficult case for the librarian's touchstones and guidelines. The withholding of all personal information is off-putting, as is the apparent absence of any print publication, at least in English. The multiple pages with javascript assisted forwarding are not, well, straightforward. On the other hand, his acceptance by professional linguists and language teachers as a valued online reference is easy to document. He has many references to scholarly works and links to online resources, including links to Robin Allott's and Edo Nyland's pages, with an indication that someskepticismm may be in order in the case of Nyland. On his many pages on individual languages, however, no sources or other scholars are cited. The main page is well laid out and includes a self-scrolling applet; elsewhere there are nicely done tables and trees; it is revised nearly daily. The English is excellent; the typos are scarce.
Who then is Cyril Babaev? Recently, however, he broke his silence about himself and put up an "About me" page, which confirms one's hunch that he does not hold an academic position. What one might not have suspected is that he was born in 1978, if only because Indoeuropeanists should be at least a couple of hundred years old.
Eric Gans comes up on the Origin of Language search with one of the flakier looking pages (Chronicles of Love and Resentment) which is an "Internet column" consisting of a new piece every week or two. The current one is Column No. 204. The topic is whatever interests Eric Gans that week. Several columns deal with Language Origin (ten, so far) so the engines pick him up. The site does not have as many backlinks as the previous ones (about 24). Partly this may arise from Gan's abstaining from Lists and Newsgroups. Deja finds no postings from him to any group and only one reference, an "anybody heard of ?" query about points in Gans' theory posted to sci.anthropology in 1997. The URL toChronicleses", however, does not take you to one of the big "free-with-banner-displayed" service providers; it is the impeccably academic www.humnet.ucla.edu.
www.humnet.ucla.edu/There is a gap, however, that we should not leap across too quickly. Can print "cred" be transferred to the Web? Why would someone who can easily get things into print (a whopping 62 entries in the Modern Language Association Bibliography) choose to put something on the Web instead? Is it possible that Professor Gans has gone off a bit on the Generative Anthropology /Originary Thinking business and has found the Web a very convenient way to proclaim what standard academic and print channels could not accommodate? Basically, GA /OT holds that the original, language-originating word was the-name-of-God which simultaneously brought into existence the human. Gans reports that he has taught a seminar on GA in the French Department at UCLA every year or so for the last dozen years and gathered enough adherents to give a MLA session on Anthropoetics at the 1994 annual meeting. And it must be acknowledged that the actual pages of Anthropoetics use none of the visual blandishments available to Web writers but are as grimly wall-to-wall black letters on gray background as any printed document. At this point it appears that "verifying information" on the Web or elsewhere merges with deciding whether it is true or is a rewarding way of looking at things. Perhaps we should back off a bit and conclude that GA / OT is a well -formed, candidly delivered grand speculation.
Contrary to what commonsense might suggest, there appear to be two Edo Nyland's—two retired gentlemen, two Western Canadians, in fact, with presences on the Web and the name Edo Nyland. The one we are concerned with (who says he is not the other one) does provide an "About the Author" page tracing his life from birth in Amsterdam in 1927 through service in Indonesia as a medic, emigration to Canada, his working career as a Forester, and retirement to Vancouver where a new "challenge" awaited him of decoding the hidden messages in all the languages of the world to substantiate his theory that there was one original language (Saharan) and matrilineal culture which was dispersed and nearly obliterated by patrilineal newcomers. This theory even enables him to discern the hidden meanings in the Odyssey and thus to confirm that Odysseus did in fact visit Scotland. There are about 63 pages to the site.
Drosnin, Michael. The Bible Code: Doron Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Vitstum. Simon and Schuster, 1997Nyland's method is far more complicated than the "Bible Code" made popular a few years ago by Michael Drosnin and it applies to words of almost all languages (with the possible exception of Chinese.) It is rather like an anagrammatic extraction of primitive roots with somKabalisticic numerological help. These roots, however, are not the hypothetical constructs of the comparative philologist but morphemes of Basque. Thus a portion of the links to his site are on Basque language and culture pages, some even in Basque!
Jean-Jacques LeCercle,So we have both anagrams and etymology, two modes of analysis which Jean-Jacques LeCercle points out have been placed beyond the pale of modern language study. These modes play into another of Foucault's exclusions, that of the mad and the sane. Seeing hidden messages is a textbook trait, as is the possession of secret wisdom and keys that other, less fortunate people lack. Like their close cousins, originary true meanings, anagrams are ruled out by the rationalism of modern linguistics, even though one of the founders—Saussure—had a serious weakness for them in Sanskrit. Nyland's pages, then, are a kind of return of the repressed.
Now, when I tell you there are 164 back- links to the page, I expect some to say "Stop right there! That's what's wrong with the Web! 164 credulous souls referring who knows how many others to Nyland's story of "Saharan!" Here is Susan Hudgins, an honors student at Auburn reporting her discovery on page four of Prof. Sonny Dawsey's "Interesting Sites Discovered by Students" page. Saharan, s.v. Linguistic Anthropology
This site has links to informative articles on the origins of almost every language, from the early languages of Hebrew and Sanskrit, to the Asiatic, European and North American languages.
Now if she had run "Edo Nyland" through Google she might have come across The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets' site (a British Punk Rock group) and its fan club page where one Ubbo Spamla compares Nyland to H.P. Lovecraft (somewhat to Nyland's detriment) and calls him "mad as a fruitcake." Ubbo Spamla's rap Of course, she might have to look up Lovecraft. This posting might stimulate further looking as she wonders what sort of Thicket she has wandered into. Spamla is rebuked in the next issue by one John Goodrich of Alameda , Calif. who nonetheless agrees with Spamla's assessment of Nyland, based on his (Goodrich's) having taken a course in the history of languages. He dismisses Nyland's picture of the suppression of the peaceful, matrilineal, idyllic Saharans by priest castes and patriarchy (all of which Nyland adopted from Marija Gimbutas's celebrated The Language of the Goddess (Harper and Row, 1989)) as "politically correct, slick post-modernist hip bullshit." Goodrich is a better reader, however, than one viciouslyanti-Semiticic page that mentions Nyland with approval, perhaps because of Nyland's sketch of the world-dominating caste of priests that deliberately corrupted and obliterated the truth.
Clearly we are in a different rhetorical world that we have been with the other authors. Indeed, we are in a free fire zone where satirists, Celtic cultists, Korean physicists, science fictionists, Basque speakers, magic fans and pagans, Polish name interpreters, ranting numerologists, Yiddishists, gnostics, seekers and collectors, racists and rockers, converge. Imagine that you were a Basque student of linguistics at MIT. What would you say to all that? Karlos Arregi, who is exactly so circumstanced in life, chose to link Nyland's page and repudiate it as Basque linguistics. (The page is now under reconstruction.)
 Linguistics resources, UT |
But what if we find the University of Texas linguistics department linking the site with no reader's advisory? |
"Fun, Interesting, Useful" but cf. Comment |
What if we find Nyland on a list of Starting Points for Linguistics 001 at Georgetown University? |
Julia Simon's links, s.v. miscellaneous |
Perhaps we come out in the end with Julia Simon, German student of computational linguistics in Helsinki anpractitionerer of same at LingSoft who lists him on her personal page with the notice: "Edo Nyland has a very unusual theory about the origins of some Indo-European (and other) languages... decide for yourself if he's a genius, a lunatic, or just pulling everybody's leg." I must say that the last possibility had not occurred to me and yet there is no way to rule it out. |
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Stevens objects to "shattered ethos" |
Nyland has also used the newsgroups to publicize his theory of Saharan/Basque, groups ranging from alt.lang, alt.hist.ancient-european to sci.archaeology, sci.anthropology.paleo and sci.lang. In so doing, he has gained a little support, but much opposition, some very hostile, as a kook, crank, crackpot, etc. Some of these anti-Nyland postings are vituperative, contemptuous, and sweeping in their dismissal, leading one sympathizer (Eric Stevens) to object to the total condemnation. Stevens' postings urging people to keep an open mind and have a look have drawn fire as an endorser of a kook and therefore a kook himself. Here we see the academic dialectic turn to eristic, not what we want our students to come across while we are teaching them the riches and subtleties of academic discourse. We may take some pride in maintaining good decorum in our debates: neither David Bartholomae nor Peter Elbow ever, EVER, called the other an "intellectual chewtoy"—at least, not in print. Such sweeping rejection is a real shortcut—the opposite of "genius" which endows all of an individual's writings with the presumption of truth. Even if a writer is more a magpie than a connoisseur of ideas, it does not follow that everything in his nest is wrong. But there are some who do not suffer fools gladly in alt.language and sci.anthropology.paleo. |
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Nyland has been very successful getting his name into the engines: FAST has 216 pages, google has 192, iWON 214, altavista 140. Nyland's site does seem to confirm the librarians' worst fears of the Web as a free-for-all where pre-publication referees are totally absent and reviewing is unorganized and spotty at best. The links to his page are like reader-response protocols, from which we can conclude that his page has very broad appeal, but there are many different ways to read and extract from it. About the only thing these folks have in common is the ability to read English and a taste for an "original" page. But if we think of these links as one or two line reviews, we have many more reviews than most articles or books ever get. Let the people speak—there is sanity in this democratic clamor. If we had one thing to tell Susan Hudgins and the Calvin College English Department and studyweb, it would be to run the author's name by any one of the big search engines or query the page URL in altavista (link:www.islandnet.com/~edonon) etc. and compare your take on the page to what you find there. |
Clearly the majority of these Web writers on the origin of language are amateurs; there is only one identifiable academic professional among them and even he uses the Web to promote his new cross-disciplinary way of understanding the Origin of Things. In this they are representative of web writers on many topics. Thus the checking of credentials, sponsoring agencies and institutions, and the like, is at best of limited efficacy with the Web. We can still attend to the way Web authors execute their roles: Do they place themselves in relation to the work of others? Do they give signs of knowing their own limits? Do they participate in the give-and-take of discussions of their topics with other knowledgeable persons? On this last point I confess it did surprise me that all of the authors of Web pages bearing on the origin of language have done at least some posting to news groups and lists. These groups provide forums for the dialectic of claim and counter-claim and they carry out the negotiation of value and the formation of reputation. Their commentary may not be detailed, complete, or conclusive, and it certainly is not binding on anyone, but they do perform the functions of a constantly convened professional meeting and participation in them blurs the line of amateur and professional.
A second thread: as I worked to assess these five Web authors and their claims, I made frequent use of library catalogues, citation indices, reviews in printed journals, and contributions to books. Such moves seem to give up on the assessment of these pages purely from within the Web medium. Most of these searches, however, were to verify that there was nothing else in print by or upon these writers than that claimed by them on their pages. The information given by these authors about their print profiles proved accurate and complete, and it would seem that such searching through print indices and catalogs is not an essential part of Web research. My search of the print resources was unusually thorough (for me) because I did not want out of ignorance or haste to slight these writers and damage their reputations. Also, I wanted to check whether my usual practice of pretty much taking what Web writers (on factual topics, anyway) say about themselves at face value was sound.
My greatest discovery, and surprise, was the rich fund of responses and citations that can be fairly quickly brought up on line. True, the "reviewers" may not be professionally qualified and equipped to place the site of the received knowledge of a discipline, and true, there are folks out there who appear to the trained researcher to be gullible, and to be ready to share the results of their gullibility, as well as people who are flippant, arrogant, and hostile. All of that must be factored in. The effect of all these voices speaking one right after another in apparently random order is of course to flatten hierarchies of qualified speakers (since one of the marks of your position in the print hierarchy is your access to the editors and journals). The librarian's guides to Web reference do mention putting the author's name into the search engine to find out more about her or him, but they hold back from recognizing the crew of responders as qualified reviewers. The use of 'link: <name>' with altavista to see who has not merely referred to the writer but linked the page is sometimes mentioned, though scarcely prominently. Since the people who like and link your page, and the sense they make of it, are not finally within your control as a Web writer; it is much easier to think of quality as something the writer puts into the page than to think of it as something others find there, as something arising from (essentially) the writer's virtue rather than a resultant of many voices speaking. In practical terms, however, I find that my own assessment of a page is enriched and stabilized by reading other readers' comments. It is very isolating to read something which seems quite twisted or daft; one wants to find another voice more compatible with one's own as a sanity check.
Practical questions and applications: My seeking information and assessing sources on this topic differs from a true neophyte's because I have introductory linguistics under my belt, though it is not an area that I have followed or read much in, so much of what I recite as the relevant facts have been recently and quickly gathered from the Web pages themselves. This gathering has of course requiring a good deal of clicking, and I have added to the work by counting and tabulating citations and by then describing the field of response. Some of this work could be omitted if one only wanted an overall sense of the range of opinion on the topic and on the claims made by the various voices speaking online to the topic. But I think it would be valuable to ask students to do a state-of-the-Web's-knowledge sketch using one or two big search engines, altavista's "link" and deja (or a big engine and a smaller one, for comparison). Here are a few topics that seem feasible and rewarding (though some do dip well into the Web's darker side and cry out for class discussion).
It would also be very interesting to take it one step farther: run the term by Infotrak and compare the results.
The Web at this point seems not so much a medium that will supplant print as an emerging parallel universe, one where writers are free of some of the responsibilities and rewards of print adulthood, where they can pursue new or alternative interests, and where they write as citizens of a world of discourse, offering always only their "2¢ worth." This is the story I would tell of web research, not to supplant the librarian's tale for libraries, but to offer another account more suitable for this new medium.
Works Cited (Print)
Alexander, Janet E. and Marsha Ann Tate. Web Wisdom: How to Evaluate and Create Information Quality on the Web. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.
Calishain, Tara and Jill Alane Nystrom. Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd ed. Coriolus Press, 1998.
Drosnin, Michael. The Bible Code: Doron Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Vitstum. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997
Sosnoski, James. "Hyper-readers and their Reading Engines," in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies, eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press/ NCTE, 1998: 161-77.