Academic Life as a Series of Footnotes
I spent my graduate school years learning to footnote scholarly works in my research papers. Footnotes determined how thoroughly researched, and well written my paper was. I have practiced footnoting so much that it almost became impossible to write without footnotes. Any regular writing without using footnotes was not seen as deserving attention during this stage of my academic evolution. The only writing that counted as writing was academic writing with authoritative use of footnotes. As graduate students we reveled in reading each other papers. My friends and I compared and read each other's papers with admiration for use of footnotes. See Dr. Parakala's notes on footnotes for an examination of academic's passion for footnotes (http://parakala.org/life-in-general/my-crush-on-footnotes)
Little did I know this is the beginning of academic life which is recorded in a series of footnotes. As noted by one of my fellow historians footnotes is central to academic life (http://communities.historians.org/blogs/mark-bowles/2013/10/19/becoming-a-footnote-in-history). Citing and adding footnotes to research papers is only the beginning, the career progresses with accumulating more and more footnotes for oneself. The more footnotes one acquires the more well known a scholar one becomes.
Digital history is the new academic frontier. Digital humanities projects are encouraging historians to adopt to the digital platform, and offer classes with digital content. Almost all the historians I know, including me, have blogs, digital classrooms, and are in the process of developing Apps for history projects. Social media, especially twitter presence is also common. Is digital media evolving as the new footnotes tradition. I don't know.
Lets wait and see how academic presence will evolve in the new millennium.
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