Page 92 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

tabase, so I typically read all the footnotes in a book like this, and my copy of Blair’s book contains, I would guess, about 100 bookmarks of the archival and removable colored plastic “stickies” type that I typically buy from Sta- ples in packs of 125. Probably because the publisher wanted to save money on production and issue this book at a reasonable price, Blair’s style of foot- noting in this book was unusually complicated. As is increasingly common, Blair’s footnotes were placed in the back of the book, thankfully in this case with headlines referring back to the pages of the text to which they applied. However, most of Blair’s footnotes referred only to the main author’s name and page number of one or more primary and secondary references, for which one had to hunt in the bibliographies following the footnotes. Thus, to get the complete meaning of each of her footnotes I first had to read the footnote, then to check the specific reference or references, sometimes in one or both bibliographies, and then perhaps to go back and re-read the footnote taking into account her source or sources. In this tedious process I frequently found that I lost my place in the narrative. How many times did I wish that Blair’s footnotes included a longer and identifiable reference to her sources! Admittedly that would have added perhaps another gathering or two to the book and might have increased its production cost slightly. My guess is that sales would have been the same at a slightly higher cover price, and the book would have been much easier to use. Having read Blair’s book in April and May 2011, in June 2011 I was gradually going back through her book, following all my bookmarks, and incorporating relevant portions of her references and observations into the database, remaining careful to cite her work when I did so.
As I worked back through Blair’s book, I wondered how reading all of her footnotes, and working through the cumbersome way that the publisher set up the footnotes and references, differed from following hyperlinks in an essay like this. Following links has been criticized as distracting from advocates of “close reading,” especially since many links are only indirect- ly relevant, and one link tends to lead to another, causing one to lose the original train of thought. Yet, what I would characterize as close reading of
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