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I love Anthony Grafton! He's basically the last of the 17th century polymathic scholars, which is fitting because that's precisely what he studies. Academics have recently been having a debate about putting footnotes online which seems apropos here: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/665-wait-your-footnotes-are-...

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A centralized URL is likely to go offline long before all decentralized physical copies of a book.

A scholarly article without footnotes is like source code without git/mercurial history. Like the long tail in search, it's not about frequency of access, but the force of accountability that footnotes exert upon the main text.

Great article you posted, lots to think about. I can really see online footnoting being a great approach for university textbooks (which are often already long), particularly because undergrads seem less likely to be engaging thoroughly with the notes anyway. For monographs, where more readers are more likely to be reading the notes along with the rest of the text, I'm less sure about moving to online. Definitely a conversation worth having! Thanks for sharing the article.

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