Methodology
This research paper on the topic of telecommuting is for IDIA 620 Information Culture. The focus on this class has been studying and appreciating the recent history of the rise of personal computers and their effect on popular culture. It is a class exploring literally the [human] culture of computers, (in other words the culture of computer users, and how computer have come to affect society, the family, education, and the workplace). This class exists as part of the IDIA Masters program, and as such the final "paper" must obey common sense expectations that it be the best researched, most formally cited and documented of all the writing of the semester.
However, the class has not just tolerated, but in fact has celebrated and given sway to human interest writing about culture. To this end, we have published all our work on the web in a series of interrelated blogs. In this publishing environment, we have made use of and explored the unique medium of hypertext, not from a design and technical publishing point of view (that is what Hypertextual Production and Dynamic Web Sites is for), but again, purely in terms of the generation, exploration, and dissemination of meaning.
To reconcile the collision of these two vectors is at heart an impossible task. If the final paper is in fact published ON paper and in MLA format, it will violate the spirit of all of the human interest writing on, and about, and in hypertextual communication that we have done so far. On the other hand, if the "paper", again I keep using that word, is consistent with the standards of online journalism -- even professional online journalism -- then it will fall far well short of the standards for a major research paper that prevail in most cases throughout the program.
My choice is to state here how I will research and cite sources, and then to apply this completely personal, arbitrary, and academically incorrect formula in my work. I just finished for another class a well-researched formal paper, which was published in MLA format, and I have fresh in my mind the standards for citations, formatting, and end notes. But happily, I will not follow them here.
I am choosing to create paginated HTML that is intended to be read in landscape mode, on screen. Links inline will direct the reader to sources, and an exhaustive list of research that informed this writing will be published as "sources". This is completely wrong from the point of MLA formatting, but in my opinion it is adequate to show the sources of information that influenced the ideas presented here, and to allow for a narrative flow that is consistent with the human interest genre writing we have been studying. I am absolutely not going to interrupt the narrative as MLA insists that we do, to cite in-line every single statement which restates the idea of another with external source. This is writing about ideas, not a formal research paper. Not science. In fact, not "academic" in the traditional sense.
To me, the ultimate proof of success of this writing would be if a web spider indexed this content, and a human being outside of the class read it from beginning to end. Any other standard would miss the spirit of an Information Culture research "paper". Arg! That word again!