[Buddha-l] The state of buddha-l: a brief report

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 17, 2009, at 6:54 AM, Alberto Todeschini wrote:

> Erm... your remark leads me to wonder if I am planning to--or am  
> allowed
> to-- present my dissertation in electronic form. I guess I should find
> out....

That is worth looking into. What it may achieve is nothing more than  
shifting the burden of printing and photocopying off your shoulders  
onto the shoulders of your examination committee. Few people I know  
(Jay Garfield being the only exception I can think of) can read long  
works on a computer screen. (Even Jay Garfield doesn't like reading  
from a computer screen, but he reads lots of things on his kindle). So  
your examining committee will probably end up printing your  
dissertation anyway, thus saving no paper at all. (Something to  
consider: it is not always wise to piss off the members of one's  
examination committee, and they might be pissed off if they had to  
print out a thesis themselves.)

> Unfortunately, while Google Books is already extremely useful (I use  
> it
> daily), it's still missing a large amount of material relevant to
> scholars of Buddhism.

My principal worry about material being available in electronic form  
is that people will eventually get out of the habit of using books and  
journals that haven't yet been made available in digital form,  
resulting in a lot of excellent scholarship being doomed to scholarly  
oblivion. That may sound improbable and futuristic, but just in the  
past two years I have received an increasing number of essays from  
students that have nothing but websites in the bibliography. This past  
year, to my horror, I received a senior thesis for an honors B.A.  
student that did not have a single printed work in the bibliography.  
Every reference was to a website. The thesis itself was printed on  
paper. Try to imagine what a pain it was to check out some of the  
references. Well, OK, it was no worse than the old days when I had to  
take a bus to the library and spend several hours in the stacks to  
check out references.

On the issue of footnotes and in-line references, my thesis supervisor  
(B.K. Matital) was really keen on in-line references, and he also said  
anything worth saying is worth saying in the main body of a work. With  
his urging, I submitted a PhD thesis that did not have a single  
footnote. Several of the people on my examination committee remarked  
that a thesis without footnotes or endnotes just does not look like a  
work of scholarship. One member admitted that when he first received a  
copy and looked in vain for the endnotes, he almost decided to flunk  
the thesis without bothering to reading it (not an unprecedented event  
in my department). When I eventually turned the thesis into a book, I  
furnished it with plenty of irritating endnotes, hoping someone might  
read it. But the price of the book was so high that no one has ever  
read it anyway. Tant pis.

Richard