>Yoshie - first, I should apologize for the snippy part of my remarks
>('does anybody read these?...').
No offense taken -- none at all. No sweat!
>I have read academic literature (in statistics), and they do
>things differently there. Perhaps the field is wierd. When writing an
>article, the applicable previous work is cited. If necessary, equations,
>definitions, and *short* excerpts may be used.
>
>However (at least in statistics), the author doesn't quote previous
>articles in their entirety.
Rest assured that I have & will not quote articles in their entirety. Perhaps some of my quotations, however, have & will be longer than you find appropriate.
There are several reasons that I quote sometimes fairly long passages instead of simply giving the URLs, even when the articles in question are available on the net.
1. Websites are ephemeral. They sometimes are unavailable because their servers are busy or down. More problematically, sometimes they disappear for good.
2. Some of the articles on the net are not universally available -- they are made available only to those who have -- individually or institutionally -- paid subscription fees to the databases which own them. A problem of intellectual property rights limiting access to knowledge.
3. Aesthetically, I'm an enthusiast of lists, collages, montages, quotations, etc. It's a socialist modernist thing, in the tradition of Brecht, Benjamin, Eisenstein, etc. It's also a "Japanese" thing, according to Roland Barthes, _The Empire of Signs_ (which is an instance of post-modernist Orientalism but still an elegant & suggestive meditation upon his encounter with what he thinks of as the dialectical opposite of the so-called "West"), for instance. Orientalism was a source of inspiration for modernism in general & especially socialist modernism in particular. This is an ambivalent legacy....
Yoshie
Postscript: I would never cite long passages from papers on statistics! Am I unfairly prejudiced against this discipline?