I think the broader point that I'm interested in making - that I may have obfuscated by bringing up scanners (though it successfully got discussion going..) - is the criticism of the idea that cites should be made available as a matter of course but not just an easily accessible format of the evidence itself.

Take away "full formated" versions of cards. Ignoring the narrow question of scanning, I don't see why the evidence itself shouldn't be open to your opponents. Dehighlight however you want if you insist on that qualification (though one person's "work product" is another's "how the evidence was read and used in the round") - why is it that cites are all good but the underlying evidence isn't?

I feel like the cites norm just persists because it's what's always been done. Before computers produced all the evidence, people photocopied, cut, and taped. Pre-internet, no one was going to fedex you photocopies, so they handed out the cites and you could go look it up yourself. But now giving full text of your sources is <b>no more difficult</b> than going through files and cutting out sources and adding "first words of card...last words of card." It just makes the recipient of the cite have to work harder. And you already read the evidence against them.

"It helps ed" doesn't make any sense - one squad's notion of educaton shouldn't be enforced upon another's to that recipient squad's research detriment. I think there certainly is a brightline between Journals and Google News. I'm not concerned about cites with simpler URLs attached. That's practically just the evidence. I'm concerned about obscure books and difficult to access journals - and I've seen camp lectures where it's taught as a part of the game to high level debaters to use intentionally difficult sources.

The caselist is nice, but let's get real. There's nowhere near 100% participation and even when teams are on it, there's 1ACs and maybe a disad or two. It would be nice if requests for evidence worked more smoothly. If a team emails another team for a card that was read in a round against them, it's just wasting everyone's time to copy and paste the cite rather than just the card itself.

1)  Which camp(s) gave these lecture(s) to students to use obscure tags?  That's certainly something, but one or two lectures =/= the debate community's norm on ev citation

2)  (response to bolded)  This isn't "one squad's notion" of education, unless we all have different notions on how "education" and "learning" takes place by reading the articles / footnotes / works cited...There's a unique process there of contextualization that is completely sidestepped by giving away full ev.  This isn't FORCING your teams to learn the way we want you to - it's the SQ and its why debate is such an educational activity in the first place.

3) You never responded to working this out on a case-by-case basis.  It "makes sense" that cards read in a round should be made available with their full text, but I'm still not sure how you're going about implementing that sort of norm.

4)  Books - public library, if not at your most local library, some DO participate in Inter-library-loan programs.  Obscure journals?  Don't see why a case-by-case method couldn't solve the offense here.

I just think a norm is a bad idea.

1. I can't prove systemic nationwide instruction regarding intention use of difficult sources because I don't attend camp lectures nationwide, nor do I read all lecture notes, but this is my source:

"II. Picking a new aff - L. Cutting out of books is really strategic – makes it hard for the other team to look at your evidence"

http://ddi09.wikispaces.com/SS+Elective+notes+-+How+to+Find+and+Write+New+Affs

This coming from such a high profile institute serves to confirm suspicions of mine that have arisen over the years while trying to find evidence based off of cites which are often incomplete, deceptive, or from unnecessarily difficult sources.

2. This is nonresponsive. Your perceptions of why debate is so educational shouldn't be used as a warrant for refusing full text requests by other squads. If you want to force your own students to go through the tedium of finding the original source material to reconstruct an argument already deployed against them in a round, go ahead. But you don't have standing to object on behalf of other squad's students regarding what's best for their education - they can decide on their own if researching cites for arguments already used against them is a better use of time than researching new arguments for themselves.

3. I'll concede that most of the time if a card is inaccessible that contacting coaches would solve the issue of resource inequality. But particularly under those circumstances it was a waste of everyone's time to give the cite rather than the card. And despite everyone's good intentions, responses to cite requests empirically haven't exactly been on the front burner for every coach juggling team duties, jobs/school, and personal lives. And anyone who's made cite requests knows that.

4. Yes, you're right. Nothing is truly in a literal sense inaccessible. Special trips can be made to faraway libraries whose loan policies may be closed to them. Students could take a substantial amount of time to go to libraries, search for texts, wait for interlibrary loans to arrive. In the meantime, they might lose to the same evidence time and time again without getting a fair opportunity to examine and interrogate it.

These last points are just defense - they're not unique reasons why citation disclosure is better than text disclosure.

Note that I'm not advocating universal full text disclosure. Just to teams against whom you've already deployed your evidence. The "here's the cite, go look it up" stance strikes me as being akin to a lawyer presenting a brief to the court but not to their opposing counsel in ongoing litigation, preferring merely to give them a list of cases they've cited.

This is not research.

Huh?

The argument is that looking up cites trades off with actual new research into other positions. And cite lookup is only educational insomuch as it's a form of research that needs to be practiced. And I agree that it's not really research, and therefore not that educational, but I don't feel like you meant to agree with me..

1)  You could find "other positions" in the works cited portion of articles - you never know what you're going to find with cites and what a full text article will really lead to.

2)  This all assumes that the entirety of your team is using ALL of its available time looking up cites, and leaving other positions unresearched.  Unfortunately,

a) This is non-unique: Teams HAVE limited time and thus ALREADY have to prioritize arguments

b)  Too many alt causes to research tradeoff - including HIGH SCHOOL if you're a debater, and most likely some sort of schooling for the coaches.

c)  How do you research "other positions" ?  Do you get the cites off of national wiki's?  Do you look up on Cross-x?  Do you just...read random articles?  I don't see how "looking up cites" isn't considered research already.

3)  You say it's only educational because you have to learn how to research and that it needs to be practiced...But I don't think I need to really cite examples on how looking up cites and other research methods have directly contributed to debate alumnus success post-high school and beyond. 

4)  It IS educational because you learn the context of the arguments you're looking for the full text of.  By looking up the cite and reading the article, you would necessarily be doing some "larnin'" about the issue at hand.  Unless, of course, it's purely about competition and having the right chess pieces/cards to get the almighty W...Because having cards is the only thing you need to win.

Edit:  Yatesh isn't blind, which is more than I can say for myself.

My argument doesn't at all assume a team is using all its available time looking up cites. Wasting time is obviously a linear disad. It doesn't matter that students have class to attend. What you're arguing is akin to saying "who cares that your cell phone company has overbilled you by $400 - you already have to pay rent!"

As long as we're talking non-uniques here, if we all mega-heart cite lookups, rest assured they will happen as a natural result of researching positions other than what has already been run against you. Do you think taking a cite and turning it into an article that can be read will disappear if a norm is established that includes sending opponents the cards you read, rather than just the cite?

Note also that you pressed me to show some proof regarding my claim that debaters are being encouraged to purposely make cite lookups difficult - and I did. I think that's an important facet of a cites v. full text norm discussion. Full text post-round disclosure isn't subject to gaming meant only to impede opponents' research.

I'm not stupid. I don't think my insignificant posts on the MDTA message board will change anything, and I look forward to another season of tedious cite lookups. But I feel like it's worth having a discussion because I don't think it's a norm that makes sense.

And of course, I stress again that insomuch as your arguments are true, Mike, that they're all reasons why any coach should feel free to force their own students to go through the hassle of cite lookups instead of receiving the full card texts in response to requests. But they're not a reason why your squad, or whoever's, should refuse them to mine or anyone else's if requested.

There's a pretty simple argument that's been danced around, so I'm going to come out and say it.  Finding cards is hard work.  Processing cards is hard work.  Highlighting cards is hard work (as a former highlighting slave during my early days as a Macalester debater, I can tell you that this is CERTAINLY true).  All of this work takes time.  You and your team don't have a right to the fully produced evidence that gets produced by me and my team.  The article, certainly.  If you want to look it up, you absolutely should be able.  This is critical to test the veracity of my evidence both in general and versus the rest of the article.  But you shouldn't get to pull down the whole card.

Taken to its logical extreme (which, to be honest, is what we should be looking at because of the competitive pressures of this activity), a team with a portable OCR scanner and a laptop could take evidence read against them in one round (probably every necessary card) and run the same position in the next debate.  If we want to encourage preparation and original research, this should be wholeheartedly discouraged.  And don't pretend that this couldn't or wouldn't happen, because similar things have happened involving flash drives, emails and the like.  Brandon's discussion of forwarding and info-sharing becomes even more ridiculous in a world where teams can have access to lots of evidence immediately.

PS - If a team is cutting cards from a book so they can "better hide their ev", that's pretty dumb.  If your evidence is any good, you shouldn't need to hide it from people.  Also, your argument seems to be best solved by a combination of full NFL citation/email for full, unformatted card text if unable to find.

Dan, I am not at all saying there should be a norm AGAINST full ev disclosure.  If you read above, you'll see I suggested that this be taken as a case-by-case basis individually between coaches instead of attempting to create a community norm for full ev disclosure.  In fact, if you ever e-mail me this season I'll do my best to email you the article from the journal of expensive access or the book written by Tom Q. Obscure that you're looking for.  As a U student, I have access.  I won't, however, send you the piece of evidence as cut by Wayzata.

I'm going to have my debaters look up cites because it's a valuable activity.  It may not be "efficient" enough for squads that have serious "research detriments" but this activity has far more educational potential than competitive potential.

I'm not forcing anything upon anybody, what I'm saying is that the status quo already contains the mechanisms to solve your problems.  A community norm has too many disads.  It's not like I'm going to stop anyone that I coach from e-mailing another school/coach and asking for ev, haha.  You wanted a discussion, and here you have it: Not many people agree with you.

Uggh.  Scanners.

Aside from the whole exploding head problem, scanners are the crankiest, most ill-behaved things you can hook up to a USB port.

This is a very interesting discussion... I posted a link to it on The 3NR (http://www.the3nr.com/2009/08/10/norms-regarding-disclosure-citations-or-full-text/) to get some perspectives of non-MN folks but if anyone that has posted here wants to cross-post at The 3NR, be my guest.

Couple thoughts:

1. I think Dan's argument about inequitable access to research resources hasn't really been answered.  I don't know what the situation is in the Twin Cities with regard to university library access, but here in Milwaukee the only university library that the majority of high school students can gain access to is the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (it is open to the public).  However, guests do not have access to most electronic databases and they do not have borrowing privileges.  It takes a lot of time and effort to ILL the materials you're looking for, especially when you're a high school student and you're balancing school, debate, other activities, a job, etc. and don't have a lot of political capital with your librarians.  Coaches can help, obviously, but it's still a lot more difficult than it should be for students to secure access to academic materials (books, journals, databases, etc.). 

2. Instead of disclosing the full text of evidence, one "solution" might be for schools to be more willing to share the full text of *articles* that they have cut evidence from if this request is made by one of their competitors.  This gets into some murky waters regarding copyright, unfortunately, and others would be more qualified to speak to that concern than would I.  It only seems fair, however, for debaters/teams to have a fair chance to review the original source material that their competitors are quoting.  This obviously cannot be a universal obligation: sometimes debaters no longer have access to the sources they cut (maybe they did so at camp or when making a special visit to a university library), but if they *do* have access, it seems commendable for the source article/text to be shared with those who request it. 

3. I can appreciate the concerns that some people have expressed about the re-use of their "work product" (highlighting, underlining, etc.).  Do those that feel this way have a problem with the sharing of unformatted text?  Instead of sharing a tag, citation, and first and last words, it would be very easy to share a tag, citation, and complete unformatted text.  Does this still link to the "you're stealing my work product" DA?  If so, are you also uncomfortable sharing tags and first and last words?

~Bill

My solution is the following:

"...a combination of full NFL citation [OR] email for [article or] full, unformatted card text if unable to find."

I think that pretty much covers all the potential objections and avoids the access arguments.  But really, the solution is not to scan the full text of evidence with the potential of using that same card in your next debate.  That seems counterproductive.

Bill,

I think a good response to the resource inequality portion of this discussion is taken up by Kate Baxter-Kauf.  I won't try to paraphrase her arguments because she has a perspective that I don't.  I wouldn't want to butcher it. 

Also, your suggestion of coach-to-coach requests has been brought up a couple times already, and there hasn't been a significant answer to it.

here, on page 1:

and here, on page 2:

We aren't saying that efforts shouldn't be made to make full text available.  What we're saying is that making this a norm, enforced or not, has several disads that backchanneling solves at least partially.  Full ev disclosure won't solve resource inequality.

Resource inequality isn't a problem for me or my school. Or yours. But I do think it's out there, and for less plugged in, connected teams, even coach to coach requests might be daunting.

And I hope everyone who is vehemently opposed to scanners helps reinforce the norm of prompt and thorough responses to requests for cites. 

On a personal level, my squad and I have zero interest in copying anyone's files and turning around to run them. I had the idea because last year I had problems on several occasions just getting cites - not full text, just the initial cites - and in at least one instance, a request for cites wasn't replied to until after a second important debate involving the same evidence happened.

Clearly resource inequality isn't a problem for a good few of our schools.  I was only bringing it up because Bill mentioned it in his post as still being unanswered.

Public shaming will probably work--a thread devoted to cite slackers.

Hasn't ever worked for Arif.  ---> www.arifowes.com  <-----

That's mostly because it was never fixed when I DID pay people back.

Broken system.