Quotebacks is a new project from Tom Critchlow and Toby Shorin “to encourage and activate a deeper cross-blogger discusson space [and] promote diverse voices and encourage networked writing to flourish”, whose manifesto I present below in full.
Our overal design goals are to help maintain context when composing new texts with quotes, to enable generous quotations, and to facilitate quoting all texts and voices. A bit more about our goals.
First and foremost, quoting gives context, helping readers see where an author is coming from. Quotes and citations are an important part in making and remembering history. And looking looking towards the future, they allow us to better see, understand, and build on the vast graph of human knowledge—the original “web”—that other, greater internet of which this one is just part.
Secondly, quoting another person can be generous. Generous quoting can mean raising another’s voice alongside your own, affirming their authorship, and striving to not take them out of context. One can quote generously, no matter whether one is agreeing or disagreeing with another author.
And of course, quoting is also a political act, in which we elevate and validate the voice of another individual. We’re inspired by this challenge to think about our own quoting and citation acts[.]
Without question, I support their answer, “Why quote?” I especially like the specificity of calling quoting a “political” act.
What perplexes me is that I can’t for the life of me see the difference between this and simply manually blockquoting and citing other people, other than having a JSON file of all your quotes stored in your Chrome browser. Is it just to have a fancy embed box for quotes the way social, photo, and video sites get to have?
What am I missing?